Vatican, Oct. 17 (CWNews.com) – Pope Benedict XVI (bio – news) said that hunger and malnutrition are scandals, caused by selfishness, in a message to the director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The Pope’s message to Jacques Diouf, the Senegalese head of the FAO, was released for World Food Day, October 16, which makes the anniversary of the founding of FAO in 1945. The lingering problem of hunger, he said, makes the UN agency’s work “even more urgent.”
The Pope’s message argued that hunger is not caused solely by poor harvests. “It is also provoked by human beings and by their selfishness,” he said. Shortages of food are aggravated, the Pope wrote, by “the rigidity of economic structures, too often concerned only with profit, through practices hostile to human life, and through ideological systems that reduce people to the level of mere instruments, depriving them of their fundamental dignity.” In his own separate statement for World Food Day, Cardinal Angelo Sodano (bio – news), the Vatican Secretary of State, echoed the Pope’s message, saying that the continued existence of hunger– alongside great wealth– is a scandal that must be corrected.
Noting that the FAO was created to ensure adequate world food supplies, Cardinal Sodano asked why there are still severe shortages of nourishment, when the world has ample resources to provide food for everyone. He pointed toward a “culture of consumption that encourages false needs.”
Cardinal Sodano’s message, released the day after Pope Benedict’s, said that something more than a technical solution is needed. Rather than a correct in marketplace functions, he called for “first of all, a rediscovery of the sense of the human person.”
Tags: Hunger
