Published by Ave Maria University
Vol. 9 | June 2025
Aq u i na s a n d t h e Fi na n c i a l C r i si s Gabriel Martinez, Ph.D.
A
usurer: some sort of medieval person, maybe a character from Shakespeare, greedy and hopelessly out of date. Many people know that while the Catholic Church frequently declared usury a mortal sin, the prohibition on charging interest on loans was relaxed over the centuries, so that now very few people give it any thought. Most of us have no qualms with collecting interest from our money market mutual funds or our high-yield savings accounts. The Scholastic thinking on usury also seems outdated.
The traditional teaching had two kinds of concerns. The first is that money (unlike land or trees or animals) does not produce fruit on its own, so asking for a return on lending money is against the nature of money and therefore unjust. The second concern was to deal with situations in which a lender took advantage of a borrower and his desperate need. Most people believe that the current, modern economy provides abundant occasions for money to be, indeed, very fruitful. While the ancient and medieval world were