Roman Catholic Teaching On International Debt: Toward a New Methodology for Catholic Social Ethics and Moral Theology

The contribution of the Roman Catholic Church to global action on debt relief for the poorest of the poor remains an unheralded accomplishment. Largely unknown in U.S. parishes, this important legacy of the papacy of John Paul II and the work of the church in the world at the end of the twentieth century has also received scant attention within the literature of Catholic moral theology. This paper seeks to address this lacuna. It begins with an overview of the history of the debt question and then reviews the position of the Roman Catholic Church as it evolved over the last quarter of the twentieth century. The paper shows the ways in which the Roman Catholic literature on the debt question integrates the principles of Catholic social thought, Scripture, liturgy, and peacemaking. It closes with a series of questions for Catholic methodology, toward a method we might name evangelii gaudium.