2025 is a special year. The thirst for peace that rises as a cry from many places in the world meets the path of the Jubilee Year. The path of hope is called peace, but not as a wish, a wish or a pious wishrather with the strength of faith that does not escape from reality and takes on the tears and pain of the world.
In the Message for the World Day of Peace which bears the title “Forgive us our debts, grant us peace”Pope Francis says it with disarming clarity, admirably intertwining theology and economics, prayer and responsibility. It speaks to individual consciences and to politics, to believers and to every person of good will.
The root of the justice we need is in the awareness of being everyone children of the same Father which has no other figure than that of mercy and forgiveness and teaches us that everyone is called to become a reflection of that mercy.
In the DNA of JubileeIn fact, there is a need for justice that today invites us to change the system. «The injustices», writes the Pope in the Message, «at times take on the appearance of what Saint John Paul II defined as “structures of sin”, since they are not only due to the iniquity of some, but have, so to speak, consolidated and are supported on extended complicity.”
First among these the issue of the debt of impoverished countries who have no hope of recovering unless the noose that oppresses them is untied. A debt that over time has changed so much that it is no longer held by other nations, but by unscrupulous private individuals who use it as material for blackmail to continue to plunder the raw materials that the development model of the North of the world needs.
To the point that «foreign debt has become an instrument of control, through which some governments and private financial institutions of the richest countries have no scruples about indiscriminately exploiting the human and natural resources of the poorest countries, in order to satisfy the needs of their own markets”.
For this reason the real debt it is rather what rich nations have contracted towards the poor and it is a ecological debt which produces the advance of the desert and the rise of the oceans, a media debt which does not allow their voice and their reasons to reach us, a debt of peace because war sets the world on fire, producing death, suffering and destruction on the one hand and the extra profits of the arms industries on the other.
Hence Francis’ proposal to use «at least a fixed percentage of the money used in armaments for the establishment of a global fund that will definitively eliminate hunger and facilitate educational activities in the poorest countries aimed at promoting sustainable development, combating climate change”.
Decisive steps to experience a Jubilee that truly becomes Gospel.
