God has loved every human face, both man’s face and woman’s face. For this reason, every single human face has to shine in beauty. Beauty shines on human face as a result of the interior experience of being loved and being able to love. Without love, there is neither love, nor smile, nor serenity.

Behind every sad face you will find the experience of the evil suffered, of the betrayal projected and committed against your yourself and your closest people.

We have believed in the necessity of fighting against usury, in order to save the human face beauty, where God’s own image and likeness have to shine. Usury, the one you have suffered and endured, but also the one you have searched and inflicted, marks human face with sadness and death.

F.Massimo Rastrelli with some members of the staff of the Antiusury Foundation

People tricked into usury look hallucinated and delirious. They cannot see the sun, as well as either beauty or goodness in things and people. They only see the debt to pay and the inevitable deadlines of the increasing financial commitments.

Usury victims feel strongly guilty, most of all towards their partner and children. They feel forsaken even by relatives and friends. They feel lonely. They cannot see God and his eternity, either. They think that even God doesn’t love them.

During my experience as Priest and Parish Priest, through the face of usury victims I have recognised the same face as God’s people enslaved by the Pharaoh. Such a sad face has saddened my face too.

No other experience like this one has helped me to understand God’s relationship with human beings. Thus, I have firmly come to the same decision as God towards people enslaved in Egypt. In order to be good towards his people, God had especially to be the "Liberator" as well.

God had to emerge from his invisibility and be involved in human history, in people’s weakness and fragility. He had to educate, forgive and free. He had to stretch his arm out, performing with his almightness miracles which would never have been so great, if He hadn’t felt such a strong love for human being. The gift of redemption has essentially meant a gift of liberation.

However, no liberation can take place from outside, operating in the same way as you put alms in beggar’s hands. It is necessary to give from outside and stimulate from inside. This second aspect is the most difficult, since it requires you to act on the roots of freedom, opening it to that kind of love which makes people aware of their responsibilities towards others.

Usury victims are demolished by humiliation, crushed by the painful slavery, destroyed by their feeling inadequate, first of all, towards their own family. They don’t think they can trust even God, whose voice and command they cannot hear anymore.

Jesus ordered his followers: "Raise the dead". Psychologically and morally dead are those men and those women who have been cheated through fraud and have felt betrayed in their sense of justice by laws, law courts, and lawyers.

Psychologically dead are those men and those women who have thought of having met a solidly behind friend, finding instead trapped in the merciless and inevitable oppression of usury.

Psychologically dead are those men and those women who, finding themselves in an overhanging necessity, such as paying house rents, overdue bills, taxes or unexpected fines, unexpected and unguilty unemployment, or the threat of humiliating distresses, have turned to private loans without formalities and with low monthly interests. That’s the trap! Interests should never be monthly. From then on, usury victims are forced to starve their children, in order to give usury and criminal organisations everything they earn.

Psychologically dead are those men and those women who have believed that money is absolutely necessary, and that, in absence of income, one should anyway find it. Therefore, usury victims often run into loans without making their partner and children aware of this. As they realise the impossibility of paying such a short-term debt, refusing also to reveal their running into debts, they come towards the catastrophe, paying their debts with other debts, which are bigger and bigger, more and more demanding.

Psychologically dead are those men and those women who, managing a small and flourishing firm, have found themselves with suppliers to pay and heavy debts to collect. As it hangs the necessity of paying bills, in order to avoid any protest, usury victims have found themselves in the unfair situation of not being able to collect debts, not only from private citizens, but also from public governments, and from the State itself. As a consequence, perhaps they have wrongly turned to the business partners’ friend for an easy loan.

Psychologically dead are those men and those women who have knocked at every door and have lived the terrible experience of finding them all closed.

Moreover, they have very often found Church doors closed. Thanks to its practical believers, Church has shown itself unable not only to help, but also to understand. Since over a century, Church has stopped warning its believers against debt responsibilities and usury evil.

All these men and women have found themselves in the whirl and this phenomenon has now huge proportions: 24,000 families in 1994, and 636,000 in recent years, according to reliable figures by Banca d’Italia.

Facing this terrible economical situation, either the "social" man living in our democracy, or the "humanitarian" one, referring to the new increasing paganism, reports this problem with sorrow, reveals its scandal, but doesn’t lift a finger. The succession of even collective suicides is going on and is reported by mass media, rising also a succession of protests, which gain nothing else than empty declarations of principle.

Jesus, who is "resurrection and life", overwhelms over this background of distressing dreariness. Jesus makes us pray in this way: "our Father! … forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us".

Jesus opens men a new way, that "narrow way", which is within everyone’s reach, although nobody can turn into it without Jesus. Usury slaves’ redemption cannot also happen, until people, who can and have to help, make themselves responsible for other people’s cross, just as Jesus made himself responsible for our cross and the Cyrenaic for his one.

Resurrection from usury death cannot also happen, if every Christian doesn’t give himself, in order to restore to life those people who have foolishly bought and than cruelly lost it.

As far as we are concerned, having paid attention to short-lived passing of time and to the responsibilities that the Gospel shows us, we have joined together in the name of God and "with that little, coming from lots of people, we have done much for many". During the nine years of life of the Fondazione Antiusura S.Giuseppe Moscati (St. Joseph Moscati Antiusury Foundation), we have made free from usury more than 1,100 families, using successfully an amount of about 6 billions Lire, given by over 10,000 benefactors, for loans coming to 14 billions lire. In the future, we would also like to carry on with this activity.

For every person, family or firm set free from usury, there is no more desperation and the night of death has experienced the miracle of a new sunrise. This has happened because Love has welcome them in Jesus’ and Gospel Grace, in the bosom of the Church, through believing men’s and women’s heart, who have seriously understood God’s presence and Word.

It is just for this reason that we ask "everybody who has" to join us, in order to continue saving, and take actively part to other people’s "resurrection". In order to let Jesus raise the dead, everybody should just take the Grace of living Him in oneself. In this way, Jesus will continue making the miracles due to his Word in ourselves and in other people for human salvation.

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E-mail: moscati@gesuiti.it