Diaconia
Online

Volume XX
Number 1
January 2000

Forgiveness of Debt

This is the third in a five part series on the Great Jubilee

"No man ever got rich by pulling down his neighbor’s house." I believe Abraham Lincoln first said that, and it feeds directly into the current Jubilee 2000 campaign to forgive the debt owed to international financial organizations by the poorest of developing nations.

Recently, a full-page ad signed by eight Catholic bishops and 1800 individuals in the New York Times put forth the idea succinctly.

"The Jubilee year is a time for setting captives free from bondage, returning land to its rightful owners and canceling debts for those who cannot pay. It is time for breaking the chains of oppression that hold people bound and for restoring full human dignity to those for whom it has been taken."

The ad urges President Clinton and Congress to cancel impoverished nation debt outright, freeing them to use their limited resources to provide adequate health care, education, food, and jobs. This is not costly. Canceling most international debts owed the US would cost $3 per US citizen. "International debt in excess of $200 billion is a hurricane wreaking havoc upon the lives of impoverished peoples throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America," the ad metaphorically noted.

A few weeks ago the Clinton Administration asked Congress to appropriate $970 million in debt forgiveness. Unfortunately the discussion is bogged down in the controversy surrounding IMF policies and the cries of the poor threaten to be drowned out.

There is little chance of ever recovering those loans. Debt service is really too burdensome. Even before the news of Hurricane Mitch energized our feelings of compassion by bringing the images of destroyed homes, crops and innocent, poverty struck children directly to our TV sets, Honduras spent more on debt relief than on health and education combined.

Why do some object to the forgiveness of debt? If today’s debt is written off, they argue, why should international lending institutions lend again? After all, these nations need ongoing infusions of credit. Do we simply discourage future lending and cause more problems than we solve?

Some note the loan proceeds never went to the poor in the first place. Corruption is so deep seated in many emerging economies that much of the money found its way to officials’ bank accounts. The risk is that only lip service is being paid to poverty reduction.

We all agree there is a Christian rationale for debt forgiveness. The question is "Is there an economic one?" I think that despite these objections the answer is ‘yes.’

There is a periodic, health restoring call in scripture that calls for universal debt forgiveness. In the modern civil sphere, we have laws, which undo the burdensome effects of the inevitable failures and mistakes that build up. Bankruptcy laws allow for the cleansing of balance sheet debt when it threatens the health or well being of a citizen.

Burdensome, un-payable debt hurts everyone. The global economy has suffered a series of financial collapses, which threatened to do widespread damage. Mexico in 1994, Asia in 1997, Russia in 1998 and Brazil in 1999, all shook international economic markets. Indonesia suffers mob violence as nationalistic enthusiasm, fed by poverty driven frustration, runs amok. Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank’s chief economist notes that when so many cars run off the road you begin to wonder whether the road might be the problem.

Debt forgiveness is not a new, nor even an Anglo-Saxon idea. Ancient Greece avoided collapse by forgiving debt; the idea of allowing land to remain fallow, to give it time to renew its nutrients emerges from Mesopotamia. Today’s bankruptcy and anti-monopoly laws are mere descendants of these codes

Finally, debt forgiveness, the legal release of unbearable and un-payable financial burdens, reduces the often-violent boom-bust cycles common in emerging economies. They enhance personal liberties and provide the social security we need to grow and prosper as a global economy.

But the real reason to forgive debt is to preserve the dignity of the human person, the idea of human freedom, and the protection of private property. Jesus berated the Pharisees for their easy willingness to place economic and moral burdens on people, burdens that went beyond human capacity to bear. Acts of forgiveness offer those who are burdened the chance to recover and once again be socially useful. Healthy economies need to limit the more extreme economic burdens that can destroy them. Everyone benefits.

A good paper on this subject is "Economic Law or Disorder" by Carl Luxem, Jr. Copyright 1999, 7600 Parklawn Ave. Minneapolis, Minn. 55435

Deacon Charles I. Clough, '86

Associate Director of Hispanic Program

A native of Spain, Fr. Alvaro Silva was ordained in 1974 in Barcelona, and worked in New York before moving to Boston in 1980. Much of his pastoral work has been as a spiritual director, retreat master, and teacher. For the last twelve years he has worked with the Latino community at St. Gabriel’s Parish in Brighton. Fr. Silva has a degree in Systematic Theology, teaches at Thomas More College, and is the Spanish editor and translator of several works by St. Thomas More. He also edited Brave New Family, an anthology of poetry and essays by G. K. Chesterton on marriage, family and divorce (Ignatius, 1990). He is now parochial vicar at St. Ann’s in Wollaston

Soon the Catholic Church in this country will have a majority of Latinos, a great challenge to all. I tell Hispanic immigrants that although we came here out of hunger, unemployment, social and economic injustice, dictatorial regimes, etc., we are here with a mission: to help build the Church in the United States. The Latino community, which already has many dedicated men and women, badly needs vibrant, generous, and mature men who will wholeheartedly give themselves serving their people and the whole Church as permanent deacons. To be loyal to the Hispanic culture but also to profit from our unique experience as immigrants and learning every good thing America has, is one of my priorities. The Latino community can use many a deacon, and I’m glad to have some experienced and wonderful colleagues in the Diaconate Program who will help me make this possible.

Fr. Alvaro Silva

Book Review:

ANAM CARA, A Book of Celtic Wisdom by John O'Donohue, Published by Cliff Street Books, an Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers

Like the dessert, 'Death by Chocolate', Anam Cara is so rich it must be tasted in small bites and savored slowly lest the senses be overwhelmed. O'Donohue invites his readers to "that place in the soul where there is no distance between you and the eternal". Anam Cara in Gaelic means soul friend.

The deeply rooted Celtic understanding of friendship receives its inspiration in that exalted notion of soul friend. Your Anam Cara is the one to whom you could reveal those most hidden things of your life--your desires and hopes, your shortcomings. With your soul friend you are joined in an ancient and eternal way with your friend's soul…"your friendship cuts across all convention and category".

We become close to our Anam Cara, ourselves, and whoever else we wish to be bonded with, most especially through the dual charisms of the language of touch, and by the sacrament of listening. Human touch at the proper time can be affirming, healing or consoling. Regarding listening, O'Donohue quotes Martin Heidegger, who states, "True listening is worship." Amongst like souls, the author lauds the value of silence, the intimacy of the communication that requires no words, and "the potential of silence," which allows us to enter into "the rhythm of the universe."

That rhythm, like all of human life, has a definite circularity. In Celtic imagination circularity is good in all things, (see Celtic art) natural and eternal. Human experience, nature, and the action of divinity follow the circular pattern. Time is perceived as a circle, and the beauty of aging is included in the pattern of your journey. Toward the end of one's search is the profound joy of harvesting the fruits of your experiences, (your own homecoming in a sense) and the closing of the circle.

Central to the thrust of the book is that belonging is utterly crucial to human existence. Belonging cures aloneness. If we belong to a soul friend, to our own ideals, to a faith, then we can see even the latter part of our journey, advanced age, as a blessing.

Enjoying the less frenetic pace of older age, you can savor the variety of things you have done; even that golden hued time or occasion when you said or thought, "I wish this moment could last forever:. But you knew it couldn't last forever because "the pilgrimage is always moving; the pilgrim may stand still, but time does not. Once the soul awakens, the search begins and you can never go back.

This is an age of exhaustive self-examination and navel gazing, analyzing ad nauseum, the age when every character defect or minor fault must have its root hidden in our childhood, and like scabs on a scraped knee, they must be picked at immediately and repeatedly. O'Donohue suggests that if we desire integration and healing that we practice 'spiritual noninterference' for those painful areas of memory where we may not have yet learned to be compassionate with ourselves. These areas can be visited at a later, gentler time when we are more spiritually mature or the soothing unguent of time has assuaged the hurt.

Finally, the circular journey brings us, in O'Donohue's haunting, revelatory, so ineffably Christian phrase, to the 'miracle' of death.

Crammed with poetic musings and profundities that impel the reader to pause, I originally felt that Anam Cara was a book that would be better preached than read. But the more I thought about it, each page a sermon, each paragraph material for a thesis, I revised my thinking to where it might be more profitably read as one would a daily spiritual guide, to be read in the manner of Ignatius' Exercises, or My Daily Word.

O'Donohue mines numberless nuggets from ancient Celtic myths and poetry, yet never ignores the not-so ancient. He lavishly quotes from sources as diverse as St. Paul, and Kahil Gibran. Eclectically ranging millennia of intellect, he pauses in various centuries to borrow from, and apply, thoughts of Aristotle and Augustine, on up to Meister Eckhart, and Boris Pasternak.

Enjoy--slowly.

Deacon Richard F. Radford, '88

Diaconia Editorial Staff

Coordinator of Publication: Sister Clare O’Keefe

Editors: Charles A. Cornell, Leo Martin, Carolyn S. O’Neil, Richard F. Radford,

Members of the Diaconate Community are encouraged to submit ideas, articles, photography that might be of interest to the Community. Submit by mail to the office or by email to cac@stisidorestow.org.