Vatican officials, charity workers, and internationally recognised economists came together yesterday to discuss debt reform in an online town hall organised by Caritas Internationalis. Source: Vatican News.
One of the more shocking statistics discussed in the meeting was that 3.3 billion people –nearly half the world’s population – live in countries that spend more money on debt than on healthcare.
The webinar brought together more than 200 people – humanitarian workers, economists, and senior Vatican officials – to discuss debt, climate, and development.
Alastair Dutton, Caritas’ Secretary-General, introduced the discussion. He suggested that the fact that so many countries spend more on servicing their debt than on healthcare and education shows that, in today’s economy, human beings are secondary “to economic interest”.
Mr Dutton also highlighted that the subject of debt reform has already been raised by Pope Leo, just weeks into his pontificate.
The topic was also seen as crucial, the Caritas chief noted, by the late Pope Francis, who, in 2024, called for a “multinational mechanism” to manage debt between countries, avoiding an “every man for himself” mentality in which “it is always the weakest” who lose out.
Mr Dutton highlighted Caritas’s Turn Debt Into Hope campaign, which calls for the forgiveness of unjust debt.
The aim of the campaign, Caritas officer Alfonso Apicella explained, is to build public pressure around unfair debt practices, particularly in view of the Church’s ongoing 2025 Jubilee Year, a period traditionally associated with financial clemency.
“There are 1.4 billion Catholics in the world,” Mr Apicella said, “and we want to show that they have agency.”
Meanwhile, Sister Alessandra Smerilli, Secretary of the Holy See’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, highlighted Pope Francis’s notion of the “ecological debt” owed by rich countries towards the poorer countries, are suffering the effects of a climate crisis which they have contributed much less to causing.
This was a topic also touched on by Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, who noted that the concept of ecological debt was also highlighted by Pope Francis in his Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee Year.
FULL STORY
Caritas: ‘Crippling’ debt weighing down developing countries (By Joseph Tulloch, Vatican News)
