VATICAN (CNS): The Catholic Church’s advocacy for debt relief is focused primarily on enabling nations with high foreign debt to provide for their people, but the Vatican Covid-19 Commission is also worried about families staggering under debt burdens.
In fact, the commission’s economy task force has recommended “extensive debt standstills and reductions for indebted households” and the training and deployment of “debt advisers,” including through parishes and Catholic charities, to help households get out of debt.
While many families with steady incomes from remote working used the pandemic lockdowns to spend less and pay down their debts, people who lost income or lost their jobs often survived thanks only to food banks, charity, government aid and eviction moratoriums.
Pope Francis launched a fund in his diocese, the Diocese of Rome, in 2020 to help families who lost jobs or were forced to close their small businesses during the lockdown. He established the Jesus the Divine Worker Foundation with an initial donation of more than US$1 million [$7.77 million]. The Lazio region and the city of Rome matched his donation and individuals gave as well.
‘Usury is an ancient and unfortunately still concealed evil that, like a snake, strangles its victims’
Pope Francis
The diocese reported on August 3, that in its first year of operation, the fund distributed more than US$2.6 million [$20.2 million] in emergency disbursements to help people with their mortgage, rent or utility payments, monthly support of up to US$700 [$5,400] for jobless families and grants to individuals to start small businesses or learn a new skill.
Bishop Benoni Ambarus, director of Caritas Roma, said it also brought more families into contact with Caritas counsellors, giving Caritas greater first hand accounts of the pandemic’s impact and allowing the organisation to tailor its assistance.
While most Italians have a high rate of personal savings and low household debt, those who don’t easily can fall prey to loan sharks.
The country has a national organisation of mostly parish- or diocesan-established anti-usury foundations, which educate people about the dangers of indebtedness, assist people with high debt and help rescue those who have fallen into the clutches of loan sharks.
“Usury is an ancient and unfortunately still concealed evil that, like a snake, strangles its victims,” Pope Francis said during a meeting with the organisation’s national council in 2018.
“It must be prevented by removing people from the pathology of debts accrued to get by or to save their business,” he said.
The Church-sponsored anti-usury bodies, the pope said, also must help people learn to adopt “a sober lifestyle, able to distinguish between the superfluous and the necessary, and which promotes responsibility in not assuming debts to obtain things that could be renounced.”
