What Ever Happened to the Jubilee?

“Pray remember poor debtors having no allowance.”
— Inscription above the window of Fleet Street Debtors’ Prison, London (c. 1830)

Debt Forgiveness, Student Loans, and the Crisis in Catholic Social Teaching

This year’s Jubilee of Hope, proclaimed by Pope Francis and formally concluded on January 6, 2026, invited Christians to recover an ancient and radical vision of liberation. In Scripture, the Jubilee was a time of concrete release: “You shall proclaim liberty in the land for all its inhabitants … each of you shall return to your own property, each of you to your own family” (Leviticus 25:10). Every fiftieth year, ancient Israel’s rulers were commanded to forgive debts, free those who had sold themselves into servitude, and restore foreclosed ancestral property. The related sabbatical-year law required the full forgiveness of debts every seven years (Deuteronomy 15). Debt forgiveness was not an act of discretionary charity but a matter of divine justice — a God-ordered liberation of persons and families crushed by debt and indentured to creditors.

The Catholic Church inherited and continues this biblical tradition by commemorating a Jubilee at least once every quarter century, ever since Pope Boniface VIII decreed the first Roman Holy Year in 1300. Yet the question remains: What, precisely, has become of the Jubilee’s original meaning?

Jubilee and “Liberty”: Lost in Translation

The Hebrew word translated as “liberty” in Leviticus 25:10 is deror (dĕrōr; see Stökl, 2018; Hebrew דְּרוֹר, cf. Strong’s Hebrew). As economist Michael Hudson has shown, deror refers specifically to the cancellation of debts, the freeing of bondservants, and the return of land to cultivator-occupants who had lost it through foreclosure or economic duress. In other words, the Jubilee was not symbolic, gradual, or abstract. It was immediate, personal, and liberating in the fullest sense.  

Yet Catholic social teaching has developed what Hudson once described as a “blind spot with regard to the Biblical economic laws” (Hudson, 1993: 59), insofar as liberation has increasingly been understood in metaphorical or structural terms rather than as freedom from the impoverishing consequences of debt itself. The Old Testament Jubilee was not discretionary, technocratic, or mediated through multinational financial institutions. By contrast, the Vatican’s landmark Jubilee document on the debt issue was “outsourced” to a commission of academics and other development experts, who provided a “blueprint” for “sovereign debt restructurings” by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other global institutions constituting the “multilateral financial system” (cf. The Jubilee Report, 2025). Nothing could be further removed from the spirit and substance of the Hebrew Jubilee. Divinely decreed, the Jubilee demanded complete cancellation and immediate release from unpayable obligations, not merely periodic “debt service relief,” as timidly recommended by the Vatican’s Jubilee Report. By associating itself with such a “reformist” approach and failing to call for debt forgiveness as a moral imperative, the Vatican inadvertently legitimizes a global financial system that exists to prolong the very indebtedness such measures purport to alleviate. It is thus not surprising that the word “forgiveness” appears but once in the entire 2025 Jubilee Report. And as far as the even worse fate of the indebted individual – who increasingly bears the burden of decreased social spending by the state – the report is entirely silent.       

The Scale of Contemporary Personal Indebtedness

The recovery of Jubilee’s original meaning is thus urgently needed today. In the United States alone, student-loan debt now exceeds $1.8 trillion (Hanson, 2026). If the 42.8 million Americans burdened with student loans constituted a nation-state, their collective educational debt would approach the combined external debt of Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, and South Africa, according to World Bank data.

This form of indebtedness is not incidental. American graduates must compete with Chinese, European, Indian, and Latin American peers for admission to elite postgraduate institutions, scarce scholarships, and the shrinking number of jobs that pay enough to secure economic independence. International competitors do not spend decades repaying educational loans — a structural disadvantage that undermines opportunity before careers even begin. Student debt thus mirrors other features of the contemporary global order in which Americans experience chronic trade deficits, declining mobility, and increasing precarity.

The result is a global, financialized educational system that immiserates and indents the very people it claims to serve.

Debt Forgiveness Before Modernity

Debt jubilees are not only biblical. Historically, powerful rulers across the ancient Near East periodically canceled their peoples’ debts through so-called “blank-slate” decrees. From Hammurabi of Babylon in the eighteenth century BC to Ptolemy V of Egypt, kings released subjects from debt to preserve social stability and political legitimacy. In classical Athens, Solon enacted the Seisachtheia the “shaking off of burdens” — freeing citizens from debt bondage and restoring mortgaged lands to families (Hudson, 2018).

As Hudson and other historians have documented, ancient statesmen understood that populations crushed by unpayable obligations would eventually revolt, perish, or flee. To be clear, these decrees were not proto-socialist policies. For pharaohs and other potentates of antiquity, who ruled by divine right, the exercise of mercy was the ultimate act of political wisdom and power.

John Paul II and the Restoration of the Jubilee

Modern Catholic social teaching has not been silent on debt. Pope St. John Paul II, in particular, treated the Jubilee as a hermeneutical key to his entire pontificate. In Tertio Millennio Adveniente (1994), he urged Christians to raise their voices on behalf of the poor by proposing the Jubilee as a time for “reducing substantially, if not cancelling outright, the international debt.”

Yet John Paul II’s vision was not merely institutional or geopolitical. In his 1999 message to the Jubilee 2000 Debt Campaign, he insisted that the benefits of debt relief must reach the poorest themselves and reaffirmed a foundational principle of Catholic teaching: “The human person is the most precious resource of any nation or any economy.” He asked pointedly why progress in resolving the debt problem remained so slow, and why so many hesitations persisted.

Implicit in this personalist framework is a question that remains unresolved: How can Catholic social teaching address personal indebtedness in advanced capitalist economies, where debt is increasingly privatized and borne directly by individuals rather than states?

From Sovereign Debt to Personal Debt

Here the limitations of contemporary Catholic discourse become apparent. Since the 1960s, Vatican engagement with debt has largely operated within a developmental paradigm focused on sovereign obligations owed by poor countries to wealthy creditors. Recent Vatican initiatives, including reports and initiatives commissioned during Jubilee years (2000 and 2025), continue to emphasize restructuring frameworks, international cooperation, and multilateral institutions. Even when global inequality is acknowledged, the subject remains debt between states, not debt borne by persons.

This paradigm ignores the realities of advanced economies, where individual indebtedness — for education, healthcare, and housing — has reached unprecedented levels. In the United States alone, medical debt exceeds $220 billion (owed by more than one hundred million people; CFPB, 2024). Student loans, unlike business debts, are rarely discharged in bankruptcy. For millions of borrowers, death remains the only assured release. Federal regulations explicitly provide that student loans are discharged upon the borrower’s death (34 CFR § 685.212(a)(1)) — a grim testament to the absence of a Jubilee in this life (eCFR :: 34 CFR 685.212). Lest there be any false hope, the U.S. Department of Education reminded debtors in April 2025 that it had no intention of honoring Rome’s Jubilee of Hope: “There will not be any mass loan forgiveness” (U.S. Department of Education, 2025).  

Pope Francis, Leo XIV, and the Jubilee’s Discouraging Conclusion

In January 2025, Pope Francis invoked the language of the Jubilee during the Holy Year, urging that divine forgiveness be translated “on a social level, so that no person, no family, no population is crushed by debts.” He encouraged leaders of nations with Christian traditions to set an example by canceling or reducing the debts of the poorest countries. Yet this appeal remained framed exclusively in terms of debts owed by states, not by indebted individuals. When the Jubilee formally concluded on the Feast of the Epiphany in January 2026, Pope Leo XIV’s homily made no reference to debt at all. By Christmas, indeed, Vatican media acknowledged that the Jubilee had concluded without any comprehensive agreements on debt cancellation, even for debtor governments. In retrospect, it was predictable that the Vatican-commissioned Jubilee Report — coauthored by Joseph Stiglitz and other eminent scholars — did not address personal debt forgiveness or widespread indebtedness in the United States and other advanced Western economies. The silence is even more striking, however, given the Jubilee’s mandate. At the very moment when the biblical Jubilee might have been recovered in its most literal sense, the Vatican did not find the courage or voice to insist that God’s promise of liberation from debt be taken literally, and thus seriously. At the end of the Jubilee of Hope, its commandment remains unfulfilled. 

Recovering a “Personalist” Jubilee

The Jubilee of Leviticus was not about restructuring payment schedules or improving access to credit. It was about deror; release, liberty, freedom from personal economic bondage. The Jubilee, coming every 50 years, affirmed that human beings are not instruments to be monetized, assets to be encumbered, or lives to be measured solely in terms of productivity. A society that permits lifelong indebtedness for access to basic goods — education, healthcare, shelter — has departed fundamentally from the moral logic of the Jubilee.

Recovering this vision requires that Catholic social teaching return to its historical scriptural roots. John Paul II’s insistence on the primacy of the human person points beyond a state-centered approach toward a genuinely personalist Jubilee — one capable of addressing the forms of bondage that define contemporary life.