Worried that Catholic events being planned for the 1999-2000 millennium in dioceses and parishes might miss the biblical emphasis on social justice, the Roundtable of U.S. diocesan social action directors met Feb. 21-22 in Washington intent upon "putting justice in the Jubilee." Seminar leaders were James Hug, SJ, and Maria Riley, OP, from the Center of Concern. CTA co-director Dan Daley was there to gather ideas. The CTA national board and staff is exploring millennium and Jubilee themes for CTA national conferences in 1999 and 2000.

Maria Harris' book

For a comprehensive understanding of Jubilee theology, the book most quoted at the Roundtable was Dr. Maria Harris' "Proclaim Jubilee: A Spirituality for the Twenty-First Century" (Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). Starting from core biblical texts of Leviticus 25 about making every 50th year a jubilee, and Jesus' announcement in Luke 4 of "the year of the Lord's favor," Harris identifies five essentials in proclaiming Jubilee:

1. Let the land lie fallow. This is a call to a countercultural Sabbath rest, a deliberate retreat from constant productivity.

2. Answer the call to forgiveness, especially forgiveness of debt. This is the biblical source for the growing clamor, from John Paul II and the World Council of Churches to the Jubilee 2000 movement (see below), for richer nations and their banking institutions to forgive outright the insupportable debt burden of the 32 SILIC nations (severely indebted low income countries), 24 of which are in sub-Saharan Africa.

3. Proclaim liberty. Like the 1976 bicentennial rhetoric of the original Call to Action about "liberty and justice for all," Jubilee calls for freeing captives. In the U.S., Harris highlights the prison population -- mostly poor and people of color, and the millions of children shackled by poverty and violence.

4. Practice justice. Harris quotes biblical scholar Walter Brueggeman: Jubilarian justice means that you find out what belongs to whom, and give it back. In ancient Israel it meant giving back land to the landless. Today the phrase is "to redistribute capital." The growing gap between rich and poor is now wider in the U.S. than in any other Western industrialized nation: 20 percent of U.S. households receive 49 percent of the income.

5. Hold a great Eucharistic feast. Jubilee is a time for jubilation, thanksgiving, celebration.

Don't multiply projects

Paradoxically, Jubilee for peace/justice advocates may be a call to do less, not more. Roundtable chair Stephen Colecchi, director of the Richmond, Va., diocesan peace/justice office, told his harried peers at the Washington meeting, "Jubilee is a spiritual antidote for frenetic activism." Instead of adding programs to an already crowded agenda, he urged the social action leaders to let God give them a Sabbath breather, take a fresh look at their work, maybe even drop programs that do not effectively "set captives free" or "forgive debts." He invited them to reinvigorate existing programs by recasting them in Jubilee images. "Jubilee has a language and a logic that can speak to many issues of our day: the exploitation of the land and ecology, the slavery of child labor and sweat shops, the forgiveness of Third World debt, and the redistribution of excessive concentrations of wealth and capital."