Pope's appeal for debt relief gains momentum

By Deborah Castellano Lubov

In more than 160 countries, Pope Francis' call for debt relief is becoming manifest, says Eric LeCompte, the Executive Director of Jubilee USA Network, a development coalition of more than 750 religious groups and organizations around the world, in an interview with Vatican News.

The coalition, which includes Pope Saint John Paul II among its founders, frequently advises the Catholic Church and Bishops' Conferences around the world on implementing the Church's vision for the Church on Jubilee, a vision of debt relief, debt cancellation, and building an economy that provides for everyone.

For more than 25 years, LeCompte has led religious groups to win policies that alleviate poverty, address global conflict, and promote human rights. He has also addressed the United Nations General Assembly on needed economic and climate policies to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Amongst other roles and responsibilities, LeCompte, who serves on boards of faith-based development and financial transparency organizations and recently received an honorary doctorate from Catholic Theological Union of Chicago, has advised a UN General Assembly process on global sovereign bankruptcy structures to alleviate poverty and is a member of expert UN working groups.

As global debts are at record highs, having reached 313 trillion dollars in 2023, Pope Francis, in his latest World Peace Day Message, called on nations to forgive developing nations' debts, abolish the death penalty, and allocate arms spending to combat hunger and climate change. Similarly, during his first Angelus of 2025, the Holy Father renewed his appeal to grant debt relief to the world's poorest nations. 

Interview with Eric LeCompte

Q. Pope Francis, especially in his latest message for World Peace Day, called on nations to forgive developing nations' debts. How would you say the Pope's debt relief call is manifesting itself?

Pope Francis has really been one of the greatest leaders on these issues. Pope Francis began his pontificate by noting that we need to have a global economy that provides for everyone. I will never forget when Pope Francis spoke in 2015 at the United Nations during his visit to New York and addressed the General Assembly. For the first time in world fora, he was calling for the implementation of a bankruptcy-like process to the international financial system to alleviate poverty, to deal with climate issues, to deal with migration. At the heart of all of the world's problems, what Pope Francis has continued to say is that these are economic issues like debt. Pope Francis has said we need debt relief and economic aid to be able to address poverty, inequality, and climate issues.

Yes, this has been an important appeal this Jubilee...

Right, on December 23, we took Pope Francis's message of pursuing debt relief to launch five years of campaigns. We did this right at the Holy See, thanks to the Holy See Press Office and the Dicastery of Communication, with Caritas Internationalis and global Catholic relief agencies all over the world. We launched campaigns on the Holy Father's message in 160 countries for five years, because we know all of the processes we need to win on debt relief, on economic aid, on moving forward and creating this new international bankruptcy process that the Holy Father is calling for. We can't achieve this in one year.

And this could seem a bit overwhelming just on the surface to people who don't understand the intricacies, but in a practical way, could you explain what are some of those best practices? What are the concrete things that happen or need to happen in order to effectuate this, in order to actually make progress in this regard?

Debt relief is really important. Since John Paul II's appeals and efforts for debt relief, along with Benedict's, we have moved policies forward and made changes within the international financial system at the United Nations, with the G7 governments, with the G20 governments, with the International Monetary Fund, an entity which affects our jobs and lives almost as much as the very oxygen we breathe. It's the primary institution which governs our global economic and financial system. We won several major global agreements endorsed by the Catholic Church, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, and the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative in the early 2000s. Those sound like a big mouthful, but what those things actually mean, is that we won actual policies that resulted in $130 billion in debt relief.

Right now, because of debt relief, the most accountable form of economic aid that is delivered through the global financial system - it means 54 million kids in Africa have gone and are going to school, who never would have seen the inside of a classroom. It means amazingly and authoritatively that people all over the world, in the world's poorest countries, for the first time in their lives, were able to see a doctor or were able to get vaccines or healthcare.

How so?

It's about continuing and creating a process that can make sure that countries no longer get in debt. So right now, the majority of the world's countries are dealing with deep debt crises and deep financial crises. This was compounded by the pandemic and because of the pandemic. What has happened is we've seen poverty in particular for children and women moved to extreme levels. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of people have now entered extreme poverty around the world and there's very little hope of getting out of poverty because these countries are in deep debt, economic and financial crises. What a bankruptcy-like process will do is it will offer the same stability that we have in our domestic economies. Almost every country in the world relies on a bankruptcy process in their country, so that when entities, when businesses, when states, when a country gets in crisis, they have a way of canceling debt, but also protecting the interests of both the lender and the borrower, of both the creditor and the debtor. It's a foundational process in our domestic economies, but bankruptcy doesn't exist in the international financial system.

Therefore, what it will do is it will create actual legal processes within all of the world to allow all of those countries who have debt to continually come to a table and both receive relief and protect legitimate investors. Unfortunately, some of that debt is not owed to legitimate investors. Unfortunately often there a lot of bad guys, who are trying to exploit the poorest people in the world for their own gain. It is sinful to build wealth off the backs of the poor.

Would you say therefore that this Jubilee hope calling for debt relief is a concrete effort of the Catholic Church to protect the vulnerable?

This bankruptcy-like structure that Pope Francis is calling for, that the Catholic Church has called for, means that we have a continual process to address crises and these inherent inequalities. The work of the Catholic Church as it moves forward on debt relief campaigns, and with 160 countries working to make these changes to the international financial system, is incredibly important. 

The Catholic Church, as the world's number one provider of social services, of health care, of poverty reduction programs, has a very clear moral authority to actually call for the changes in the international financial system. Our Mother, the Church, has a clear moral authority to work with other faith groups toward this common goal, as it has been doing, of making a worthwhile change to the financial system that not only protects the poorest among us, but protects all of us.