More than 700 bishops representing the world's 80 million Anglicans are about to enter the last week of the Lambeth Conference, at which international debt has raised more passion than any other moral, social or theological issue.
Just as the Vatican has tried to make abortion and contraception the main social moral issues for Roman Catholics this century, the Lambeth Conference appears to be making international debt the main social moral issue for Anglicans in the next century.
In the last few days, the bishops have met the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, and the Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, to press home their priorities. And in the course of the conference, the president of the World Bank, Mr Jim Wolfensohn, was visibly angered as he responded to what he saw as the "grave injustices" in a 20-minute presentation to the bishops by Christian Aid.
In a lengthy and thunderous litany of complaints, Mr Wolfensohn said Christian Aid's film would have the bishops "believe that I rather like children dying, that I have no faith, that my interest is to collect debts, that I have no interest in education or health, that I know nothing about the impact of payments imposed by governments, that would lead you to think I know nothing about the slums in Jamaica and know little about Tanzania. All I can say to you is that I believe that each of those assertions is wrong."
He insisted: "I'm not angry about the film, I'm upset." But his anger was visible and palpable. He gave some startling statistics about "a world which is inequitable and which . . . has three billion people [living with] under $3 a day." Defending the World Bank's debt relief programmes, he said the world was losing the battle against poverty and indebtedness and declared: "I care. And so do my people."
Mr Wolfensohn tried to turn the tables on the bishops, saying: "I am doing many of the things that the church wishes to do and should do itself . . . I'm not putting out films about what you could do in terms of health and education and distribution."
But the bishops were not impressed. More than two-thirds of the bishops at the conference are from Third World countries Africa, Asia and Latin America and most of them have immediate and personal experiences of the effects of debt on their people. Before Mr Wolfensohn spoke, more than 30 bishops, including Archbishop Walton Empey of Dublin, turned up to show their support for Jubilee 2000, the campaign calling for the cancellation of the developing world's worst debts by the year 2000.
Archbishop George Carey of Canterbury, who introduced Mr Wolfensohn to the conference, said the moral argument on debt cancellation is "incontestable". He spoke of millions of people "living in abject poverty" and chained to the burden of debt. "This is immoral and we are under an obligation to say so."
Archbishop Njongokulu Ndugane of Cape Town, who is the Primate of an Anglican Church covering seven countries in southern Africa, later told the conference: "All of the countries of my jurisdiction are affected and damaged by the crisis of international debt. It is a crisis of the first magnitude in the world."
In the highly indebted countries, the amount of debt is around $215 billion (£152 billion) on present data; in real terms, according to Mr Wolfensohn, it is probably between $300 and $400 billion.
Archbishop Ndugane spoke of the trickle-up effect of debt. "For every $1 that rich countries send to developing countries, $11 comes straight back for the repayment of debts owed to the richest countries . . . Each day, the poorest countries transfer $717 million to the richer creditor countries."
During the conference, the bishops from the Philippines told how the repayment of debt has been written into Philippine law, so that 43 per cent of government revenues must be set aside by law to repay debts before considering spending in other sectors. Archbishop Ndugane counted the human cost of such policies. "The human cost is the export of Philippine labour all over the world to earn hard currency to help repay their country's debts," he said. "So people of the Philippines can be found all over the world, being exploited as servants, sailors and prostitutes."
Despite Mr Wolfensohn's defensive intensity, Archbishop Tutu's successor was impressed with neither the World Bank nor the International Monetary Fund. He described the Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) of the World Bank and the IMF as an "historical breakthrough and a good beginning". But it suited creditors, not debtors, and he argued it "is not really going to be effective".
"Substantial and permanent debt relief including outright cancellation is an early part of the remedy which will help [the HIPC] countries survive," he told the bishops.
Mr Wolfensohn had failed to win friends or influence bishops at Canterbury. In what one senior bishop of the Church of Ireland described as "a damage-limitation exercise", Mr Axel van Trotsenberg, manager of the HIPC project at the World Bank, stayed back and called an impromptu briefing. But by then the bishops had been swayed by the Archbishop of Cape Town, most journalists had filed their copy, and the real side show was being provided by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester, an expert on Islam who is being tipped as one of the potential successors to Dr Carey.
Archbishop Ndugane wants "a truly jubilee celebration" with the cancellation of the unpayable debts of the poorest countries to mark the millennium of Christ's birth in 2000, so that "the third millennium will be a new beginning for the Third World".
An international Jubilee 2000 campaign has already spread through Britain, Ireland, Austria, Germany and African countries such as Ghana and Kenya. Whether the bishops at Canterbury can make any impact on the World Bank, the IMF and the creditor banks and nations, has to be seen. But certainly Mr Wolfensohn's anger indicates that the World Bank is sitting up and listening. In turn, the bishops have shown that church gatherings such as the Lambeth Conference can have relevance to the problems in the real world.
