“When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are hungry they call me a communist.”
These are the words of Dom Helder Câmara, archbishop of the Brazilian diocese of Olinda and Recife who was brutally murdered on August 27, 1999. Dom Helder Camara was 90 years old when he was murdered. He was internationally acknowledged as “a man of God and a defender of the poor.” Known as “the red bishop,” he was a source of embarrassment for the military regime. For many years he was subjected to endless interrogations and threats. Considered a threat to national security, he was adamant that he was no communist, no Marxist, and no subversive. Yet he spoke out when others were silenced. From 1970 to 1983 he was banned him from public speaking in Brasil, and his name could not be published in any Brasilian media. He turned to speaking out in the international sphere.
Cardinal Arns of Sao Paulo said of him: “Dom Helder is a poet, a mystic and a missionary. As a poet he knows how to say things and the people understand what he says… As a mystic, he lives praying, and passes his whole life always with God… But he is also a great missionary, a man who brings the ideas of God to the hearts of people. I have no doubt that he is the greatest man of the Church in Brazil.”
On this World Food Sunday 2009, signifying the end of World Food Week, the words of Dom Helder Camara still hold today. Camara spoke of finding a way to put food into the mouths of every person on earth. For that he was branded a communist. Ten years later, the world is no further ahead, and in fact is beginning to slide.
The world economic crisis has brought into stark relief the extreme fragility of the global food system. For the first time in history, more than one billion people are undernourished, 100 million more than last year; one in every six persons is hungry every day. This is not the consequence of a poor global harvest, but rather is the economy, which has reduced incomes and employment opportunities, and significantly reduced the access of the poor to food.
Hence, the theme chosen for World Food Day this year is “Achieving food security in times of crisis.” While the fallout from the global crisis still dominates the news, it is of paramount importance to remind the international community that the crisis is stalking the small-scale farms and rural areas of the world, where 70 percent of the world’s hungry live and work.
Developing countries are now more financially and commercially integrated in the world economy, so that a drop in global demand, supply, and credit availability has far more immediate repercussions on developing countries. At the same time, foreign aid to the poorest 71 countries will decline by 25%.
The stark fact is that unless substantial and sustained remedial actions are taken immediately, the World Food Summit target of reducing the number of hungry people by half to no more than 420 million by 2015 will not be reached.
It is not only financial resources that are needed. A whole series of fundamental problems need to be resolved: how aid is channeled, how it reaches small farmers effectively, reform of the world food security governance system, and an increase in the share of national budgets dedicated to agriculture and private sector investment.
Jesus directly addressed such issues. It is unfortunate that two thousand years later, the same inequalities, prejudices, and inequalities exist. It was Jesus’ way to point out how things will be turned around, so that those who think they come first might find themselves in a different position. Granted, worrying about whether we come first or last is not a reason, in itself, to work for changes to inequalities. But Jesus’ consistent theme was that the last shall be first in the realm of God. The intent of Jesus’ teaching was that if human beings actually worked to bring about the realm of God now, those who are poor, hungry, crying - would find themselves being treated with dignity and care, with food on the table, a roof over their heads, freedom to get an education, and good health care.
Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.
Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.
It’s interesting to compare the Matthew version, called the Sermon on the Mount - and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. Matthew only includes the blessings, while Luke has Jesus giving both blessings and curses. Matthew addressed spiritual poverty, spiritual hunger, and spiritual grief. Luke seems to address physical poverty, physical hunger, and physical grief. For World Food Day, it seems to me the two complement each other. If you are physically poor, then your spirit is in danger of becoming more constrained to the narrow world of struggling from day to day. If you are physically hungry, and your body begins to waste, your heart and your spirit will starve as well. Dom Helder Camara understood this, I believe, and worked out of that understanding. His focus was on poverty and hunger, and the world systems which created that hunger.
Former US President Bill Clinton received an honorary Doctorate from McGill University this weekend. One of his comments, while addressing the issue of health care in the US, is also absolutely pertinent and apt with regard to global hunger. Clinton said “It's simply going to be impossible for us to build the world we need unless in the wealthy countries, we are ruthlessly honest about where we are wasting money and hanging on to yesterday's way of doing things."
“If I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. If I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
Sources:
1. Biography of Dom Helder Camara, by Fr. Tony Lalli, from the Xaverian Mission Newsletter
2. Jacques Diouf, Director-General, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
3. Former US President Bill Clinton, McGill University Friday October 16, 2009.
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