Resolving the global crises of world hunger and malnutrition demands a shift away from a distorted approach to food and toward healthier lifestyles and just economic practices, Pope Francis said.

“We are, in fact, witnessing how food is ceasing to be a means of subsistence and turning into an avenue of personal destruction,” he said in his message to Qu Dongyu, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, to mark World Food Day on Oct. 16. World Food Day marks the date the FAO was founded in 1945 to address the causes of world hunger.

Pope Francis said he hoped the world day theme of 2019 – “Our actions are our future: Healthy diets for a #ZeroHunger World” – will be a reminder of how many people continue to eat in an unhealthy way.

“It is a cruel, unjust and paradoxical reality that, today, there is food for everyone, and yet not everyone has access to it, and that in some areas of the world food is wasted, discarded and consumed in excess, or destined for other purposes than nutrition,” he said.

“To escape from this spiral, we need to promote ‘economic institutions and social initiatives which can give the poor regular access to basic resources,'” he said, citing his encyclical, “Laudato Si’.”

The theme also points to “the distorted relationship between food and nutrition,” he said. Some 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger, “while almost 700 million are overweight, victims of improper dietary habits,” said Pope Francis.

Being overweight is no longer a major health issue in developed countries, he said, but also in poorer areas where people may “eat little but increasingly poorly, since they imitate dietary models imported from developed areas.”

The Vatican promoted the launch of  ‘smart rosary’ bracelet on Oct 15 compatible with an iOS and Android app, which costs over $100.

“In a world of indifference and in the face of so many injustices, poverty, elementary rights denied, praying for peace in the world means reconciling ourselves in our daily relationships, with the poorest, with the stranger, with different cultures and spiritual and religious traditions, but also with our land, our forests, our rivers and oceans,” Fr Frédéric Fornos, SJ said in a press release sent by the Holy See Press Office on October 14.

“The rosary is a beautiful spi-ritual tradition for contemplating the Gospel with Mary, it is a simple and humble prayer,” he said.

Creating an Amazonian-rite liturgy and new ministries for laypeople, including the ordination of women deacons, are some of the recurring proposals made by small groups at the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon.

Such proposals, one group said, would increase as well as transform the Catholic Church’s presence in the Amazon, turning it from one of transience to one of permanence.

The group identified as Spanish-B noted differences of opinion. Some Synod members, it said, proposed asking the Pope for the “the possibility of conferring the priesthood on married men in the Amazon on an exceptional basis, under specific circumstances and for certain specific peoples, clearly establishing the reasons that justify it.”

The 12 small-group reports, published by the Vatican on Oct. 18, were the result of reflections in groups organized by language; each group summarized their members’ conclusions and offered proposals for the whole Synod. Most of the groups cited the presence of women as a “decisive factor in the life and mission of the church in the Amazon,” and one that must be recognized officially. Four of the groups explicitly called for the ordination of women deacons and three others said the church should study the possibility.

The Church in England and Wales rounded off almost a month of celebrations for the canonisation of St John Henry Newman with a service of ecumenical vespers at West-minster Cathedral.

The Archbishop of Canter-bury, Justin Welby, who preached at the service – which was presided over by Cardinal Vincent Nichols – said that the sea change in ecumenical relations that has taken place over the past century would have left Newman “speechless with astonishment”.

For a modern Archbishop of Canterbury to preach about Newman – the former leader of the Oxford Movement whose conversion was among the most high profile of modern times – was, he admitted, a cause for apprehension.

“Some might argue that it is like the owner of Liverpool asking the Everton manager to welcome to the Reds one of the greatest players Everton had produced, and who had left the Blues against their will,” he said. Referring to Liverpool-born Cardinal Nichols, he continued: “I know that His Eminence would deny the possibility of greatness and Everton being in the same sentence but exercise the imagination.

“Or more savagely, it might be asking a party leader to welcome one of his own who had crossed the floor in the worst of circumstances. That is how our churches are often seen, at best rivals, possibly mutual opponents, and even in some cases enemy forces in a five-century war. It is this way of thinking that leads the political turmoil of the present time to be compared to the Reformation.”

But, he said, this analogy was wrong: “For we are not enemies, nor are we opponents, nor even rivals… We are more like a family that had a very bitter dispute, a divorce in the past, and has acquired the habits and occasionally bad manners of separation. For all that we are still family, called together by grace, caught up in the love of God.”