A decade ago, New York City officials were so reluctant to give out food stamps, they made people register one day and return the next just to get an application. The welfare commissioner said the program caused dependency and the poor were "better off" without it. Now the city urges the needy to seek aid (in languages from Albanian to Yiddish).

In launching its needle-exchange program last week, the Catholic Diocese of Albany, N.Y., said the decision came down to choosing the lesser evil. Illegal drug use is bad, but the spread of deadly diseases is worse. The medical evidence is clear, the diocese argued on Feb. 1, when it began "Project Safe Point" in two Upstate New York locations through its local branch of Catholic Charities. Public health studies document that exchanging used syringes for new ones can effectively stanch the spread of blood-borne diseases such as AIDS, and even lead drug abusers to treatment and recovery.

Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday blamed indifference as the fundamental cause of hundreds of millions of deaths in the world from lack of food, water and medicine. Benedict chose justice and injustice as the theme of his Lenten message released by the Vatican on Thursday in several languages. Lent, a period of reflection and penitence in the Roman Catholic church, begins this year on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 17. Benedict said this Lenten season he wants people to reflect on what justice really means for human beings.

Rick Warren, perhaps the nation's best-known pastor, was stunned. "I went to Bible College, two seminaries and I got a doctorate. How did I miss this?" "This" is not some deep, hidden biblical code predicting the end of the world. It isn't a cipher that further elucidates the truth of the Trinity. It isn't even the formula for turning water into wine. No, the thing that stunned Rick Warren was when he was struck for the first time by the sheer volume of verses in the Bible that express God's compassion for the poor and oppressed. Unfortunately, Warren isn't the only person of faith to be surprised by just how much God has to say about poverty and justice.

We all like to imagine that there'll be something to stop our fall if we hit hard times. Mulugeta Yimer, for example, is a 56-year-old Alexandria cabdriver who escaped poverty and persecution in Ethiopia 20 years ago only to be clobbered by the recession. Business is way down, and he's facing possible foreclosure on his home. He says he is averse to government handouts, but when he contemplates what might be in store for his wife, who works part-time at a convenience store, and their two young children, he muses wistfully, "There's always welfare, isn't there?" Actually, no. When President Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law, he didn't just end welfare as we knew it. For all practical purposes, it turned out, he brought an end to cash help of any kind for families with children in much of the country.

With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children. It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs. Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.

Congress should make a priority of expanding federal nutrition programs that are aimed at helping millions of struggling families feed their children. The need to bolster these programs was underscored again this week in a dismaying Department of Agriculture study showing that a record number of households had trouble getting sufficient food at one time or another last year. These facts are troubling enough, but a separate federal study showed that even before the recession began, more than two-thirds of families with children who were defined as "food insecure" under federal guidelines contained one or more full-time worker. This suggests that millions of Americans were trapped in low-wage jobs before the downturn that made it more difficult for them to provide children with adequate nutrition.

This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 17 million American households (49 million people, or 14.6 percent of the population) were food insecure in 2008, the highest number since the government began tracking food insecurity in 1995. The number of children affected by hunger also increased, according to the report. In 2008, 506,000 households (1.3 percent of households with children) experience very low food security. This was up from 323,000 households (0.8 percent of households with children) in 2007. According to the report, food-secure households are defined as having "consistent access to enough food for active healthy lives for all household members at all times during the year."

A new Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report says agricultural productivity in developing countries may decline by between nine and 21 percent by mid-century due to climate change. During the same period, the world's population is expected to grow to more than 9 billion, which may leave some countries more reliant on food imports. A separate report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) says growing population and loss of production due to climate change will lead to increases in food prices. At a teleconference, Gerald Nelson, lead author of IFPRI's report said, "Our models project that even without climate change, food prices will rise. But climate change makes the problem worse."

As long as the world made headway in reducing the masses of hungry people, it was easy for wealthy nations to largely ignore World Food Day, which is observed every Oct. 16. But not so this year. Decades of progress in fighting hunger have come to a stomach-churning halt. Last year, the proportion of people in poor countries who are malnourished suddenly rose after a long decline. And that surprise shift continued into 2009 with the number of chronically hungry people expected to top 1 billion this year -- the highest level since 1970 -- or about 100 million more than last year.