Rome Newsroom, Jul 13, 2020 / 08:30 am (CNA).- Mafia loan sharks have exploited the economic downturn creating a hidden “new slavery” of usury within communities, an Italian bishop said Sunday.
Bishop Giovanni D’Alise of the southern Diocese of Caserta issued the warning following reports that some parents had been forced to send their children to work off family debts to local mobsters.
“I tell my communities and priests and all those in Caserta who have business dealings, to all the baptized who work more actively for the common good, to keep their eyes open,” D’Alise told the Italian newspaper Avvernire on July 12.
Organized crime, especially loan sharking, has been on the rise following the economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic. With many businesses and industries closed for weeks or months in some areas, local mob figures were often used as lenders of last resort for struggling families.
The bishop, whose diocese is in the Campania region of Naples, said that “under our eyes unthinkable things are happening.”
D’Alise’s comments were based on a report from Caserta’s Chamber of Commerce, which found that loan sharks were demanding children to be sent to work to pay off their parents’ debt as Italy’s economy worsens as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
“If there are sons or daughters of a working age, legally, adults or minors, the loan shark asks the father to use them in a firm close to him, but which cannot be traced back to him,” Tommaso De Simone, the Caserta Chamber of Commerce president told Avvenire July 10.
Usury in southern Italy has grown “exponentially” in recent months due to the country’s lockdown, according to De Simone.
The Catholic Church has frequently condemned the practice of usury, or the loaning of money while charging unreasonable rates of interest.
“It’s a serious sin, because you make money by taking advantage of other people’s needs. This is anti-human and anti-Christian,” Bishop D’Alise said.
In this case, Italian media reports that the loan sharks are linked to the Camorra, a mafia group based in Naples.
“Now I have the impression that a new slavery is emerging. Just as the Camorra crept in and hid among us, so did the usury,” the bishop said.
“Many workers are increasingly exploited; we even go now to sons and daughters. Boys who are sent to work instead of adults, to pay off the debts incurred by parents,” he said.
The Archbishop of Naples Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe called the Neapolitan Camorra mafia “another possible epidemic” in a homily during a livestreamed Mass in May.
“There are those who are good at making a fortune in times of epidemic. … Let’s move, intervene immediately, because the underworld is faster than our bureaucracy. The Camorra does not wait. It is up to us to get rid of all [criminal] organizations. We must overcome and affirm the right to hope,” Cardinal Sepe said May 2.
The Neapolitan mafia has been known to take advantage of an economic downturn by lending their money — earned by illicit means, like drug trafficking — to businesses who cannot pay the money back.
“When the money cannot be returned, the Camorra takes advantage of that. Because of the money the Camorra can acquire management of the business. From that moment on, the Camorra will use that company as a conduit to launder its own illicit money,” Naples police officer Alfredo Fabbrocini told EuroNews July 10.
De Simone said that loan sharks often have “the face of a friend, a benefactor, who helps you when everyone else has abandoned you. That gives you money right away, when you need it.”
“As long as you have properties, the usurer lends you money. Loans that can hardly be repaid: not so much and not only for the obviously very high interest, but because when, as in the quarantine, there is no economic income, the further loan you need to eat on one side and to pay the installments of the debt on the other,” he explained.
“Children often pay for their families. I have no names to indicate, but from the stories of many economic operators, disgusted by what is happening,” he said.
For Bishop D’Alise, the root of the problem of usury is a failure to uphold human dignity. Because of this, the Italian bishop likened it to the issue of racism in the United States.
“In both cases a person is worthless,” he said. “I still have before me the image of the policeman holding George Floyd with his knee. It crushed him, not only physically.”
He said that the Church’s response needs to be “effective solidarity” that can recognize this dignity and support those most in need.
“What is required of the Church is a strong exercise of solidarity, each for what he can, but that is a sensitive and effective solidarity. Often we do not realize how much goodness, but also how much evil there is between us. And kids cannot pay the price,” he said.
[…]
Peter Seewald has developed an intimacy with Benedict apparent in his interviews, and book. His judgment should be trusted. If our blessed loved Benedict XVI departs he’ll remain an advocate. Of course his final testament will be interesting. A true and faithful witness I’m confident he will be rewarded with beatific knowledge of his beloved Jesus of Nazareth. It will end the moot controversy of who is pope. The contrast with Francis is remarkable. Nowhere do we find in Benedict since his spiritual maturity any ambiguity, any preposterous suggestion, any abrogation as pontiff in witnessing to and defending the faith as revealed. Unlike our present experience. I refuse to judge Pope Francis because I am not equipped to do so. God is the judge of his conscience. No one is equipped to accompany and discern the truth of a person’s soul. Nonetheless I can and must pass judgment on a person’s works. There I address with full confidence that there are deceptive features, said in passive tense not active as one intending to deceive. For example Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia 303 quotes Saint Thomas Aquinas in ST 1a2ae 94 4, Although there is necessity in the general principles, the more we descend to matters of detail, the more frequently we encounter defects. Aquinas addresses Justice in this passage to emphasize the need to deliberate the conditions on the ground so to speak in determining what is just. He’s posing a hypothetical to demonstrate a point, not that we can never determine what is just – if for example we take it literally that we will always find exceptions. Instead Francis proposes that we will always find exceptions to an intrinsically evil act like Adultery [or abortion, homosexuality, cohabitation] which demolishes the reality of intrinsic evil. Aquinas holds there is no virtuous mean between excess and defect for such an evil. Murder, abortion, homosexuality are always evil. Consequently Francis underscores a doctrine of mitigation that affects all morality leaving culpability indeterminate and subject to discernment and resolution. He references in 302 the Catechism that mitigation may reduce to a minimum moral culpability (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2352). Mitigation cannot become a theological category that eliminates mortal sin as warned by John Paul II. Especially if we remain in a continuous state of repeated intrinsically evil acts, as if the serial fornicator, adulterer, sexual deviant diminishes culpability, is even freed from mortal sin. Insofar as abortion the overwhelming majority are convenience decisions, rarely under extreme conditions of duress. Mitigation as employed by the Pope Francis places personal conscience as the determinant of what is a moral good or evil. Indeterminate moral standards due to exceptions, mitigation, and conscience are the three levers that overturn traditional Apostolic morality, a first in Church history and a deceptive doctrine he commends to all clergy to employ by accompaniment and discernment. Thereby placing the onus on the priest to grant the benefit of the doubt. As in Malta tacitly approved by this Vatican that anyone may now approach the sacraments at will regardless of manifest sin, with the proviso they follow the guidelines, the three levers of deliberation and dissolution of culpability provided in Amoris Laetitia. I submit this commentary in conscience as priest and my obligatory witness to the truth.
Does possibly mitigated subjective culpability ever elevate conscience as the determinant of what is moral good or evil, or eliminate objective morality? Pope Benedict wrote directly and unambiguously to this point, and to the widespread deadening of conscience in the West:
“I have been absolutely certain that there is something wrong with the theory of the justifying force of the subjective conscience . . . Hitler may have had none (guilt feelings); nor may Himmler or Stalin. Mafia bosses may have none, but it is more likely that they have merely suppressed their awareness of the skeletons in their closets. And the aborted guilt feelings . . . Everyone needs guilt feelings. The loss of the ability to see one’s guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is a more dangerous illness of the soul than guilt that is recognized as guilt (see Psalm 19:12). [‘But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults.’]
“To identify conscience with a superficial state of conviction is to equate it with a certainty that merely seems rational, a certainty woven from self-righteousness, conformism, and intellectual laziness. Conscience is degraded to a mechanism that produces excuses for one’s conduct, although in reality conscience is meant to make the subject transparent to the divine, thereby revealing man’s authentic dignity and greatness” (Values in a Time of Upheaval, 2006).