Can shoplifting really be justified? Why violating civil law is not always immoral

    The Church of England's Archdeacon of York Richard Seed has issued a statement on their website in response to the controversy surrounding comments made by priest Tim Jones suggesting people shoplift when in a desperate situation

The statement, dated December 22, read:

• Statement on shoplifting
• Fr Tim Jones, a vicar from York, has been in the media recently, advocating shoplifting if people are in desparate circumstances.
• The Ven. Richard Seed, Archdeacon of York said, "The Church of England does not advise anyone to shoplift, or break the law in any way. Fr Tim Jones is raising important issues about the difficulties people face when benefits are not forthcoming, but shoplifting is not the way to overcome these difficulties. There are many organisations and charities working with people in need, and the Citizens' Advice Bureau is a good first place to call."

The Archdeaconry of York, as Wikipedia explains,  is a subdivision of the Church of England Diocese of York in the Province of York

Jones, despite what the media headlines would have everyone believe, is not advocating shoplifting, but rather explaining that in a desperate situation, it is better than a violent alternative. He explained to his congregation,  as reported in SkyNews

• "My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift. I do not offer such advice because I think that stealing is a good thing, or because I think it is harmless, for it is neither. I would ask that they do not steal from small, family businesses, but from large national businesses, knowing that the costs are ultimately passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher prices...Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift...The observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are. Rather, this is a call for our society no longer to treat its most vulnerable people with indifference and contempt."
  

When people see  provocative headlines regarding a "priest" , no doubt most of them are going to assume it is a Catholic priest. Fr. Tim Jones is not Catholic, but he does bring up some interesting and valid points as to an individual's moral conscience versus the so-called 'civil (government) law'.

If one closely examines the myriad of laws issued by "the state" throughout civilization and in particular the United States in the last 200+ years, it is not difficult to concede that ignoring or even purposely breaking certain laws is not only sometimes justified,  it is sometimes required by Christians.

Bishop Lynch of St. Petersburg, Florida announced in February 2009 that they will ignore any law Congress enacts which violates the Catholic religion:

• “No Catholic institution or employee of an institution can or will be made to violat e the dictates of their conscience resulting from federal or state legislative action,”

  In the recent http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/the-declaration
  Manhattan Declaration, comprised by a union of Catholic, Orthodox and evenagelical clergy, they explained why breaking civil law was sometimes required and not a violation of conscience, but rather a dictate of it:

  Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required. There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.

  Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.
   “No Catholic institution or employee of an institution can or will be made to violat e the dictates of their conscience resulting from federal or state legislative action,”

  In the recent http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/the-declaration
  Manhattan Declaration, comprised by a union of Catholic, Orthodox and evenagelical clergy, they explained why breaking civil law was sometimes required and not a violation of conscience, but rather a dictate of it:

  Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required. There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.

  Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God

  “Catholic hospitals will not allow abortions to be performed in their facilities” and will not comply with any laws mandating abortion or other procedures that violate the ethical and religious directives, “even if our actions constitute civil disobedience,” he added.“No Catholic institution or employee of an institution can or will be made to violat e the dictates of their conscience resulting from federal or state legislative action,”

In the recent Manhattan Declaration, comprised by a union of Catholic, Orthodox and evenagelical clergy, they explained why breaking civil law is sometimes required and is not only not a violation of conscience or moral law, but rather a dictate of it:
 

• "Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required. There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.
•  
• Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s."

 Henry David Thoreau, in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1848), wrote:

• "Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse."

The Catholic encyclopedia, on Civil Authority, explains:

• But there are limits to civil obedience, and to the competence of civil authority. As domestic obedience is not to be carried to the extent of rebellion against the civil government, so neither is the State to be obeyed as against God. It is not within the competence of the State to command anything and everything. The State cannot command what God could not command, for instance, idolatry. The authority of the State is absolute, that is to say, full and complete in its own sphere, and subordinate to no other authority within that sphere. But the authority of the State is not arbitrary; it is not available for the carrying out of every whim and caprice. Arbitrary government is irrational government; now no government is licensed to set reason aside. The government of God Himself is not arbitrary; as St. Thomas says: "God is not offended by us except at what we do against our own good" (Contra Gentiles, III, 122). The arbitrary use of authority is called tyranny. Such is the tyranny of an absolute monarch, of a council, of a class, or of a majority. The liberty of the subject is based on the doctrine that the State is not omnipotent. Legally omnipotent every State must be, but not morally. A legal enactment may be immoral, and then it cannot in conscience be obeyed; or it may be ultra vires, beyond the competence of the authority that enacts it, in which case compliance with the law is not a matter of obedience, but of prudence. In either case the law is tyrannical, and "a tyrannical law, not being according to reason, is not, absolutely speaking, a law, but rather a perversion of law" (St. Thomas, Summa Theol., I-II.92.1 ad 4). Man is not all citizen. He is a member, a part of the State, and something else besides. "Man is not subservient to the civil community to the extent of his whole self, all that he is and all that he has" (St. Thomas, Summa Theol., I-II.21.4 ad 3)
   

There are many other examples, of course, of how civil law is in direct opposition to moral law. Laws against stealing are not immoral or contrary to moral law, of course. Laws against stealing are rooted both in civil common law and on the Ten Commandments. Some argue that common law itself is based on the Ten Commandments, although freemason Thomas Jefferson purportedly believed otherwise. However, I think the point is that stealing does not always constitute a grave violation of moral law.

For some prime examples of government laws that were invalid, one could examine the case of Mildred Loving  (who just died last year) and her husband, who were routed out of bed in the middle of the night and thrown in jail merely for being a married couple of different races; they spent years fighting and eventually overturning that supposed "law" banning interracial marriage. Was such a law, enacted by so-called 'civil authority',  ever valid? One could also revisit the ugly history of eugenics in America, in particular when our nation's highest court ruled that forcible sterilization of lower-class women was 'constitutional". Was that ruling ever "valid"? NO, it wasn't.

So, if a family has no food to eat and no other means of providing sustenance, would shoplifitng in that instance be a mortal sin? I heartily think not, but let's leave it up to the good Lord to work it all out.