2010-10-15 15:42:19

Pope’s message for World Food Day


(October 15, 2010) Pope Benedict XVI is urging individuals, groups, organizations, as well as the international community to fight the scourge of hunger, malnutrition and poverty in the world through concrete initiatives of authentic human development that are informed by charity and inspired by truth. The Pope’s exhortation came in his message for the Oct. 16th World Food Day, sponsored by the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO. The theme of this year’s observance on Saturday is ‘United Against Hunger.” “Everyone….needs to give priority to one of the most urgent goals for the human family: freedom from hunger,” the Pope wrote in his message to FAO director general, Jacques Diouf. The efforts to achieve this goal will surely help to build up the unity of the human family throughout the world, he said. If the international community is to be truly “united” against hunger, then poverty must be overcome through authentic human development, based on the idea of the person as a unity of body, soul and spirit. Pope Benedict lamented that today there is a tendency to limit the vision of development to the material needs of the person, especially through access to technology; yet, he said, authentic development is not simply a function of what a person “has”, it must also embrace higher values of fraternity, solidarity and the common good. Pope Benedict appreciated the international community’s recent decision to protect the right to water, saying it is essential to human nutrition, to rural activities and to the conservation of nature. The symbolic value of this precious commodity, he said, invites all to revise present patterns of behaviour in order that the present and future generations may have access to it.








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