Usury and Student Loans: When the State Serves Mammon
When Vatican News reported Pope Leo XIV’s blistering condemnation of usury last week, most of the English-speaking press ignored it. The story was treated as another quaint moral statement from a distant religious figure, irrelevant to the modern economy.
Yet at nearly the same moment, Forbes ran an update on the U.S. Department of Education quietly resuming student loan forgiveness after a court settlement.
The contrast couldn’t be sharper. One story speaks of sin and repentance. The other speaks of law and compliance. Yet beneath both lies the same truth: Our elites have built their entire moral order around debt.
Pope Leo XIV called usury a “grave sin that corrupts the human heart and enslaves the poor.” He warned that this vice doesn’t just ruin individual lives but warps entire nations, turning economic systems into engines of despair. He echoed the prophet Isaiah’s call to “break the chains of injustice and set the oppressed free,” reminding the world that building structures which engender and perpetuate debt servitude is not simply unkind. It is evil.
Meanwhile, the Forbes article presents a contemporary bureaucratic parable. The Education Department, after being forced by legal settlement, has begun canceling certain student loans and protecting borrowers from tax liabilities. It’s a process that should have been straightforward but became mired in red tape.
And now, the government congratulates itself for offering “forgiveness” while quietly ignoring that the system itself created the crisis. It’s a strange kind of mercy that can only be dispensed after a lawsuit.
The connection between the Pope’s warning and America’s student loan regime is not just symbolic. The ruling regime has sanitized usury, institutionalized it, and declared it virtuous. We now teach children to go into debt before they can vote under the guise of “investing in their future.” What it really means is that young people are conscripted into a system that regards them as revenue streams instead of human beings.
The student loan racket is the purest distillation of Mammon worship. It begins with a moral falsehood: that education, which once aimed to form virtuous citizens, can be treated as a product with a guaranteed monetary return. Students, believing they are buying security, sign contracts that enslave them for decades. The lenders profit from interest payments that often exceed the principal. And universities raise tuition endlessly, knowing the government will keep the credit flowing.
In moral terms, there’s no difference between a loan shark on the street and a federal lending program that traps millions in lifelong repayment. Both operate on the same predatory logic that money should multiply for the strong at the expense of the weak.
Then again, at least your loan shark has the decency to look you in the eye.
This inversion of moral order is what Pope Leo XIV called the “corruption of the human heart.” When men make profit the supreme good, they forget their neighbor’s dignity. They cease to see others as human and start to see them as assets—or worse, liabilities.
And that’s why the modern economy cannot reform itself. Every forgiveness program still operates within the same spiritual and moral framework. The system cannot repent because it does not believe it has sinned. Its only response to failure is generating more paperwork and more debt.
The Forbes article, though outwardly neutral, perfectly embodies this blindness. It describes the government’s legal obligations and tax implications but never asks the obvious question: Why should the young need to be forgiven for seeking an education? The unspoken assumption is that usury is just part of the natural order; that predatory debt is as inevitable as gravity.
But as Pope Leo XIV reminds us, this order is not natural; it is fallen. It is the result of choosing Mammon over God; of exalting the market above mercy.
Real mercy would go beyond forgiving loans after decades of servitude. It would also mean abolishing the system that created them.
The Church, when she speaks with such refreshing clarity, still carries the antidote. “Either we reclaim our moral and spiritual dignity,” the Pope said, “or we fall into a pit of filth.”
His Holiness is right. The numbers on the balance sheet may change, but the final accounting remains.
Until the West repents of its Mammon worship, there will be no true prosperity; only managed decline and digital serfdom. And no government reform or financial settlement can redeem what only conversion can heal.
We must remember what our forefathers once knew: Money is a servant, not a master. The economy is not a god to be worshiped. When we forget those truths, we do not possess wealth; we get possessed by it.
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Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.