Can You See God in the Faces of the Hungry?

Food also has a sacred quality. Food is life. Food is a gift to us from God. The relationship of food to God’s presence runs throughout the Old and New Testaments. God feeds the hungry people of Israel by sending them manna and quail in the desert. (See Ex 16:13–18.) The prophet Elijah’s gift of unending grain and oil during famine to the widow who fed him was a tangible sign of his prophetic power. (See 1 Kgs 17:8–16.) Isaiah describes the Messianic age as one of restoration in which the hungry will have an abundance of food and drink. The Mother of Jesus gives thanks in her Magnificat that God fills the hungry with good things. (See Lk 1:53.)

Jesus himself chose bread as the matter for the sacrament of Eucharist, which binds his life to our own. The first Apostles, having known the risen Christ in the breaking of the bread, fed the hungry as a primary aspect of their ministry. They brought into being a separate ordained ministry of the deacon for this very purpose. The Letter of James (2:15–16) reminds the first Christians that wishing someone well while not caring for his or her daily needs is of no use whatsoever.

Attending to the poor and hungry became a historical hallmark of Catholic religious monasteries and missionary activity. And we have the teaching of the early Church fathers, repeated again and again throughout history and so powerfully taught in the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World: “Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him you have killed him” (69).

Despite the generosity and efforts of so many goodhearted and right-minded people, and despite the many great scientific and technological advances in communication, agricultural production, transportation, political organization, and so forth, and despite the best-laid plans and efforts of multinational organizations, millions of people still suffer daily from chronic hunger. Estimates are overwhelming, so overwhelming that it is hard to wrap our minds around numbers so large: 800 million people suffer chronic hunger; 20,000 human beings, mostly children under the age of five, die every day of malnutrition or hunger-related illnesses. Only about 10 percent of these cases of hunger are due to war or famine. Roughly 30 million people in our own country, the United States, suffer from “food insecurity,” meaning they are either hungry or unsure where their next meal will come from or when. Hunger is a global problem. It is present here at home and abroad. It is also an unjustly distributed problem in that those areas least equipped to deal with food shortages and the problems that arise from them have the highest number of hungry people.