Pope’s quotes: Hunger is a scandal

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A quote from Pope Francis:

“It is a scandal that there is still hunger and malnutrition in the world! It is not a question of responding to immediate emergencies, but of addressing together, at all levels, a problem that challenges our personal and social conscience, in order to achieve a just and lasting solution. May no one be obliged to abandon his or her country or own cultural environment due to a lack of essential means of subsistence!

Paradoxically, in an age when globalization enables us to know about the situations of need that exist in the world and to multiply exchanges and human relationship, the tendency to individualism and to withdraw into ourselves seems to be on the rise. These tendencies lead to a certain attitude of indifference — at the personal, institutional and State level — toward those who are dying of hunger or suffering from malnutrition, almost as though it were an inevitable fact. However, hunger and malnutrition can never be considered a normal occurrence to which one must become accustomed, as if it were part of the system. Something has to change in ourselves, in our mentality, in our societies.

-- Message for World Food Day, Oct. 16, 2013

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