By Gary Topping–
I spent most of my working life in downtown Salt Lake City—in fact, in some of the city’s roughest districts. Part of my life, almost daily, was coping with panhandlers, and it took me a long time before I finally settled on a policy for dealing with them. There were some rough and potentially dangerous encounters along the way. One time, after I had turned a guy down, he waited until I was almost, but not quite, out of earshot before he called me an obscene name. My immediate reaction was to turn around and go for him, but fortunately (for both of us, perhaps) it was a rare moment in which Christianity kicked in, and I decided to turn the other cheek.
There are good arguments in favor of turning panhandlers down. They’re just going to use the money to buy booze or drugs, one of them goes. Another one points out that our society has so many welfare services, for food, clothes and almost anything else that a needy person might require, that there really isn’t any reason for someone to be out begging on the street. Further, it is alleged that some people who are not really needy at all use panhandling as a supplemental income to line their pockets. My wife and I learned the truth of that last one when we were on the golf course one day and she spotted a well-dressed guy getting out of a nice car. She had regularly seen him panhandling on her way to work. Posted by a freeway exit, he was always clad in camouflage to identify himself, truly or falsely, as a veteran. That, with his gray hair, made him a sympathetic figure: another veteran, down on his luck. He risked everything for us; shouldn’t we give something back?
I finally decided to reach into my Christian faith for a solution to the problem, and in that, as in many other ways, I was assisted by one of my best religious mentors, Msgr. M. Francis Mannion. Simply expressed, his position was that judging the worthiness of panhandlers is not a call we get to make. If a guy is going to spend the money on liquor, “maybe a good ‘belt’ is just what a person in his situation needs,” he said. In any event, Christians are admonished throughout the Gospels, the Pauline letters and especially the Letter of St. James to look out for the bodily and material needs of the poor. To that end, Msgr. Mannion always carries a certain amount of cash when he goes out into the public, for the specific purpose of giving to anyone who asks him for help.
I think it’s a good policy. Give it a try!
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
