Archbishop asks for the conversion of finance and encourages to condemn external debt

The Archbishop of Seville (Spain), Mons. José Ángel Saiz Meneses, asks for initiatives that promote a “conversion of finance” and encourages to condemn the external debt of developing countries, supported by the teaching of the social doctrine of the Church.

In a letter entitled A bold and creative financial architecturethe archbishop reflects on the celebration in the Hispanic city of the IV International Conference on Development Financing, an event before which the Church has responded with some parallel events and also with the celebration of a prior prayer vigil.

Mons. Saiz remembers that in the Call Bula of the Jubilee 2025 Pope Francis explained “the jubilee tradition of the remission of debts, urging the dams of debts to the most disadvantaged countries”, a request for social justice repeated by the teaching of the Pontiffs and that the Archbishop was in charge of remembering.

San Juan Pablo II, in Centessimus year (1991), proclaimed that Christians must be the “voice of all the poor in the world” and claimed, “an urgent reform and new architecture of the international financial system that even, as the Dicastery for integral human development has recently recalled, recognizes ecological credit in developing countries,” explained the Archbishop of Seville.

Mons. Saiz also pointed out that the Pastoral Constitution Joy and hope of the Second Vatican Council “already warned that the economic order should be at the service of man and not on the contrary: the economic order must be subordinated to the moral order.” Then, San Pablo VI, in his encyclical Peoples program From the year 1967, he denounced “that underdevelopment is not a simple technical delay, but an institutionalized injustice.”

Minimum condition to restore the hope of peoples

To this, the archbishop of Seville adds, “the accumulated wealth, often fruit of historical exploitation processes, contrasts scandalously with the misery of entire regions of our world.”

In the encyclical Anxiety of social situationsSan Juan Pablo II linked the problem of debt of developing nations “with the mechanisms of structural domination”, in the sense that “the economic structures that perpetuate misery are not morally neutral.”

Advancing in the teaching comment on this issue, Mons. Saiz added that Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Love in truth“He warned that the logic of maximization of the benefit and financial short-compliance has set aside the centrality of the person”, while, in their messages to the meetings of the G-8 (group of the first eight economies of the planet), “expressly requested the cancellation of the debt of the poorest countries, as a minimum condition to restore hope to whole peoples.”

For the archbishop of Seville, “Pope Francis raised the tone of this complaint in his interventions”, especially through the encyclical All brothersin which he stated that “politics should not undergo the economy, and this should not undergo the efficiency paradigm of technocracy.” This reflection led the Pontiff to affirm that “this economy kills” in the apostolic exhortation Gospel joy.

Mons. Saiz affirms after this teaching tour that “the Church does not propose technical solutions”, but that “its voice rises as a call to the conversion of the heart. The transformation of the structures begins by the transformation of consciences, and this conversion is essentially personal, but also cultural and spiritual.”

Therefore, the prelate stressed that “prayer implies listening to the clamor of the poor since Christian prayer is always intercessor, compassionate and drives us to action.”

Thus, he concluded that “Christians are called to actively involve ourselves in the design of economic policies, in citizen movements, in initiatives that promote a ‘conversion of finance’ in the key of fraternity, seeking that peace ‘unarmed and disarming’ to which Pope Leo XIV referred in his first words as a pontiff.”