Whilst it seems morally good to support the recent emergence of foodbanks, it would be a mistake not to feel ashamed or even angry that they exist at all. It would be a bigger mistake not to look at the deeper reasons for their existence.
I feel uncomfortable with what seems to be a certain ‘inevitability’ about them. There is also the nagging feeling that only the ‘deserving poor’ will benefit from them. Those on the edge are often not ‘deserving’ yet in deep need.
The real poor are often not too hungry for food, but they are deprived of real community, real hope and the determination, which comes from education, to go further than they ever dreamed.
The poverty most difficult to address is spiritual in nature, where people have been duped out of their religious past and are dogged by the sad reality that we have ceased to be a society and become a multiplicity of societies who don’t live very well together.
We must indeed feed the hungry, but we do not live on bread alone.
Fr John Michael Hanvey, Blackburn
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