Pope calls for ’end to discarding people’

Santa Cruz (Bolivia), July 10: Pope Francis has called for “an end to discarding people” and said that given so much hunger in the world, we must not simply say “the accounts don’t balance” but rather feed the poor. “Faced with so many kinds of hunger in our world, we cannot say to ourselves: ‘Things don’t add up; we will never balance the books. There is nothing to be done.’ Because then despair takes over our hearts,” he said during a huge Mass he celebrated in this eastern Bolivian city. Before hundreds of thousands of people in Christ the Redeemer Park, the pontiff on Thursday criticised what he said was the logic of consumerism or discarding things, including one’s fellow man, that is trying to impose itself upon the world. He used the biblical story of the loaves and fishes, when Jesus’s apostles wanted him to send the crowds away because there would be no way to feed all of them, but he multiplied the food on hand and there was enough for all. (IANS)