In Argentina’s Patagonia region, large shale fields called Vaca Muerta sprawl over open, dry flatlands. Under the area’s giant sky, locals have farmed fruit for decades.
In 2010, a petrochemical company discovered that Vaca Muerta—Spanish for “dead cow”—holds one of the largest natural gas deposits in the world. Since then, companies have hungrily drilled fracking wells and pipelines into the shale lands—sandy, clay-like deposits full of natural gas—at increasing speeds over the past few years. Meanwhile, rising prices and the influx of workers have displaced locals and pushed them into poverty.
Argentina holds billions of dollars of foreign debt and is the largest debtor of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF keeps urging Argentina to export fossil fuels and increase fracking as a solution to their debt crisis.
In response, a group of Argentine climate activists, along with activists in South Africa, Ecuador, and other countries in the global South, have called on people in the global North to help address the connected injustices of debt and the climate crisis. They started an international group called Debt for Climate. Charles Spring, one of the leaders of the Debt for Climate chapter in the United States, says that the group advocates for debt cancelation because it can “generate a better economic system for the countries in the global South to not be needing to extract fossil fuels from their ground to be able to pay off their debts,” acknowledging that the worst impacts and burdens of climate change are disproportionately hitting the global South.
When talking about climate and economics, there are two kinds of relevant debt. Ecological debt refers to what rich countries in the global North owe the impoverished and exploited people and lands of the global South. While the global North’s consumption habits fuel the extraction of natural resources and the land, the global South carries the burden of these practices (such as trash from rich countries being shipped to landfills in poor ones, or extraction of natural resources in the global South that are sent to the North). External debt (or foreign debt) is a loan that comes from a different country—for example, when rich countries in the global North lend money to poor countries in the global South.
Pope Francis, who was Argentinian himself, often spoke and wrote about the connections between the debt crisis and the climate crisis. “Ecological debt and external debt are two sides of the same coin that mortgages the future,” he said in a June 2024 address. Francis also made debt forgiveness part of his messaging around the 2025 Jubilee Year of Hope.
He urged the “international community to work towards forgiving foreign debt” and to recognize the impacts of the ecological debt that exists between the global North and South. “This is an appeal for solidarity, but above all for justice,” he said in January on World Peace Day.
Numerous groups have taken his messaging to heart and are reimagining the ancient biblical practice of Jubilee as a blueprint for what real debt forgiveness could look like—both internationally and here in the United States—in a world facing intersecting crises.
A historic tradition of debt forgiveness
The Jubilee is an ancient Jewish practice. The Torah proclaims that every seven years, “debts are forgiven, slaves are set free, people are to return to their ancestral lands, and in deference to the planet, the land is allowed to rest and God directly provides,” says Eric LeCompte, executive director of Jubilee USA Network.
Every seven times seven years was the 49th year, the great Jubilee, when a ram’s horn was blown and resounded through every living thing. The great Jubilee was meant to “restore God’s justice in every aspect of life,” Pope Francis said on the World Day of Peace in 2025. “The blowing of the horn reminded the entire people, rich and poor alike, that no one comes into this world doomed to oppression.”
The Catholic Church first celebrated a Jubilee year in 1300; since then there has generally been a Jubilee scheduled every 25 years, although this can vary. During a Jubilee year, the Holy Doors open at the Vatican, indicating physical thresholds of mercy and forgiveness. “If you’re a very pious Catholic, there are opportunities to receive special indulgences or graces during a Jubilee year,” says Dean Dettloff, the research and advocacy officer at Development and Peace—Caritas Canada, a Catholic solidarity movement that is part of global outreach organization Caritas Internationalis.
But Jubilee years aren’t just spiritual or personal observances. In 2000, “Pope John Paul II bound together that spiritual tradition of mercy and grace with the material realities of debt and credit,” Dettloff says. Out of this call, the Jubilee USA Network was born, LeCompte says. Jubilee USA is an interfaith movement that advocates for international economic justice and works on measures and policies regarding national debt relief in the global South, including debt restructuring and responsible lending and borrowing.
Over the past 25 years, Jubilee USA has won about $130 billion in debt relief—which, among other wins, meant “52 million kids went to school and are going to school in Africa who never would have seen the inside of a classroom,” LeCompte says, because those countries could invest in education instead of paying back large debts with interest.
In the late 1990s, the energy around debt justice was much higher, which made the Jubilee have a “capstone feeling to it,” Dettloff says. “This time around, it’s the opposite. Lots of countries are in a huge debt crisis, but it’s not publicly recognized in the way that it was in the ’90s. This Jubilee, I hope, kicks off a moment to reckon with that.”
Pope Francis began planting seeds in the global imagination around debt justice, and “it’s up to us to water and reap them,” Dettloff says. Pope Francis connected debt to a “much bigger moral picture” that includes ecology, peace, disarmament, and poverty.
In the mid-1990s, the Catholic Church first called for the implementation of an international bankruptcy process. During his papacy, Francis also continually called for this, including in a 2015 speech he made to the United Nations. “As a society, we affirm that people should be given a second chance even if they made a bad choice or a debt turned out to be unsustainable through no fault of their own,” Dettloff says. “We don’t do that with countries. A nation cannot go to the bank and say, ‘I want to declare bankruptcy.’”
Similar to a process of bankruptcy, Jubilee “protects all of us from becoming too rich or too poor, and protects our planet,” LeCompte says. The Jubilee year goes back even further than the Bible, Dettloff says: “For thousands of years, humans have felt like debt is a really dangerous thing and there ought to be a way of getting out of it. It was really common in the ancient Near East for rulers to release their debtors for lots of reasons.”
Christians have inherited that tradition. Today, “we live in a world that is organized only for creditors,” Dettloff says. “So it takes on specific characteristics under capitalism, but there’s this sense that Jubilee names a common vision.”
Debt: A global crisis
Last summer in Kenya, mass protests broke out when the government tried to raise taxes on Kenyans in order to pay back the nation’s creditors. The police shot and killed dozens of young people who were demonstrating against the proposed tax reform. The protests, however, were successful: The government did not pass the proposed tax reform.
“People are willing to pay taxes for government services that benefit them directly; it’s a bit absurd to pay taxes in order to line the pockets of a private creditor,” Dettloff says. “Kenyans rose up against that, and many of them paid with their lives for that choice.”
Sri Lanka’s presidential election last year was also heavily influenced by the nation’s debt and economic crisis. In 2022, Sri Lanka defaulted on its sovereign debt, meaning it was unable to meet debt payments to creditors. This triggered mass protests that drove out the former president and resulted in one of the worst financial crises in the country, in which the government was unable to pay for necessities like medicine and fuel.
“We live in a world that is organized only for creditors.”
Leading up to the Jubilee year, Dettloff met with people all over the world organizing for debt justice. He says one colleague from Africa quoted Thomas Sankara, a revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso who was assassinated, who said: “If we don’t repay, lenders will not die. That is for sure. But if we repay, we are going to die. That is also for sure.” “[My colleague] said that quote really strikes a chord today with people in Africa, because it’s true,” Dettloff says. “The creditors will not die if they’re not paid, but all the money that goes out of an African country, a Latin American country, is money that’s not going into social services and public projects.”
This Jubilee Year, in response to Pope Francis’ calls for debt justice, Caritas Internationalis launched a campaign called “Turn Debt into Hope.” Many faith-based and civil society organizations have joined the campaign, including Debt for Climate. Caritas has a presence in over 200 countries and is the second largest humanitarian organization in the world after the Red Cross. Alfonso Apicella, the organization’s senior officer for global advocacy campaigns, says that Turn Debt into Hope is a “campaign that’s focused on the global South” and recalls the Pilgrims of Hope theme for the Jubilee year.
In communities where Caritas is present, “we know what the effects of lack of public spending on health, education, public infrastructure, and climate adaptation look like,” Apicella says. Many countries are forced to pay back creditors instead of spending the money they have on public initiatives. “For us, debt justice and debt relief is directly related to economic slavery,” he says, referring to how countries get buried in debt without a way out. “How can we make a difference as Catholics, with big questions and bold demands in the political sphere?”
Today, 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more servicing their debts than on health care, education, and other social services combined. “Debt relief is one of the most accountable forms of aid,” LeCompte says. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, LeCompte says, the debt crisis is becoming worse in developing countries. “[During the pandemic], we saw hundreds of millions of people, mostly women and children, get pushed into poverty,” he says.
After the 2008 financial crisis, private creditors such as BlackRock began frequently lending to countries in the global South. The IMF and World Bank are multilaterals, meaning they have some level of transparency around lending, but private creditors do not. About half of these private creditors are regulated by the state of New York, and the other half are regulated by the United Kingdom. “The UK and the state of New York are uniquely responsible for the rules around which private creditors lend to whole countries,” Dettloff says.
Today, more than 50 percent of external debt in many developing countries is held by private creditors, private firms, and corporations, “including some very challenging groups, the so-called vulture funds or predatory hedge funds,” LeCompte says. The United States also has a significant role among multilateral lenders such as the IMF. The United States is the largest shareholder in the IMF—which Jubilee USA considers the most powerful institution after the White House, LeCompte says—so it gets the most votes and makes a lot of decisions around debt and the international financial system.
Jubilee USA is involved in campaigning and working on policies around debt cancelation, including legislation in New York. This year, Debt for Climate has held rallies at the IMF and World Bank, as well as at private vendors such as BlackRock in New York, bringing the words and stories from people in the global South to these centers of power.
One of Pope Francis’ policy ideas around debt is the basic demand that we should cancel unjust debt, Dettloff says, with the goal being “self-determination and sovereignty” of the countries with loans. “It shouldn’t just be some rich countries that decide what the rules are, but the world should be able to have an equitable conversation around how debt operates,” Dettloff says.
Women and marginalized people in the global South need an equal voice in these big global meetings around debt and economic policy as well, says Shereen Talaat, founder and director of MENA Fem, a feminist group in the Middle East and North Africa that organizes around debt, economic, and ecological justice. “We feel that at least a small amount of our economy should not be for debt repayment or debt interest but to have space for climate response. I believe in working together in solidarity towards canceling the debt.”
A locally grown problem
Although common in the United States, medical debt doesn’t exist in most other Western, industrialized countries. More than 100 million Americans have medical debt of some kind, and it is the number one cause families go bankrupt. Braxton Brewington, the press secretary of Debt Collective, the nation’s first union of debtors, says the vast majority of medical debt is held by Black people in the U.S. South. Student loans, another source of crushing debt in the United States, are disproportionately held by Black women.
Debt Collective organizes around all kinds of debt and creates coalitions and tools to help connect debtors. Debt Collective was born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement as a project called Rolling Jubilee, in which the group would purchase debts on the secondary market and then erase them rather than collecting them.
It stopped for a few years, but the Rolling Jubilee fund was brought back to life in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though it was a great form of mutual aid for so many people, “we can’t buy all the debt in the world,” Brewington says. “And even if we somehow did buy everyone’s household debt, it would come back because of the structural inequities that we have in our economy and our society.”
Debt Collective started organizing around student debt, particularly with people who had been defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges—mainly veterans and single mothers—and led the first debt strike in U.S. history, Brewington says. The group politicized an obscure and legal provision in the Higher Education Act that says if you were defrauded by a for-profit college, you are eligible for relief. “People have had billions of dollars’ worth of student debt canceled because of this process that we created” from this provision, Brewington says.
Debt Collective also organizes around payday loans, credit card debt, bail debt, criminal legal debt, and K–12 lunch debt—which is a debt that, even if it’s just a few dollars, “causes ripples within families and communities,” Brewington says. “Because there’s so much stigma and shame around it. Kids are being scolded by cafeteria workers or sent home with wristbands and literal, physical markers that they cannot afford food.”
In one successful campaign, activists, teachers, and community members came up with the money to pay off a few thousand dollars of school lunch debt in a Pennsylvania district. The district received so much pressure that they canceled the debt, Brewington says. “That was really exciting for people to see, that we have power and we can make demands.”
Debt Collective also emphasizes the fact that there are “debts that we do owe,” Brewington says, especially those of us living in the United States. “Mostly brown and Black countries in the global South are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis and having to pay more than their fair share,” he says, referring to that concept of ecological debt Pope Francis repeatedly made part of his teaching on debt and economic justice. “We talk about what climate reparations look like.”
In the United States, reparations to descendants of enslaved Americans is another “just debt: a debt that should be paid,” Brewington says. Black people in the United States who are descendants of enslaved people “endure a lot of the consequences of that today, which is often why they are in debt,” Brewington says. “We fit that in the framework of the Jubilee as well, in terms of setting people free. The Jubilee was not only about debt; it was also about setting slaves free.”
“Debt relief is one of the most accountable forms of aid.”
Advertisement
Brewington points out that debt forgiveness is “literally in the Lord’s prayer.” At Debt Collective gatherings, organizers want to help people understand that “we are not in debt because we’ve sinned,” Brewington says. “I think for a lot of folks, not just Catholics or anyone religious, but the way that we talk about debt, it is talked about as if it is a sin. And we say, you have student loans and medical debt because we do not have free health care, because we do not have free college.”
It’s actually the ultra-rich who are culpable, Brewington says—the billionaires who are “hoarding wealth, which is against biblical teaching. We think it’s those folks who are committing sins and should be ashamed, not those of us who are trying to care for our grandmother because she has cancer. We always encourage folks to resist the shame of household indebtedness.”
Pilgrims of hope
Later this year, Caritas is planning to bring signatures from the Turn Debt into Hope campaign before world leaders at COP30, the big global meeting around climate change, and the G20, which brings together leaders from the world’s largest economies, to show “creditors, both public and private, that people want something different,” Dettloff says, and that what happens to people in the global South “matters to those of us in the North.”
From across all the organizations that are involved in the campaign, Apicella says Caritas hopes to bring around 10 million signatures to decision makers and politicians so they can see that the Catholic community and beyond stands by Pope Francis’ call to “turn the Jubilee principles into practice through economic policies,” Apicella says.
LeCompte and staff at Jubilee USA are asking American Catholics to sign the petition and contact members of Congress, encouraging them to pass laws on debt relief and debt cancelation. This Jubilee year and beyond, Brewington hopes people who have “physically embodied indebtedness and financial insecurity” in the United States and around the world are set free.
The first time Jesus speaks publicly, he reads a passage from Isaiah: “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
“Jesus’ manifesto is the Jubilee,” Dettloff says. “It is the declaration of a permanent Jubilee, when the oppressed go free.” This year, the ram’s horn is the cry of the poor and the Earth. Those who hear this cry bring peace and hope to the world, and as Pope Francis said, help the human family remember the truth that “we are indebted to one another.”
This article also appears in the August 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 8, pages 10-15). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Add comment