From a reader…
QUAERITUR:
I hope you can explain something for me. I saw something about the Pope in Africa saying that Jesus’ miraculous feeding of the crowds was really just a moment of sharing, people stopped being selfish and took out the food they had and shared it around. Doesn’t that mean that it was wasn’t a miracle at all? It was just a human thing?
You are asking about a line Pope Leo’s recent sermon in Cameroon at Douala in Japoma Stadium) Friday 17 April 2026.
That is on top of this:
We need some context. Pope Leo was preaching in Africa. A glance at the whole of the homily clearly addressed the fact that some people have abundance and others are in poverty. He was reflecting on John 6:1–15 as a word of salvation addressed to Cameroon and “all humanity”. He frames Jesus’ question to the Apostles about the hungry people who followed him into the wilderness, “What will you do?”. This is a question for everyone: parents, pastors, public officials, rich and poor, young and old. He stressed human need and creatureliness, then presents Jesus’ response as blessing the little that is available and distributing it for all. Leo interprets the feeding as showing that bread becomes sufficient when it is shared, and he links the sign to Christ’s refusal of domination and His mission of loving service. He then moves from bodily hunger to spiritual hunger, presenting Christ in the Eucharist as the true nourishment of the soul and the source of hope, solidarity, forgiveness, and ecclesial fellowship. There’s more but it is not relevant.
What is the troubling line? I’ll put it in bold along with couple of other things:
While awaiting our answers, Jesus gives his own: “Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted” (v. 11). A serious problem was solved by blessing the little food that was present and sharing it with all who were hungry. The multiplication of the loaves and the fish happened while sharing: that is the miracle! There is bread for everyone if it is given to everyone. There is bread for everyone if it is taken, not with a hand that snatches away, but with a hand that gives. [Tell that to Wisenbuger in Detroit and Martin in Charlotte.] Let us observe Jesus’ gesture closely: when the Son of God took the bread and the fish, he first gave thanks. He was grateful to the Father for that which would become a gift and a blessing for all the people.
In this way, the food was abundant. It was not rationed out of necessity. It was not stolen in strife. It was not wasted by those who gorge themselves in the presence of those who have nothing to eat. Passing from the hands of Christ to those of his disciples, the food increased for everyone; indeed, it was superabundant (cf. vv. 12-13). Amazed by what Jesus had done, the people exclaimed: “This is indeed the prophet!” (v. 14), that is, the one who speaks in God’s name, the Word of the Almighty.
Note well. Leo started with that tired and, by itself, heretical trope, that the real miracle of the moment was getting everyone to share the food they had hidden. This has been around a while and it is a darling of liberals to the point that they can barely see the anti-Eucharistic meaning and the acid of modernism that dissolves the supernatural into the nature.
However, that said, Leo went on to include that the food was superabundant and he used Eucharistic imagery. That saves what he said.
That said, there are priests and bishops out there who do fall into the trap and make jackasses of themselves while trying to keep the Church as a continuation of Woodstock.
“The multiplication of the loaves and the fish happened while sharing: that is the miracle!”, is not a harmless paraphrase if it is not hemmed in with many other things.
Taken by itself, and that is what some critics of Leo did, it relocates the miracle itself. In the Gospel, the miracle is not that the crowd learned to share lunch.
The miracle is that Christ multiplied the loaves.
That is the Church’s own language. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1335, the Church speaks explicitly of “the miracles of the multiplication of the loaves.”
1335 The miracles of the multiplication of the loaves, when the Lord says the blessing, breaks and distributes the loaves through his disciples to feed the multitude, prefigure the superabundance of this unique bread of his Eucharist….
John 6 is especially clear. After the meal, the disciples “filled twelve baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten,” and then the crowd, having seen the “sign,” said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world.”
The text points to a supernatural sign, not to a lesson in group ethics.
And, the leftovers come from the original five loaves. The crowd reacts by identifying Jesus with the expected prophet like Moses. That response makes sense ONLY if they have witnessed a messianic wonder. It makes no sense if all that happened was that people became less selfish.
Bringing this forward, of course Christians should share. No Catholic denies that. Charity is a necessary moral consequence of the Gospel. But consequence is not the same thing as content. The feeding of the five thousand can certainly teach generosity, yet the sign itself is Christ’s sovereign act. Christ – not a communist – does not merely organize redistribution. He feeds the multitude by divine power and in doing so prefigures the superabundance of the Eucharist.
That is why the Church has always treated this event as a miracle of multiplication.
The modern “miracle of sharing” reading has long been criticized as an imposition on the text rather than an interpretation drawn from it. The theory depends on details absent from the Gospel and empties the sign of its supernatural force. It reduces a revelation of Christ’s identity to a moralism about human behavior.
Where does this, frankly, stupid reduction of “sharing” come from and why should it be avoided if possible?
The “sharing” trope, the “miracle of sharing” interpretation, traces back to a 19th c. German Protestant Heinrich Eberhard Gottlieb Paulus. Paulus was a rationalist, who denied the possibility of miracles and prophecy. Therefore all Gospel miracle accounts were explained away in purely naturalistic terms. In fact, Leo does summarize Paulus’s reconstruction: Jesus and the disciples began distributing their own food in order to set an example, the members of the crowd followed suit, and eventually there was enough for all. However, he hemmed that in with the rest of the account which reinjects – barely – the supernatural element.
Note also that Heinrich Paulus, writing in 19th c. century Germany, was also anti-Semitic. So there is an implicit anti-Semitism in this interpretation. Many people who took this view depicted the rich Jewish people as being selfish who needed to be moved by the humble poverty of Jesus and His disciples. That’s the miracle. Ummm… no.
This “miracle of sharing” notion should be scrapped and never used because it causes confusion, as it has this time. Sure, this time, we can see that Leo meant that the miraculous multiplication happened in the contexts of sharing. Sharing by the haves with the have nots was a point he was trying to make.
But today, you have to be super careful about what you say because for every 1 person who is smart enough and patient enough and has enough know how to study a little, there are 8958 who don’t and they are all on twitter or have “Catholic podcasts”.
Speaking of Popes, yesterday we celebrated another saintly pontiff, St. Leo IX (+19 April 1054). He militated against simony and decreed clerical celibacy to the rank of subdeacon. As Pope he travelled all over the place, attending “walking togethers” which dealt with concrete issues, rather than dreamy bloviating. During his time as Pope, relations broke down with Constantinople. He also had a hard time with the Normans in the south and led an army against them – yes, the SAINT Pope led an army. He lost and was held captive until he recognized the Normans in Calabria and Apulia.
The sun rose upon Rome at 06:23 and it will sink beyond sight at 19:56.
“When,” you ask, “did the sun rise in Rome today? I respond: “06:25.”
In Rome the sun rose at 6:28 and it set at 19:53.
