Last Saturday, addressing the National Anti-Usury Council, Pope Leo XIV stated that “the phenomenon of usury points to the corruption of the human heart.” The Pontiff touched the deepest and most forgotten aspect of the issue. Because usury is not merely a financial crime, nor a deviant behavior: it is a moral and institutional disorder. It is the transformation of another’s need into an occasion for profit, the reduction of a human being to an object. It is the sign of a society where wealth no longer serves life, but domination.
The Pope spoke of “slavery”, and indeed, usury acts as an invisible chain that binds not only individuals but entire peoples. The difference today is that those who lend money are not always local oppressors: often, they have the neutral face of an algorithm or the reassuring image of a financial institution. Yet the logic remains the same: maximizing profit, even at the cost of other people’s lives.
Behind this mechanism lies not only individual greed, but a larger and more rational structure. Scholars who have studied corruption dynamics have shown how every economic system tends to create a kind of “hidden order” that regulates relations between power, money, and complicity. In this “underground market”, not only favors are traded: one buys protection, silence, and impunity. Over time, the entire system adapts to this illicit exchange as though it were a second nature.
Thus, usury, in its most evident form, is only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies a culture of dominationthat has learned to disguise itself as efficiency, competence, and even solidarity. The usurers of today promise help, just as certain corrupt officials promise “speed” or “simplification.” But theirs is an efficiency that destroys trust, and a simplification that erases justice.
The tragedy, then, is not only moral but political: a country where usury thrives is a country where institutions can no longer guarantee reciprocity, where debt becomes the very form of social relationship. When citizens no longer believe the State can protect them, they hand themselves over to those who offer money now and slavery later. When desperation meets bureaucracy, the fertile ground for usury is born.
And yet, the Pope reminded us that there is a way out: it is called gratuitousness. It is the only force capable of breaking the logic of calculation. The story of Zacchaeus returning what he had stolen is not a pious tale: it is a manual of spiritual economics. The man who lived by corruption discovers, in the encounter with Christ, that true wealth is freedom from debt—not economic debt, but moral debt, the slavery of always needing to gain something from others.
Perhaps this is the most radical conversion the Jubilee proposes: to move from possession to restitution, from greed to responsibility. And perhaps, more than new laws, what we need is a new gaze: to understand that every time indifference makes us silent before injustice, we become accomplices of that “hidden order” that binds corruption and usury together. For, as Leo XIV reminded us, “only gratuitousness reveals the meaning of humanity.” And only gratuitousness—in our hearts, institutions, and markets—can restore our freedom to see the other not as an opportunity for profit, but as a face to be discovered.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
Silere non possum