Sri Lanka forum rethinks global debt, church renewal

What is the debt of the North to the South?

While church-based Jubilee 2000/USA and its allies were demonstrating in Washington last month for cancellation of debt owed by impoverished Southern hemisphere nations to the affluent North, Fr. Tissa Balasuriya convened the Forum for African and Asian Spirituality in Sri Lanka to ask for reparation and compensation from the North for its far greater debts owed to the South.

The Forum's 25 participants came from 15 countries on five continents. They included economists, sociologists, liberation theologians, educators, human rights activists, pastors, community organizers, and an "engaged Buddhist." CTA staffer Don Wedd was among them. They calculated dollar figures for the North's indebtedness to the South. Zimbabwe, for example, though colonized as late as 1890, contributed at least $36 billion to the North through loot, land, cheap labor, unequal terms of trade, and unequal health and education services for blacks and whites. In 1995, this debt that the North owed Zimbabwe was nine times what Zimbabwe owed the North in national debt! Preliminary data for India suggested an even more extraordinary extraction of wealth by the British, which continued for centuries.

Re-envisioning the church

The Forum also asked: what sort of church could help rebuild global justice in the 21st century? Not the present one, conferees agreed, which was aligned with the colonizers, and gathered the gold, land and benefits of cheap labor to itself. An Anglican priest told how his parish sold just three of its chalices, hundreds of years old and stored in a bank vault, for $850,000.
The Forum said a re-oriented church would build on the Pope's Lenten apology, and, "with a firm purpose of amendment," give compensation to its victims. To avoid "further occasions of sin," it would change its structures to prevent ongoing sins of exclusion, develop a more global theology of liberation, and create links between personal spirituality and global social commitment. A renewed church would be ecumenical. And since the majority of the church live in the South, for sheer survival they urgently need the North's debt to be repaid.