Pope Francis urges the end to the Naturalizing and Bureaucratizing of Hunger
June 13, 2016
Pope Francis visited the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) headquarters in Rome today where he talked about the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving the goal of zero hunger. Francis drew attention to the risk that poverty and hunger could begin to seem ‘natural’ rather than things that demand urgent action. “Today we cannot be satisfied simply with being aware of the problems faced by many of our brothers and sisters… We need to ‘de-naturalize’ extreme poverty, to stop seeing it as a statistic rather than a reality.”
The Pope also criticized how the political decisions of bureaucracies can stand in the way of effective humanitarian assistance. “Without faces and stories, human lives become statistics and we run the risk of bureaucratizing the suffering of others. Bureaucracies shuffle papers, compassion deals with human beings.”
Despite these growing concerns, the pontiff ended his address by encouraging those present, and us all, to “seek creative solutions of change and transformation.”