With the Jubilee 2025 Turn Debt Into Hope campaign we are mobilizing a worldwide ecumenical movement advocating for systemic change to address global economic inequality and the burden of unjust debt.
Hope is at the heart of the Jubilee vision, which is described in the Book of Leviticus (25: 1-55) as a time of liberation through the cancellation of debts, freedom from captivity, and the restoration of community and land. In announcing Jubilee 2025, Pope Francis wrote “We are called to be tangible signs of hope.”
According to the UN report “A World of Debt,” today more than 3.3 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt service than on education or healthcare. There is an ethical obligation to create fairer rules around the restructuring of debts as part of a wider transformation of the international financial structures. There is also the ecological debt that the Global North owes to the Global South, a debt rooted in justice and moral responsibility. This debt cannot be dismissed. Indeed, it is integral to the transformation of the global community.
On June 5, 2024, at the meeting Addressing the Debt Crisis in the Global South, Pope Francis says “ecological debt and external debt are two sides of the same coin that mortgages the future”. “Therefore, dear friends, the forthcoming Holy Year of 2025 calls us to open our minds and hearts to be able to untie the knots of those bonds that strangle the present, without forgetting that we are only custodians and stewards, not masters.”
We are pleased ORCIE’s experience with advocacy and the Jubilee campaign 25 years ago has allowed us to serve as a resource in this important work. In the coming weeks you will receive invitations to learn more about ORCIE’s policy positions on ecological and financial debt, as well as news about the Jubilee campaign webinars, messages from religious in the Global South on the impacts of financial debt, and advocacy opportunities related to the G7 in Alberta in June.