ROME — Pope Francis offered an extended reflection on the sin of gluttony Wednesday, calling it “the most dangerous vice” because it is “killing the planet.”
“The way we eat is the manifestation of something inner,” the pontiff said during his weekly general audience in the Vatican, “a predisposition to balance or immoderation; the capacity to give thanks or the arrogant presumption of autonomy; the empathy of those who share food with the needy, or the selfishness of those who hoard everything for themselves.”
“Tell me how you eat, and I will tell you what kind of soul you possess,” he stated. “In the way we eat, we reveal our inner selves, our habits, our psychological attitudes.”
The pope went on to speak of “social” gluttony, in reference to the way human beings exploit the planet.
“If we interpret it from a social point of view, gluttony is perhaps the most dangerous vice, which is killing the planet,” he said, since “the voracity with which we have been plundering the goods of the planet for some centuries now is compromising the future of all.”
“We have grabbed everything, in order to become the masters of all things, whereas everything had been consigned to our custody, not for us to exploit,” he proposed.
This is “the great sin,” he declared, because human beings have discarded the name of men to become “consumers.”
The danger, he said, “is that we turn into predators; and now we are realizing that this form of ‘gluttony’ has done a great deal of harm to the world.”
In his address, the pope also said that the bad thing about food “is not the food in itself but the relationship we have with it” and when a person has a disordered relationship with food “they eat hastily, as though with the urge to be full but without ever being sated.”
“They do not have a good relationship with food, they are slaves to food,” and in eating “many imbalances and many pathologies manifest themselves,” he asserted.
“Eating disorders – anorexia, bulimia, obesity – are spreading,” all because of “our poor relationship with food,” he said.
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