By Michael Swan, for Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada
The Peruvian cardinal Pedro Barreto Jimeno, a friend of Pope Francis; a colleague of Pope Leo XIV; a defender of the rights of impoverished peoples and the environment; and a longtime ally of Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada (DPCC), was the keynote speaker at the G7 Jubilee People’s Forum in Calgary, Alta. On the way there, he stopped by in Toronto, where his engagements included the appearance at the Our Lady of Lourdes parish that Michael Swan played a lead role in organizing and reports on here.
Swan, an active DPCC member, served a long, multi-award-winning stint as associate editor of The Catholic Register, during which he wrote extensively about our work. More recently, he and his wife, Yone Simidzu, produced Notes from Brazil, a four-part series of reports from the Amazon region, for our website.
A Peruvian cardinal and archbishop emeritus from the Amazon visited Toronto’s Jesuit parish June 9 to remind Canadians, the national Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada (DPCC) network and parishioners at Our Lady of Lourdes of just what the Turn Debt into Hope campaign is really about – “the systematization of social injustice.”
Speaking to about 100 people in the church and more than 170 others watching a live stream of the event, Cardinal Pedro Barreto urged Canadians to seize the opportunity, a kairos moment, as world leaders were preparing to converge on Kananaskis, Alta., for the annual G7 summit.
Speaking of kairos, the cardinal called it “a time for transformation of the individual and of society.”
A Peruvian Cardinal, a universal message
The reality of poor countries saddled with unpayable debts during a jubilee year should signal to Christians an opportunity to flip the script, to talk more about what the economic powers of the developed world owe to highly indebted poor countries, Barreto said. There is an ecological debt the rich world owes for damage inflicted on poor countries―damage that made rich nations rich by burning fossil fuels and plundering natural resources. The empires of the last 300 years, and the economic systems they created, have given the world the climate and environmental crises that punish people in Africa, Asia and Latin America more than those places that benefited from colonialism, he said.
This isn’t just a matter of economic or historical analysis, as far as Barreto is concerned. The debt crisis today calls for a Christian response.
“In the Christian tradition, kairos describes ‘God’s time’: moments of grace to dream and act together as a human family, to learn from history, which is the teacher of life, to consolidate processes of fraternity, listening and joint action to seek the common good of humanity and of future generations.”
DPCC’s Turn Debt into Hope campaign petition, which has already raised over 33,000 signatures, is to be presented to G7 leaders at Kananaskis this week. The campaign, part of a global Caritas network effort, asks rich nations to act immediately to stop the debt crisis enveloping at least 25 countries that spend more on servicing their debts than on health or education. It aims to raise 100,000 signatures in Canada 10 million worldwide before Jan. 1, 2026, on the petition that asks political leaders to address the “root causes” of the crisis by reforming the global financial system and giving the United Nations a role in overseeing a “transparent, binding and comprehensive debt framework.”
Late entry, top billing
Cardinal Barreto was a last-minute addition to DPCC’s plans for a pre-G7 ecumenical gathering at Ambrose University in Calgary. The G7 Jubilee People’s Forum featured a Sunday afternoon rally and a Thursday evening worship service.
The late announcement of Barreto’s stopover in Toronto left DPCC members at Our Lady of Lourdes just over a week to produce posters and social media posts and reach out to the city’s large and diverse Hispanic population.
DPCC staffer Mary Durran provided Spanish to English interpretation to ensure that Cardinal Barreto’s address was accessible to all.
Events such as the G7 Jubilee People’s Forum and national popular campaigns are necessary at a time when democracy is threatened and many voices are excluded or ignored, Barreto told this reporter the next day, in an interview for which DPCC member Catherine Barry provided interpretation.
“In a democracy, the country needs to defend the rights of society,” he said. “It’s the right of every citizen to denounce a situation – this process, which is not only the external debt (of poor countries) but the ecological debt… There are two poles – those who hold the money and the poor.”
A role for the Church
Barreto, who worked with Pope Leo XIV when they were both members of the Peruvian bishops’ conference, believes the new pope wants the Church to be a moral voice on the world stage.
“The message from the beginning of Pope Leo XIV is very clear,” he said. “It’s unity and peace. Unity in our humanity. We’re one humanity with all these diverse cultures, with one common home.” The Church’s voice on war, migration, climate change and environmental collapse has to be on the side of those who suffer, he said.
“There’s an economic war and the Church can’t be quiet about that,” he said. “It’s a catastrophe that the most powerful, those with the money and the power, are causing the poorest to suffer.”
From the ambo at Our Lady of Lourdes, Barreto urged Canadian Catholics to recognize their responsibility to meet the moment.
“We are, in this year 2025, in the Jubilee of Hope,” he said. “We are pilgrims, and we are invited to a conversion of minds and hearts. The Jubilee is the expression of the kairos, as a historic opportunity for developed countries to recognize, as a matter of urgency, their ecological debt to developing countries, a consequence of the exploitation of natural resources, and the resulting corrosion of the land with polluting waste.”