Throwing away food is like stealing from the poor – Pope Francis

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Pope Francis denounced on the occasion of World Environment Day 2013 the what he called a “culture of waste” in an increasingly consumerist world. He said that throwing away good food was like stealing from poor people.

“Our grandparents”, he said in his speech, “used to make a point of not throwing away leftover food. Consumerism has made us accustomed to wasting food daily and we are unable to see its real value”. This, alas, is so very true indeed.

“Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry,” he continued.

Around 1.3 billion tonnes of food, or one third of what is produced for human consumption, gets lost or wasted every year, according to the United Nations' food agency, and some estimates are even as high as 50 percent.

In the industrialised world the majority of waste is by consumers, often because they buy too much and have to throw away what they do not manage to eat.

A U.N.-backed study released on the same day said simple measures such as better storage and reducing over-sized portions would sharply reduce the vast amount of food going to waste.

The Holy Father said that the “culture of waste” was especially deplorable given the prevalence of hunger in the world. According to the United Nations hunger affects some 870 million people, while 2 billion suffer from at least one nutritional deficiency, and that not only in the Third World. We have serious hunger at our very own doorsteps
The Argentinian-born pontiff warned that too much focus on money and materialism meant financial market dips were viewed as tragedies while human suffering had become normal and ignored. And that in this way people are discarded as if they were garbage.

Since taking office Pope Francis has made great efforts to get the Roman Catholic Church to defend the poor and to practice greater austerity itself. He, himself, has decided on a much more austere lifestyle than all of his predecessors and has also made several calls for global financial reform.

We are in a culture today that could well be described, as the Pope did, as a culture of waste and it is an absolute throwaway society in almost all regards despite all the recycling claims and supposed efforts.

We don't need to recycle more; we need to consume less, make do with what we have and reuse things on all levels.

As far as food waste is concerned it is true that much is wasted by household in the developed world where people buy too much stuff and then throw food that is going rotten away. At the same time they do not know what to do with leftovers either, as many people today, in the modern developed world appear to be unable to cook properly.

On the other hand much of the food waste occurs between field and store and in the stores too. In the first instance it is food that is being rejected by the buyers because of shape, size, etc., and in the second instance stores throw out perfectly good food because of blemishes and such like.

In the days of old a greengrocers would be allowed to give such fruit and vegetables that he could not sell at the end of the day away to needy folks but the litigation culture put an end to that too, as did other laws.

Through our culture of waste we steal not just food from the poor, so to speak, but we steal from the Planet also, and that too is a tragedy.

© 2013

Hopes for an ecological Church raised by new Pope's choice of name

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The choice of the name Francis, in honor of the Catholic Church’s patron saint of animals and the environment, by Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio upon becoming 266th and current Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, elected on 13 March 2013, has awakened the hopes of ecologists and others who are concerned about rampant consumerism and the deterioration of the Planet that the Church will become more environmentally conscious.

In 1979, then Pope John Paul II proclaimed St. Francis of Assisi (1181/1182-1226) the patron saint of ecologists. In his first mass as Pope, on March 19, 2013 Pope Francis I said: “Let us be protectors of creation, protectors of God’s plan inscribed in nature, protectors of one another and of the environment.”

With the Church’s ability to reach people, the fact that the environment is part of the Pope's discourse is very important, because it will get more people involved.

In Latin America and Africa, environmental problems are closely linked to poverty, with the poor living in areas that are the most vulnerable to climate change and the degradation of the soil,” he said and in other areas too the Pope could possibly turn out to be an ally such as excessive consumption, which is verging on squander and has a huge impact on natural resources.

Environmentalists and bishops in Latin America both criticize consumerism and urge people to follow a simpler lifestyle and the Pope’s homily was in line with the recommendations set forth in the final document of the 5th General Conference of the Council of Latin American Bishops in Aparecido, Brazil, in 2007.

With the Pope hopefully leading the Catholic Church in a new way, and his decision not to live in the Papal apartments in the Vatican but to reside in the Vatican guesthouse also seems to point to a new broom intend on doing some serious housecleaning in the HQ of the Roman Catholic Church, great steps might be taken as to reducing man's impact on the environment.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating and we will have to wait as to how things are going to pan out and how far Pope Francis I actually will be allowed to go with this by the Curia and Vatican insiders.

We can but wish Pope Francis I good luck in his endeavors too make the Church a poor Church and a Church for the poor that also takes the environment and protecting of the environment to heart in the way of Saint Francis.

© 2013

Pope Francis wants a poor Church and a church for the poor

Pope Francis said that he wants a poor Church and a church that serves the poor

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The Roman Church and especially the Curia have just woken up to a serious shock, it would seem, in that Pope Francis has decided that he and the Church will live up to the standards of the Saint whose name he chose.

Pope Francis I has made clear that he will be introducing a different style and this became already evident on the night he was elected when he shunned the papal limousine and traveled on a bus with other cardinals who had elected him. The next day he returned to the Church-run hotel where he had been staying before the conclave and insisted on paying the bill.

Now he has refused to occupy the Papal apartments in the Vatican and has declared that he instead will be living in the Vatican guesthouse so that he can be together with the people.

Signs are also emerging that this new Pope will take a completely different stance as regards to the poor, the environment, and other issues, much in line with his name's sake, Saint Francis of Assisi.

How far the Holy Father will be allowed by the Curia and the Church administration to proceed with this is something that we will have to watch and hopefully he will not fall prey to some people wishing to keep control of their power base in the Church and the Vatican and begin to plot against him.

The fact that Pope Francis I is from the Society of Jesus may offer him some protection while, as the same time, it also makes him a target by some. He is after all the first Jesuit to occupy the Throne of Peter and in many minds that fact is not going to go down too well.

However, members of the Society have always been in the forefront of what has been referred to as “liberation theology” in Latin America and many of its priests have paid a high price for being on the side of the poor and fighting, even with arms, for the rights of the oppressed.

While it is true that the new Bishop of Rome does not, directly, come from that line of thought and work some of that may have rubbed off on him and many of his actions speak for the fact that he is not all that far removed from that line of thinking and especially acting.

Let us hope that those changes will take place and that the Pope can carry them through without any threat or worse to him from those that may not like the way the Church is going to be heading, as it would appear, under his leadership.

© 2013

Pope says God was behind Big Bang

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, says that God was definitely behind the Big Bang that is seen as the beginning of the Universe.

God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said recently.

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," the Holy Father said on the 2011 Feast of the Epiphany; the Feast of the Epiphany being the day that the Bible says the three kings from the East, the Magi, reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

The Pope said in a sermon to some 10,000 people in St Peter's Basilica that contemplating the universe we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God.

While the Holy Father has spoken before about evolution, he has rarely delved back in time to discuss specific concepts such as the Big Bang, which scientists believe led to the formation of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

Some atheists say science can prove that God does not exist, but Benedict said that some scientific theories were "mind limiting" because "they only arrive at a certain point ... and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality ..."

The Holy Father said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.

The point could be made, once again, about the chicken and the egg, as to which came first and it is at that very point, and similar ones, that the scientists normally come up with strange explanation, in the same way that some Christians, who take the Bible as completely literal, handle the issue of Adam and Eve and their two sons, especially as regards to Cain and Abel and Cain going into another country and taking unto himself a wife.

"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality ... we can only let ourselves be guided towards God, creator of heaven and earth," Pope Benedict said.

Pope Benedict XVI, and his predecessor Pope John Paul II, have been trying to shed the Church's image of being anti-science, a label that stuck when it condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, challenging the words of the Bible.

Galileo was rehabilitated and the Church now also accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.

The Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism – that is to say the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible – and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world.

But the Church objects to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.

Finally, I would say, we are coming to some sense in the field of the Christian Faith and many other groups would do well to have a look at the stance that the Vatican and the Church is no taking.

As far as many of us are concerned – and I haste to add that I am no Christian per se – science cannot explain the great majority of the wonders of the Universe in any manner that makes sense. Thus, somewhere along the lines one has to, perhaps, accept that there is a higher entity out there somewhere that one might refer to as G-d or in the plural as g-ds.

© 2011