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International Debt Crisis
By John Perez
 The debt crisis began in the mid-1970s when OPEC countries amassed great wealth. Banks were eager to lend billions of dollars to OPEC nations as well as other developing countries. The debt has continued to worsen since it erupted in the early 1980s. For example, estimates suggest that half a million young have died in the last 12 months as a result of slowing down or the reversal of progress in the developing world. Over one billion poor people in the world's impoverished countries suffer because of the debt.
In seeking to deal with the debt of very poor nations, it is not just not economics that is being tackled, but a spirit of greed and hunger for power and the dehumanizing oppression which poverty brings. In a world where we talk freely of economic communities, the mutual accountability of community has gone out of international economics.
 Caring for the poor has become an act of personal generosity not a community obligation. Today, many people see it only as a task for governments and the Church. The Catholic Church has said that those who are poor should be treated with preference. Applying the Jubilee principle that the human family is accountable to one another and has obligations to each other. The issue of Third World debt would lead, as it did for the Israelites, to a new start - not just for the poor, but for the whole international community.
The U.S. bishops join with the Pope John Paul II to focus attention on the issue of international debt. They call on national leaders to help solve the crushing burden of debt for the world's poorest countries by righting old wrongs, thus enabling these countries to focus their economies on their own people and not on payment to other nations of excessive interest.
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