These Laws Must Be Broken By Bishops: An Open Letter To Pope Francis And Other Church Leaders

I have been looking at this report from The National Coalition For The Homeless about the increasing number of cities which are making the distribution of food to the homeless illegal or imposing unworkable and unsustainable restrictions on that distribution. 

Under many of these laws it would have been illegal for Jesus to have fed people who had been following him and for other people to have given food to him and his closest followers who had left their homes and, so, were homeless.  

One thing that jumped out at me was the city of Manchester, New Hampshire, the one on the map of cities closest to where I live, also the home of the Archdioceses of New Hampshire.   In that case the effort to starve the homeless out of the city is to ban the distribution of food on public property, in the center of the city, where most of the homeless people are, allegedly allowing the distribution only in residential areas, where any such effort will certainly be resisted by area residents.  From that section of the report:

Bill Sullivan, President of Do You Know Him?  Ministries, states that moving to a residential area will only make matters worse.  He states,  "We can't be in a residential area.  We start setting up at 6 o'clock in the morning and we have anywhere between 200-300 people and that's not a quiet group

Certainly among the responsibilities of the bishop and other clergy in Manchester, New Hampshire and other cities where these laws are adopted is to break them, publicly,  to do what Jesus said to do in the gospel, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, to do justice to the least among us.  

These laws are a test of the real belief in the gospel of Jesus by those who profess a belief in that gospel.  The failure to break these laws, to challenge them and to overturn them is a scandal that the Christian churches can't afford to sustain.  If any clergy, if any bishops are not willing to sustain the criticism they will get from following those most frequent and most strongly asserted obligations in scripture then they have willingly relinquished their claims to authority to teach them.  The words in their mouths will be made meaningless and impotent by their own failure to make them real in life.   Merely opposing their adoption in theory and then acquiescing to them in fact will not be enough. 

You should instruct bishops in their responsibility to, in fact, break these unjust laws, you should instruct Catholics that they are an open and serious violation of the most plainly stated teachings of Jesus, the prophets and the disciples. If these teachings are not to be taken that seriously, what else in scriptures can be?   I will be breaking them at my earliest opportunity.