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Matthew K Michels, OblSB's avatar

Amazing and important work being done by this community in the true spirit of Catholic Social Teaching.

Remember that usury is still a sin, and most interest rates charged in the modern era are borderline usurous, if not explicitly so. We, as the People of God, are meant to witness to the world a way of living that stands in notable contrast to the ways of the world, and thus point to the Kingdom of God. This includes banking and finances.

Big thanks to Michelle and The Pillar for giving me my daily dose of "cool, I never this existed!"

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Bridget's avatar

I like the idea of supporting a no-interest (rather than low-interest) personal loan program because then I do not have to think about whether Aquinas is smarter than me https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3078.htm I wonder if there are any in the US.

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John Lieblang's avatar

The St. Vincent de Paul Society is doing something very similar to this in different dioceses across the United States. I live in Dallas so I am aware of what we do locally, but I believe there are others across the United States.

https://svdpdallas.org/mlp/

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Joseph's avatar

they are doing the work of the Gospel, through which we were told to give to the one who asks and lend to the one who wants to borrow.

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James's avatar

Beautiful, thanks for this!

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Dennis Doyle's avatar

No interest loans to help individuals pay ordinary living expenses which have become “ extraordinary” for them is new to me. In the past we have used no interest loans as seed money to build Catholic mission churches around the world. The loans had a 5 to 7 year duration. With a corpus of $ 1M we were able to seed the construction of 40 mission churches over 20 years since as the loans were repaid the funds were redeployed. We only had one default .

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