Johannesburg: The Holy Year 2025 widely known as the Jubilee Year will draw to a close on January 6, 2026, the Feast of the Epiphany, marked by the solemn closing of the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica. Throughout the Jubilee, the Catholic Church placed reconciliation, mercy, justice, and solidarity at the heart of its spiritual and social mission, echoing the biblical tradition of releasing captives, restoring relationships, and cancelling debts. However, despite sustained appeals from Church leaders and humanitarian advocates, the year concludes without the broad debt forgiveness that many developing nations especially those in Africa had urgently hoped for. With creditor nations declining large-scale debt cancellation, economic hardship across the continent is expected to persist well beyond the Jubilee.
Debt relief was envisioned as a central expression of this Holy Year’s commitment to mercy and social justice. The late Pope Francis repeatedly urged the international community to wipe out the unpayable external debts of the world’s poorest nations, arguing that the current global debt structure reinforces inequality and blocks genuine development.
Figures from Caritas Internationalis reveal the staggering scale of the problem: 54 countries are now trapped in debt distress, more than double the number a decade ago, and 34 of these are located in Africa. While the Jubilee Year of 2000, driven by St. John Paul II’s vigorous campaign, saw widespread cancellations that freed many poor countries from crushing repayments, the 2025 Jubilee has not prompted a similar global response. Despite moral appeals and advocacy from NGOs, faith institutions, and civil society, creditor nations have largely refrained from offering the sweeping relief that advocates say is essential for vulnerable economies.
Experts warn that Africa’s debt burden has reached an unsustainable level. According to legal scholar and researcher Roberto Carlés, many African nations are now allocating more than half of their national revenues to servicing external debts. In 2025 alone, African countries collectively paid an estimated USD 89 billion in debt repayments an amount that far exceeds what they spend on fundamental public services such as healthcare, education, and critical infrastructure. Carlés argues that such crippling obligations prevent governments from reducing poverty or achieving long-term development goals, trapping millions of citizens in cycles of deprivation. The relentless pressure of interest payments, he warns, is eroding the foundation of African social and economic progress.
Africa’s recurring debt crises stem from a complex web of structural vulnerabilities. Many governments depend on loans from multilateral lenders such as the IMF and World Bank, as well as wealthy nations, often at steep interest rates. When global economic fluctuations such as rising U.S. dollar values or oil price surges hit African economies, creditors typically raise interest rates, pushing repayment obligations even higher. In numerous cases, countries have been unable to begin repaying loans taken more than a decade ago because their revenues cannot cover the mounting annual interest.
Natural disasters, disease outbreaks, and sudden shifts in global commodity markets further destabilize budgets, forcing governments to borrow anew just to survive emergencies. Weak domestic tax bases also play a major role, as many African economies lack the productive capacity needed to generate stable government revenue. In addition, chronic mismanagement, corruption, and diversion of public funds in several countries have compounded financial vulnerabilities, driving governments into repeated and often avoidable borrowing cycles. Addressing the crisis, experts say, requires tackling each of these structural weaknesses in a coherent and comprehensive manner.
Global attention turned to these escalating challenges at the G20 Summit held in Johannesburg on November 22–23. The final declaration acknowledged that soaring debt levels and ballooning financing costs are severely constraining the ability of low- and middle-income nations especially in Africa to invest in development, reduce poverty, and combat inequality. Leaders expressed concern about the dramatic rise in interest obligations over the past decade and reaffirmed their intention to support affected countries through more robust frameworks. They pledged to enhance debt transparency and to strengthen the IMF–World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework, which serves as a key tool to guide national borrowing decisions. The declaration emphasized the need for dialogue-based approaches to debt resolution, reflecting a shared, albeit cautious, recognition of the urgency facing debt-stricken nations.
The Catholic Church has long championed the call for global debt justice. Beginning with the landmark 2000 Jubilee campaign, which helped secure historic debt relief for dozens of countries, successive popes have consistently advocated for reforms to the international financial order. Today, Caritas Internationalis continues to advance this mission through its worldwide initiative, Turn Debt into Hope, urging governments to treat debt relief as a moral imperative tied directly to human dignity and sustainable development.
In a message to the UN Climate Conference held in Brazil in November, Pope Leo XIV reiterated this long-standing commitment, calling for a new financial architecture grounded in human welfare and ecological responsibility. He insisted that true justice requires addressing both external debt and “ecological debt,” noting that the poorest nations often hardest hit by climate disasters bear the least responsibility for global emissions yet suffer the heaviest consequences.
Despite the clarity and urgency of these appeals, deep geopolitical fractures continue to hinder decisive action. Carlés points to the persistent divisions among wealthy nations, highlighted most starkly by the United States’ boycott of the G20 summit in South Africa. Such fractures, he argues, weaken international cooperation at a time when humanity faces interconnected crises: an accelerating climate emergency, widening economic inequality, and the destabilizing effects of chronic debt. These problems cannot be resolved by any single nation, Carlés warns. Without collective action, they will ultimately spill across borders, threatening global stability.
As the Jubilee Year comes to an end, the moral vision it upheld remains unfulfilled for millions living under the weight of unpayable debt. With Africa’s economic crisis worsening and comprehensive debt cancellation still elusive, advocates insist that the struggle for financial justice must continue beyond the symbolic closing of the Holy Door. The world’s poorest nations, they warn, cannot afford another decade lost to debt.