Pope Francis supports Caritas campaign to end hunger
(Vatican Radio) Caritas Internationalis, with Pope Francis’ blessing, launched its
first ever global campaign on Tuesday to end world hunger by 2025.
‘One Human
Family, Food for All’ is the name of the Caritas initiative inaugurated with a “wave
of prayer” set to travel around the world. Caritas groups across the globe are praying
at 12pm local time, starting just east of the International Date Line and travelling
west across Oceania, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, all the way back to the
Pacific Ocean. You can join the Caritas prayer at 12pm here in Rome, at the church
of San Francesco a Ripa in Piazza di San Franceso d'Assisi.
We spoke to Michel
Roy, Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis, to find out more about this original
idea. Listen to the full interview:
“The idea
came when the steering committee was doing some brain-storming on the best ideas to
launch this global campaign – why not route the campaign into prayer? And then, why
not have everyone invited to pray at 12 o’clock, wherever they are? […] It’s not really
praying for the campaign, it’s praying that we will have a world without hunger, and
that we, all of us, have to work for it.
It has to start from everyone individually.
We, in the northern, developed countries especially, waste a lot of food – it is said
that about 40% of food which is produced is being lost. So we have a lot to do, individually,
to change our ways, our behavior, our way of relating to food.
At other levels,
the international community decided in 2000 to reduce hunger by half, by 2015. And
the reality today is that there are as many people suffering from hunger as in 2000
– 840 million, according to the UN statistics. It’s scandalous to have so many people
suffering from hunger.”