Cardinal with close ties to Pope Leo XIV travels to Canada to support peaceful G7 activists

Cardinal Pedro Ricardo Barreto Jimeno shares why the environment and ecological debt matters.

A Peruvian cardinal who worked closely with Pope Leo XIV for years will be stopping in Calgary to support peaceful demonstrators as world leaders gather next week for the G7 summit in Alberta.

Cardinal Pedro Ricardo Barreto Jimeno, 81, hopes to help draw attention to what he calls an “ecological debt” crisis. While Barreto doesn’t plan to join protests, he said he will be supporting peaceful activists’ call for change.

According to Barreto and organizers from Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada, the group that invited the cardinal to Canada, ecological debt refers to the debt owed to poorer nations and Indigenous communities resulting from damage caused by some companies from developed countries like Canada. This damage includes oil spills and pollution from mines.

Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada, the official humanitarian aid agency of the Canadian Catholic Church, invited the cardinal to support peaceful activists in their campaign to call on G7 world leaders to prioritize the protection of the planet and poor communities.

Ahead of a speech before dozens of people at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Toronto on Monday, Barreto spoke with CTVNews.ca through an interpreter about ecological debt.

“It’s a very large injustice that the World Bank recognizes,” the Spanish-speaking cardinal said. He pointed to a World Bank 2023 debt report that found developing countries spent a record US$1.4 trillion servicing their foreign debt, as interest costs soared to a 20-year high of $406 billion. For many countries, this move would cut budgets in areas such as health and education.

Barreto hopes developed countries like Canada will recognize their ecological debt to poorer countries. He and other environmental advocates are calling on Canada and other countries to cancel “unjust and unsustainable debts” and help reform the global financial system.

“My hope, which is the hope of the church, is that the leaders of the northern rich countries will assume their responsibility in this situation,” he said. “They have a really clear opportunity here to have a change in mentality towards debt.”

Direction of Leo papacy

Barreto, a Jesuit like Pope Francis, says he, Leo and others in the Catholic Church hope to continue Francis’s legacy of emphasizing care for the marginalized and environment.

While he didn’t vote in the conclave last month — Barreto is older than the 80-year-old cutoff — he said he participated in meetings with cardinals leading up to Leo’s election, in which they “insisted” that the new pope must continue the same path as Francis of looking after the Earth.

Cardinal’s plans in Calgary

The cardinal will be a guest of honour at the G7 Jubilee People’s Forum in Calgary from June 12 to 15 before the summit in Kananaskis. Activists and faith communities from across Canada and around the world will gather and participate in talks about ecological debt during the forum.

Barreto, metropolitan archbishop emeritus of Huancayo, Peru, is known for his advocacy for the environment and poor in Peru and Latin America.

Francis made Barreto a cardinal in 2018. According to The College of Cardinals Report, a website featuring profiles of cardinals compiled by independent Catholic journalists and researchers, Barreto is also known for his “outspoken generally liberal views on national politics,” even facing death threats for speaking out against a smelter causing pollution that threatened the health of people in the Andes Mountains.