“The Gospel isn’t just a collection of words. It’s also a list of facts. It’s life. Jesus not only preached, he healed the sick, comforted the afflicted, raised the dead and fed the hungry. He performed the Works of Mercy because He loved. “I have compassion for these people,” He exclaimed upon seeing the hungry throngs, and He multiplied bread to satisfy their hunger. Bread takes on a sacred value in the Redemption. Jesus inserts the greatest mystery into bread, and He made the Eucharistic Banquet the core of the life of the Church community, forever uniting body and spirit, just as He had united humanity and divinity in Himself. Therefore, you love God, the Father, when you feed the hungry. All those who can offer nourishment to the undernourished and hungry and don’t do so, are murderers according to the Fathers of the Church; indeed, they’re god-killers. They cause Christ to die. From the perspective of the Gospel all those who, during the war years, forced condemned prisoners to starve to death, repeated the crucifixion. It was like murdering God. The hordes of the deported – in snow or under blazing sun, in armored cars, or in isolated ships whose monotony was only interrupted by the falling of the hungry – crossed the line of practical atheism even when it was perpetrated in the name of God. That is why Saint Vincent de Paul went aboard the galleys of very Christian kings, where the galley slaves were dropping dead from exhaustion. A Work of Mercy is not the mere distribution of food or money. It reconstitutes justice. “The Works of Mercy accomplish nothing without love,” Saint Augustine says. “If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere” (1 Cor 13:3), Saint Paul says to those Christians who shared the Bread of Angels but not that of men. The cold and reserved woman who gives Christmas to the poor but never opens her soul to them, performs nothing more than a bureaucratic duty: Christ is not pleased. Social welfare does little or nothing at all to produce the effects of a religious life, if those who carry it out don’t bring that divine nourishment of the Holy Spirit, which is love. No one is moved by or grateful to the faucet for the water it provides, or by the light bulb for the light it provides, Ozanam remarks. “Man does not live on bread alone,” because he is soul as well as stomach. A Work of Mercy is a moral and material duty. By feeding the hungry, I feed me because his hunger is both mine and that of the whole social body of which I am an organic part. You can’t dump grain into the ocean when in another part of the world there is someone dying of hunger. “We, though many, are one body throughout the world:” and you cannot injure one body part to the advantage of another. If you do, you’ll pay for it with revolutions, disorder and all the epidemics that are found on this side of Heaven, and with hell on the other side. It has been said that the earth is dying, that the world’s resources are diminishing and the wars increasing precisely because of hunger. Some would like to solve the problem with war and birth control, doing away with human life. But it’s not resources that are lacking; what’s lacking is love – and the intelligence – for making it circulate. Circulation is life. The stagnation brought about by accumulation is a source of hate, revolution and war. It’s death. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him, if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head” (Rm 12:20). The Works of Mercy perform the miracle of making the love circulate by making the bread circulate. It’s a miracle that transforms bread into a sort of social sacrament, in which you begin from love, God, and you nourish the body along with the soul. (From:Igino Giordani, Il fratello (Rome: Città Nuova, 2011) p.63-67.