Italy's bishops help the poor through a 'Loan for Hope' microcredit

Rome, Italy, Mar 5, 2015 / 00:08 am

The Italian bishops conference relaunched on Monday its microcredit initative for families and small businesses, a program first begun in 2009 in response to the global financial crisis.

In the last four years, the "Loan for Hope" program has distributed more than $29 million in loans to families and small companies in Italy. It is carried out through the Intesa San Paolo Bank, on behalf of the Italian bishops and Caritas Italy.

"We have provided loans to about 4,500 families, and 15 percent of them were small family companies or cooperative companies who got loans of $30,000 in order to replace furniture or write off the red of balance sheets which occurred with the economic crisis," Fr. Andrea La Regina of Caritas Italy told CNA Feb. 27.

The Italian Bishops conference employed an endowment of about $30 million, coming from a national collection of money launched in 2009 that collected some $2 million dollars, and part of the fund of the Italian state tax for religions.

In Italy, eight per thousand of the tax income may be delivered to the Catholic Church, to other religious confessions that have an agreement with the Italian State, or to Italian State itself.

The Italian Bishops Conference uses one-third of the income of the tax for development projects in developing countries or to deliver money to missions.

Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, president of the Italian Bishops conference, told CNA Feb. 27 that "we bishops touch with our very hands how families are increasingly becoming poorer, while young people live the experience of feeling useless because they are unemployed and cannot see any future perspective."

Cardinal Bagnasco said the the "loan for hope" was designed "in order to build a bridge for families living difficulties, so that they could go beyond the crisis."

Local branches of Caritas delivered the loans to small companies and families, and "the loans have always been returned," Fr. La Regina said.

The loan program was relaunched March 2 with another $30 million endowment that the bank hopes to multiply to $130 million through investments in the coming two years.

There will be a "social credit" for poor families, which consists in a loan of up to $8,300 for families; and a "credit to build companies," for small start up companies, which will be a maximum of $28,000.

The initiative of the Italian Bishops Conference is just the most comprehensive of a series of initiatives put into effect by Italian dioceses in the course of recent years to help families get out of the economic crisis – for example, the Archdiocese of Milan launched in 2008 a "Family and Job Fund" financed with $1.3 million of funds of the archdiocese.