Speaking to the magazine Scarp de’ Tenis, which means Tennis Shoes, a monthly for and about the homeless and marginalized, the pope said
that giving something to someone in need is “always right.” (We’re helped here by the translation in an article from Catholic News Service.)
What ‘happiness’ do you seek in secret?” Another way to look at it, he said, is to recognize how you are the “luckier” one, with a home, a spouse
and children, and then ask why your responsibility to help should be pushed onto someone else.
Living in the city — especially in metropolises where homelessness is an unsolved, unending crisis — means
that at some point in your day, or week, a person seeming (or claiming) to be homeless, or suffering with a disability, will ask you for help.
The Pope on Panhandling: Give Without Worry -
By THE EDITORIAL BOARDMARCH 3, 2017
New Yorkers, if not city dwellers everywhere, might acknowledge a debt to Pope Francis this week.
If it’s case by case, that means you have your own on-the-spot, individualized benefits program, with a bit of means-testing, mental health and character assessment, and criminal-background check — to the extent
that any of this is possible from a second or two of looking someone up and down.
A version of this editorial appears in print on March 4, 2017, on Page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: The Pope and the Panhandler.
This message runs through Francis’ preaching and writings, which always seem to turn on the practical
and personal, often citing the people he met and served as a parish priest in Argentina.
