Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of Jubilee USA was recently featured in America Magazine where he spoke on Pope Francis' legacy and commitment to tackling debt and financial inequalities through debt relief. Read an excerpt below, or the full article here.
The global impact of Pope Francis: From migration to taxes to A.I. weapons
By: Kevin Clarke
"Eric LeCompte is the executive director of Jubilee USA Network, a global debt relief advocacy group. The pope’s predecessors, St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, he said, shared many of his views “regarding inequality, tax and debt and how those issues impact the poor.” But Pope Francis was able to shine a light on these issues as few world leaders have been able to, he said.
What distinguished Francis was his poignant, personal experience with the issues of poverty and debt justice. As a younger man, Francis witnessed the powerful effects of financial and debt crises on the most vulnerable in Argentina during his years as a Jesuit priest and later as archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Pope Francis, Mr. LeCompte said, “saw directly how the impacts of unfair financial policies make poverty worse and create more difficult global challenges.”
Pope Francis unabashedly talked about the injustice of tax evasion, tax fraud and tax avoidance, acts which in the end mean that in a world of wealth and abundance, “we don’t have the resources to deal with poverty.”
Mr. LeCompte recalled that the first set of credentials for new ambassadors Francis accepted as his pontificate began included those from three nations that have acted as tax havens for the wealthy. The pope did not miss the opportunity to lift up the moral component of such avoidance structures and the practical social and humanitarian problems they contribute to, pointing out that hiding wealth from taxation “takes investment directly away from the poor.”
The pope’s emphasis on accepting tax obligations and tax equity “really goes back to very early church teaching,” Mr. LeCompte said, “these ideas that if we take more than what is enough, we’ve taken it from people who don’t have enough.” The pope frequently spoke about distributive economics, “which is part of what tax is.”
Among the pope’s final acts was the declaration of 2025 as a Jubilee Year that would include a focus on addressing the immiserating debt burden of poor nations as a new global debt crisis looms. Pope Francis flipped the script in talking about how to address climate change and poverty and how to finance economic development, according to Mr. LeCompte.
The pope consistently pointed out, he said, that in historical terms the earth’s riches have been extracted from the world’s vulnerable peoples and delivered to the affluent West, while powerless states imported poverty, ecological ruin and debt. Addressing those historic inequities through a practical, persisting debt jubilee process, the pope insisted, would be a measure of justice, not an act of charity.
“I like to tell people the most important speech that Pope Francis ever gave is the speech that no one understood, and that was his 2015 speech to the United Nations,” Mr. LeCompte remembers. “If you look at the press coverage, people say [of the speech]: ‘Oh, he talked about climate change.’ ‘No, he talked about war.’ ‘No, he talked about human rights.’”
But Pope Francis talked about those issues, Mr. LeCompte said, as part of an interconnected complex that can be traced back to global economic inequities, part of the reason he has “so forcefully made this Jubilee Year a focus on debt relief.”
The pope, he said, endorsed “permanent and continuous processes to deal with the challenges of debt and financial inequities,” arguing that “only if we deal with those things are we going to have the tools and resources to deal with poverty, to deal with climate change, to deal with human rights, to deal with the scourge of war.”
Read more here.