Pope Francis has expressed his support of breast feeding in public.
In an interview with the Italian newspaperLa Stampa, the first Jesuit Pope linked topics including recycling food and wastefulness to breastfeeding: saying mothers should not be ashamed to feed their hungry babies.
He expressed his view via the story of a young mother who attended his weekly Papal General Audience.
He described how as he approached the mother, her child was “crying its eyes out” with hunger and so he asked her to “please give it something to eat!”
He continued: “She was shy and didn’t want to breastfeed in public, while the Pope was passing. I wish to say the same to humanity: give people something to eat!”
He also condemned priests who do not baptise children of unmarried mothers, calling it “a sick mentality”.
But when the newspaper asked him about the exclusion of remarried divorcees from the Catholic Church he did not directly disagree with the practice, but rather said that it is “not a sanction”.
