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:
The multiplication of loaves and fish was NOT a “miracle of sharing.” Thats 1970s Jesuitical claptrap! https://t.co/5BR4bpPtRu
— Lepanto Institute (@LepantoInst) April 18, 2026
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”.
This also sounds very familiar:
Iowa archdiocese canceling Sunday Mass at 75+ parishes as part of consolidation – LifeSite
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/iowa-archdiocese-canceling-sunday-mass-at-75-parishes-as-part-of-consolidation/
It does seem that Pope Leo made a nice conceptual turnaround of the dumb old “really the crowd had enough food hidden in their ultra-dimensional magic bags of holding.”
But… The problem with making a clever turnaround of a concept, while using similar enough wording for people to get it, is that people will hear the previous concept and not your new version.
Even if you are St. Augustine, master of rhetoric, you can have your cool phrase turned on you by some yahoo like Alistair Crowley.
So yeah, it is a dangerous rhetorical ploy.
It’s just more communist propaganda. There’s no discussion at all of the supernatural act of Christ taking something material and transforming that tiny amount into food for 5000. Its just not interesting to him. Instead you get more haranguing about the haves and have nots. Im completely sick of all of it. Let him sit with David Axelrod again and figure out a way to take a fraction of the huge funding the US federal government gives bishops, 40 perent of their income, and share that. Leo and the bishops act as if material poverty is the only kind of poverty. Do they ever think about spiritual poverty? Ah, there’s no profit in talking about that. You cant peel catholics away from Trump and the GOP by talking about boring old spiritual poverty. Well, he’s got a job to do. It’s why he was hired.
Seems like the College of Cardinals is 0-2…in my opinion. But I’m just a sinner and the clergy knows it all
Thank you for giving context, Father. I’m disappointed in the Lepanto Institute and Catholic Sat for this flagrant contextomy.
Every three years, John chapter 6 comes up in the Sunday Lectionary, during Cycle B, teaching about the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes and the Bread of Life Discourse.
It is always in late July or August, when many people go on vacation.
So, every three years, someone comes back from the beach (or from grandma’s, or from anywhere), and says they heard a fantastic homily at the parish over there!
“You will never guess how the priest explained the miracle of the Multiplication!”
Oh, yes I can. From beginning to end.
Pope Leo should’nt have tried to tiptoe through this minefield. Even if he managed to avoid stepping on a Claymore mine himself, there are many people following him who will only hear the “miracle of sharing” homily, yet again.
What would Mother Angelica have to say about that??!!!
I have never doubted the miracle, of course, but always wondered where the Apostles got the twelve empty baskets.
I understand the liberal attitude. We live in an era of DOORDASH and GRUBHUB. The youth of today looks at that as a miracle
It is probably worth recalling Cardinal Archbishop Willem Eijk’s first celebration of the ‘traditional’ Mass on ‘Laetare’ and the 16 March account on the ‘aartsbisdom’ website, with its attention to his sermon – as fed (no pun intended) into Google Translate:
To feed a large group of people, Jesus has the five loaves and two fish that a young boy has with him distributed among the crowd. It turns out there is enough bread for everyone; there are even 12 baskets left over. Cardinal Eijk recounted the story he had heard about a priest who, during a religious class at secondary school in the 1950s, said to the students: “Well, boys, of course, we no longer believe literally about that miraculous multiplication of the loaves these days. What Jesus supposedly did there is completely impossible. But I will tell you what the real miracle was. Jesus proclaimed love, and that crowd was so filled with love because of it that everyone who had a loaf of bread with them shared it with others. And that is why everyone received enough.” Cardinal Eijk called this “the trivialization of catechesis to the extreme” and, alongside various cultural changes, “a major cause of the crisis the Church is currently in. What that priest said there in the 1950s—and which, I fear, has often been repeated since—is not in the Gospel. It states there that Jesus fed an entire multitude with nothing but five loaves and two fish. Jesus actually performed this sign of the miraculous multiplication of loaves. The starting point of the Christian faith is that God created the universe out of nothing. If He could do that, then He can also miraculously multiply bread,” according to Cardinal Eijk. He emphasized that it is God “who has given us life and also the means, including the means to bake bread, that we need to sustain our earthly life. This is underscored by the miraculous multiplication of the loaves. In the miraculous multiplication of the loaves, however, Jesus makes it clear that He is concerned with much more than food for our earthly life alone, contrary to what the crowd thinks. In the miraculous multiplication of the loaves, we see an unmistakable reference to the sacrament of the Eucharist and the Paschal mystery.”
Cardinal Eijk: “Today, the Church presents us with the Gospel of the miraculous multiplication of the loaves to prevent us from letting that life with God and by God slip through our fingers. And to ensure that we embrace it with joy and surrender in the Eucharist, the pledge of eternal life.”
There is a link in the News article to a pdf of the whole sermon, but I have not yet tried feeding that into a translation machine.
Pcg: plenty! If only we had her. Its lonely business, watching this slow motion disaster and no major figure to take em on. But God has left it up to us to do. Its on us now. We defend Christ and the gospel and the actual faith as it really and truly is. They cannot take it from us! This galls them and boils their innards, which does give some pleasure. ;)
Father Z, thank you for clearing this up, but if I read you right, the Pope stated
“ The multiplication of the loaves and the fish happened while sharing: that is the miracle!”
Even though he clears things up with what follows, I fear if I took the transcript of this sermon to an English professor, he would say people will remember the phrase “That is the miracle” as referring to the sharing rather than Jesus himself multiplying the loaves and fishes. That is, the Pope is inviting people (maybe not on purpose, but do we know for sure?) to interpret his words in the manner done by the Leptano Institute.
Prof: Thank you for making my point for me.
Hence, this post.
I’m tired of re-interpreting or nuancing everything modern Popes say to make it fit Catholic teaching.
Did the ancient Popes we still read today have this problem or is more of a recent development?
A woman I went to school with many years ago noted yet a third miracle in the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. She relied on Luke’s version. She was Lebanese so presumably had an insight that would have eluded Irish and Scottish me. Her miracle? Getting 5,000 middle eastern people to sit down in orderly groups of fifty.