Syllables of Ancient Wisdom
Newsletter for June 13, 2025
Earlier this week, CTV News reported that Cardinal Pedro Barreto Jimeno of Peru will be a “guest of honor” at the G7 Jubilee People’s Forum at Ambrose University in Calgary from June 12 to 15.
The People’s Forum is being held in advance of the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Kananaskis outside Calgary that begins on June 15. According to the People’s Forum website, the gathering “will be a place where people—pilgrims and activists from around the world and across Canada—will connect for community, learning, prayer and action during the G7 period.”
The G7, shorthand for the Group of 7, is an intergovernmental forum of the world’s most powerful economies, including Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The European Union is also part of the group.
Cardinal Jimeno is the Archbishop Emeritus of Huancayo in the Peruvian Amazon. He will be attending the People’s Forum to raise awareness of the issue of “ecological debt.”
One form of ecological debt is the environmental damage inflicted upon the Global South by industrial nations through extractive practices like mining and drilling. In addition to decimating natural environments, such practices can affect the health of entire communities, who rarely have a say in how their land is used.
Another form is financial. The countries of the Global South are already facing a debt crisis brought about by unsustainable lending practices from creditors such as the International Monetary Fund. In addition, they endure the effects of climate change largely wrought by developed nations.
These same developed nations then profit off “climate-financing support” in the form of loans. As David Thomas writes in African Business, “Emerging and developing market economies have been pushed into a nefarious debt trap, taking on financing to combat the effects of climate change at prohibitively high interest rates, which sharply increase debt servicing costs.”
It is hoped that Jimeno’s presence at the People’s Forum draws attention to the need for debt restructuring. On a moral and spiritual level, he might call on those of us in the Global North to address our patterns of overconsumption that exploit the resources of poorer nations.
“As church we have to be really clear that in our faith, God is the creator of heaven and earth,” he told CTV News through an interpreter. “The path of the church is to look after the earth.”
Alluding to Laudato Si’, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, he said, “We all have the responsibility of looking after the earth, but especially the governments of richer countries.”
Jimeno’s attendance at an event like the People’s Forum is a hopeful sign for Leo’s papacy. It shows a church unafraid to be engaged on the front lines and a carrying forth of Pope Francis’s ecological vision.
That vision, and its challenges to the conscience of industrialized nations, is what drew the ire of certain quarters of the Catholic Church under Francis’s leadership. As Abraham Joshua Heschel reminded us, a prophet is one who interferes in human activity when they sense it going astray. Francis’s prophetic call, his “interference,” was too much for some who feel their lifestyle is nonnegotiable and refuse to be converted by Jesus’s plea “that they may all be one” (John 17:21)—a oneness that commends us to “live simply, so that others may simply live.”
In Thomas Merton’s geo-spiritual imagination, Peru was the home of “the forgotten syllables of ancient wisdom which has never died and which contains in its secrets an image of truth that no man has recognized.” Hearing Jimeno’s voice begin to recall those syllables signals the prophetic edge and emerging leadership of the Global South in the future of the church.
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic