The Shoplifting Vicar, Anglican ordained minister Rev John Papworth, Fourth World Review LIFS (1998)

Stealing from big corporate stores isn't a sin, Church of England priest says
March 16th 1997
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/mar/16/priest-says-its-ok-to-shoplift-from-big-stores/
Despite what the Bible says about stealing, a Church of England priest suggested Saturday it was no sin to shoplift - as long as the victim is a big supermarket. "Jesus said `Love your neighbour,' he didn't say `Love Marks and Spencers,' " the Rev. John Papworth said, referring to the big British retailer.Papworth drew a distinction between stealing from individuals or small merchants - which he says is wrong - and stealing from giant retailing corporations. Those, he says, have run little stores out of business and harmed local communities.
"With these institutions, all you are confronted with are these boardroom barons sitting round the boardroom plotting how to take the maximum amount of money out of people's pockets for the minimum in return," Papworth said on BBC Radio.
British newspapers were filled Saturday with similar comments from Papworth, who works part-time at St. Mark's Church in the St. John's Wood area of northwest London. The priest initially made his remarks to an audience of police officers earlier in the week.

Complete film - John Papworth: The Turbulent Priest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Dk_8tYkUc

John Papworth: The Shoplifting Vicar
http://bilderberg.org/vicar.htm
Rev. John Papworth made the national news in 1997 when he was ticked off by the Church of England for preaching, to his congregation, that it was okay to steal from supermarkets if you were poor & hungry. Though much of the press treated his comments as 'beyond the pale' he struck a chord with many readers, fed up with the supermarket consumer culture. John edits an excellent quarterly pamphlet, 'Fourth World Review'. Here are some extracts.

Confessions of a Shop-Lifting Vicar - John Papworth
The saga of my clerical status within the Anglican Communion continues like a minor soap opera. The media furore featuring a ‘shop-lifting vicar’ made me world famous for five minutes and prompted the Archdeacon of Charing Cross to complain testily on the phone that I had ‘disrupted’ his entire weekend. You may well ask, as I did myself, ‘What is an archdeacon?’ And for that matter why have one attached to a railway station? Being very little acquainted with the niceties of clerical ranking in an ecclesiastical bureaucracy, unfortunately for me as it proved, I later gathered that the Venerable Dr W.M Jacob was effectively my ecclesiastical boss. I was also to discover in due course just why he is known as the archdeacon of arch-deviousness. After some deft, bureaucratic sleight-of-hand in declaring that since I was too late in applying for a licence to officiate, (an application which had never been required in my 14 years of unpaid service to the diocese), he would therefore not recommend me for one to the bishop, he has dallied me on a string. Letters of appeal tended to be sidetracked or to go unanswered until, just recently, a local press hack, scenting a story from the good man’s announcement that he would never, ever recommend me for a licence to officiate, enquired the reason for his ruling. This provoked a sudden volte-face. He denied making any such ruling but then proceeded to spell out the rule book in ways which would ensure, if he was around, that I would be kept out of action just as effectively. It would be a mistake to read overmuch personal animus in all this. In Trollope’s expansive, empire-building, and generally booming Victorian times a venerable archdeacon could have lived a fat, comfortable life and feel somehow he was a friend and ally of contemporary history. Today the chickens of that era have come home to roost with a vengeance. Some sort of moral lead is a yawning gulf in the world scene as the elements of the global crisis multiply and coagulate in ways suggesting that unless that lead in soon forthcoming the ship may well founder altogether. I am told that the musical needs of St Peter’s church in Rome were once served by a castrata choir; sometimes it seems to me the Anglican Church is now served by an ecclesiastical castrata. Absolutely nothing appears able to shake the moribund complacency of those who run it and the current leadership expresses all too clearly the price it is paying for generations of intellectual dishonesty. There is no open forthright debate on the challenge to its core beliefs mounted by modern astronomy, geology, biology and psychology; there is instead a rampant fever of spiritual cowardice running through its veins which leads it to pretend that the explosion of man’s understanding of his place in the universe has no relevance to its concerns and that the spiritual crisis generating the social and environmental disasters, now threatening to edge man off the page of history altogether, are things happening on another planet and of which it need have no more regard than for the craters on the moon..