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Illustration: The Glutton: by Georg Emanuel Opiz Der Völler 1804
Pope Francis Catechesis – Vice and Virtue Vices and virtues. 3. Gluttony
Aula Paolo VI – Mercoledì, 10 gennaio 2024
Proverbs. 23:15-18)
My son, if your heart is wise, my heart also will rejoice;
And my inmost being will exult, when your lips speak what is right.
Do not let your heart envy sinners, but only those who always fear the LORD;*
For you will surely have a future, and your hope will not be cut off.g
Pope Francis’ Catechesis:
Dear brothers and sisters,
In this catechesis we are doing on the vices and virtues, today we are going to focus on the vice of gluttony. What does the Gospel tell us about it? Let us look at Jesus
His first miracle, at the wedding feast of Cana, shows his sympathy for human joys: He wants the feast to end well and gives the bride and groom a large quantity of very good wine.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus appears as a very different prophet from the Baptist: while John is remembered for his asceticism – he ate what he found in the desert – Jesus is the Messiah we often see at table.
His behavior is scandalous to some, because not only does he have compassion on sinners, but he even eats with them, and this gesture shows his willingness for communion and closeness with all.
But there is something else. While Jesus’ attitude towards the Jewish commandments reveals to us his total submission to the Law, he shows compassion towards his disciples: when they are caught in the act of picking ears of grain on the Sabbath because they are hungry, he justifies them by reminding them that King David had eaten the sacred bread on the Sabbath.
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He justifies them, reminding them that King David and his companions, being in need, had also eaten of the sacred loaves (Mk. 2:23-26 – One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.”).
And Jesus established a new principle: wedding guests cannot fast when the bridegroom is with them; they will fast when the bridegroom is taken from them. Everything is now relative to Jesus.
When He is with us, we cannot be mourn; but in the hour of his passion, then yes, we fast
(Mark 2:18 –20 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. Some people came and asked Jesus, “How is it that John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?” Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them. But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast).
Jesus wants us to be joyful in His company – He is the Bridegroom of the Church ‘ – but He also wants us to share in His sufferings, which are also the sufferings of the little ones and the poor.
Another important aspect.
Jesus drops the distinction between clean and unclean foods, which was a distinction made by the Jewish law. Jesus teaches – actually, it is not what enters man that defiles him, but what comes out of his heart. And so saying “made all foods pure” (Mark 7:19 – since it enters not the heart but the stomach and passes out into the latrine?”). That is why Christianity does not consider any food unclean food.
But our focus must be on the inside: not on the food itself, but on our relationship with it. And Jesus makes it clear that what makes a food good or bad, shall we say, is not the food itself but the relationship we have with it.
And we see it, when a person has an disordered relationship with food, we look at the way he eats.
He eats in a hurry, with the urge to get full and never gets full. He does not have a good relationship with food, he is a slave to food.
This serene relationship that Jesus established with food should be rediscovered and appreciated, especially in so-called affluent societies, where so many imbalances and pathologies occur.
People eat too much, or too little. People often eat alone. Eating disorders are spreading: anorexia, bulimia, obesity… And medicine and psychology try to deal with the bad relationship with food.
A bad relationship with food produces all these diseases.
These are illnesses, often very painful, which are mostly related to the torments of the psyche and soul. Food is the manifestation of something internal: the tendency is to balance or to have excess; the ability to give thanks or the arrogant claim to autonomy; the empathy of those who know how to share food with the needy, or the selfishness of those who hoard everything for themselves.
This question is so important: tell me how you eat, and I will tell you what soul you possess.
In the way we eat, our interiority, our habits, our psychic attitudes are revealed.
The ancient Fathers called the vice of gluttony by the name “gastrimargy,” a term that can be translated as ” “madness of the stomach”. Gluttony is a “madness of the stomach.”
And there is also this proverb: that we must eat to live, not live to eat.
Gluttony is a vice that is grafted onto our vital necessity, such as eating.
Let us be careful about this.
If we read it from a social point of view, gluttony is perhaps the most dangerous vice, which is killing the planet.
Because the sin of those who give in before a slice of cake does not cause great harm, all things considered,
But the voraciousness with which we have spent the last few centuries on the planet’s goods is endangering everyone’s future.
We have rushed at everything in order to become masters of everything, while everything was entrusted to our care, not to our exploitation!
Here is the great sin, the anger of the belly: we have renounced the name ‘man’ to adopt another, that of “consumer”. And that is what we say in social life today: the “consumers”.
We haven’t even noticed that someone has begun to call us that.
We were created to be “Eucharistic” men and women, capable of thanksgiving, discreet in the use of the earth, and instead we are in danger of becoming predators, and now we realise that this form of “gluttony” has done much harm to the world.
Let us ask the Lord to help us in the path of sobriety, so that the various forms of gluttony do not take over our lives.
