Vatican City, 3 October 2015 (VIS) –
This morning in the Paul VI Hall Pope Francis received in audience
seven thousand volunteers from the Food Bank Foundation, established
25 years ago by the Italian businessman Danilo Fossati and Don
Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation, to combat food waste,
recovering and distributing food among the poor and families in need.
In his address to them, Francis
underlined that hunger has now assumed the dimensions of a true
scandal that threatens the life and dignity of many people: men and
women, children and the elderly. “Every day we must face this
injustice: in a world rich in food resources, thanks also to enormous
technological progress, there are too many people who do not have the
essentials for survival; and this is true not only of poor countries,
but increasingly so in rich and developed societies. The situation is
aggravated by the increase in migratory flows, which bring thousands
of refugees to Europe, fleeing their countries and in need of
everything. In the face of such an immeasurable problem, Jesus' words
resonate: 'For I was hungry and you gave me food'. We see in the
Gospel that the Lord, when He realises that the crowd that has come
to listen to Him is hungry, does not ignore the problem, nor does He
give a good speech on the fight against poverty; instead He performs
a gesture that leaves everyone astonished. He takes the little that
the disciples have brought with them, He blesses it, and He
multiplies the bread and fishes, so that in the end 'they took up
twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over'”.
“We cannot perform a miracle as Jesus
did; however we can do something when faced wit the emergency of
hunger, something useful, that also has the power of a miracle. First
of all we can educate ourselves in humanity, in recognising the
humanity present in every person, in need of everything. This is
perhaps what Danilo Fossati, entrepreneur in the food sector and
founder of the Food Bank, was thinking of when he confided to Don
Giussani his unease at seeing the destruction of products that could
still be consumed, when so many people in Italy suffered from
hunger”.
The bishop of Rome remarked that the
Foundation has its roots in the heart of those two men who were not
indifferent to the cry of the poor and “understood that something
needed to change in the mentality of the people, that the walls of
individualism and selfishness had to be broken down. … Jesus
Himself invites us to make space in our heart for the urgency of
feeding the hungry, and the Church has made it one of the works of
corporal mercy”.
Finally, commenting that the Food Bank
volunteers encounter hundreds of people every day, the Pope reminded
them of the need to remember that they are “people and not numbers,
each one with his or her burden that at times seems impossible to
bear. Always keeping this in mind, you will be able to look them in
the eye, to hold their hand, to descry the flesh of Christ in them
and to help them regain their dignity and get back on their feet. I
encourage you to be brothers and friends to the poor; to let them
feel that they are important in God's eyes”.
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