SAO PAULO, March 26 (UPI) -- Brazil's president appealed to Pope John Paul II for his and the Church's support for his nationwide effort to eradicate hunger, according to a letter released to the media Wednesday.
"For us it will always be of fundamental importance to continue counting on the support, the participation and the critical conscience of the Church ... in ending an unjust society model ... that contradicts the elementary beginnings of humanism and of Christianity," Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote.
Lula has made his Zero Hunger program his administration's top priority since assuming office on Jan.1. According to government statistics, about 45 million out of 175 million Brazilians are malnourished, although some say those numbers are inflated and that the starved number around 20 million.
The program intends to provide three meals a day for the needy at a cost of about $530 million.
The timing of the letter appears to be of strategic importance for the fledgling administration as an effort to curtail some of the criticism the program has received since its Jan. 30 launch. Many politicians in the world's largest Catholic country would be reluctant to criticize a program endorsed by the Pope.
Criticisms of Zero Hunger include allegations that the program is poorly run and will ultimately be a populist drain on the nation's already strapped budget for 2003.
Lula's letter also took a swipe at the U.S.-led war on Iraq, which his administration has formally opposed.
The Brazilian leader managed, however, to deftly couch his condemnation in the context of his own "war against hunger" saying that starvation "offends the dignity of the children of God."
"I have been saying with every possible insistence, that the only legitimate war that the world government's can wage is the war against hunger," said the letter.
