VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Some of the most provocative recent proposals challenging global inequality and international debt are not the work of Ivy League economics departments or Silicon Valley think tanks. They’re coming from inside the Vatican.
“I don’t know of another place that brings together this kind of serious economic analysis with equally serious moral values,” said economist Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a contributor to the Vatican’s Jubilee Report, which calls for sweeping reform of sovereign debt and global finance. “You just don’t get that in Washington.”
That vision was on display Monday (June 30) at the United Nations’ 4th International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville, Spain. A panel organized by the Holy See and Caritas Internationalis, the church’s global aid network, pressed leaders at the conference to address a debt crisis that has pushed dozens of countries into poverty and austerity.
“It is both alarming and clear that developing countries are increasingly being forced to make impossible choices between servicing debt and serving their people,” said Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Vatican’s permanent observer to the U.N. “In this Jubilee year, the church urges us to be bold in our efforts in addressing these injustices.”
Developing nations now hold about a third of the global public debt, which exceeded $102 trillion in 2024, according to the U.N. Trade and Development organization, known as UNCTAD, and they paid $921 bill …