Pope Francis offered a prayer Sunday that programs “dedicated to development, nourishment, and solidarity” prevail over programs of “hate, armament, and war.”

“In imitation of Christ,” the pope said to the crowd gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for the weekly Angelus prayer, “the entire human race is called to make sure that the world’s resources are not lost or destined to projects of man’s self-destruction, but serve his true good and legitimate development.”

The pope was reflecting on the gospel reading of the day, where Jesus is presented as feeding a crowd of 5,000 with just five barley loaves and two fish, a passage known as the miracle of loaves and fishes.

In the passage, a large crowd follows Jesus to an out-of-the-way place and he becomes concerned with how they will find food to eat. When he asks his disciples how they can feed them, they respond that it is impossible: there is just one boy with the five loaves and two fish, but that won’t make a dent in the people’s hunger. In the end, Jesus blesses and then distributes the food and it is more than enough to give everyone their fill.

“Jesus is attentive to the primary needs of people,” Francis said. “The episode stems from a concrete fact: the people are hungry and Jesus involves his disciples to satisfy this hunger.”

At the same time, Jesus doesn’t only satisfy the material needs of the people, the pontiff noted, because he also offered them “his word, his consolation, his salvation, and his very life,” but he also had care for food for the body.

As his disciples, the pope told the crowd, “we cannot pretend this doesn’t matter.”

“Only by listening to the simplest requests of people and standing alongside them in their concrete existential situations can we then merit a hearing when we speak of higher values,” he said.

“The love of God for humanity starving for bread, freedom, justice, peace, and above all of his divine grace, is never lacking,” Francis said, and “Jesus continues today to feed, to become a living and consoling presence, and he does so through us.”

Faced with the cries of hunger of so many of our brothers and sisters in every part of the world, we “cannot remain detached and tranquil spectators,” he said. The announcement of Christ requires a “generous commitment of solidarity for the poor, the weak, the last, the helpless.”

The pontiff also focused on the fact that Jesus asked the apostles to gather up the scraps at the end of the meal to make sure nothing was wasted, a topic dear to him as witnessed by his frequent criticisms of today’s “throwaway culture.”

The passage shows that “Jesus cares so much about hungry people to worry that even the smallest pieces of bread with which he feeds them will not be lost,” he said.

Speaking off the cuff at the end of his address, the pope returned to the same message, urging all his listeners to examine their consciences by asking themselves what they do with leftover food at home.

According to the Vatican police force, there were some 25,000 visitors present in the square Sunday for the pope’s address.

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