Title: “Curing Financial Leprosy” – Joe Canuck Interviews Bono & Nelly Furtado
Setting: A quiet studio in Toronto, with a mural of St. Francis embracing a leper behind the guests. The atmosphere is reverent but fiery, a blend of spirituality and economic justice.
Joe Canuck: Welcome, everyone, to The Great Healing. Today, we’re talking about curing what I call financial leprosy — the spiritual disease of debt slavery. With me are two voices who’ve sung for the soul of humanity: Bono of U2, and Canada’s own Nelly Furtado. Thank you both for being here.
Bono: Cheers, Joe. “Financial leprosy” — I love that phrase. That’s exactly what unpayable debt does. It isolates, it disfigures communities, it robs people of dignity.
Nelly Furtado: Yes, it’s a kind of invisible sickness. You can’t see it like a skin disease, but you feel it in the anxiety, the broken families, the hopelessness. Especially among working-class people, immigrants, artists — those trying to rise without selling their souls.
Joe Canuck: Exactly. The Book of Leviticus had the Jubilee — every fifty years, debts were forgiven, land returned, and the poor restored. Christ himself said, “Forgive us our debts.” What happened to that idea?
Bono: (smiling) It got replaced by compound interest, Joe. The new priesthood wears suits and works in skyscrapers. When I started the Jubilee 2000 campaign, I met bishops, presidents, and bankers. Most of them admitted they knew the system was unjust, but they called it “too big to change.”
Nelly Furtado: And yet, everything changes. Empires fall. Currency collapses. But compassion doesn’t. Imagine a system where lending is rooted in partnership, not exploitation — where capital serves the community, not the other way around.
Joe Canuck: Amen to that. You’re talking about ending usury, which used to be considered a mortal sin. The prophets, the Popes, even Shakespeare condemned it. Now it’s our global operating system.
Bono: (nodding) Usury is the original virus. It’s what turns a loaf of bread into a bond market. It’s why a child dies in Africa while another trades derivatives in London.
Nelly Furtado: That’s why we need a cultural Jubilee — music, art, and truth-telling that make forgiveness fashionable again. Let’s make mercy cool.
Joe Canuck: (grinning) You just coined a movement, Nelly. Mercy is the new luxury.
Bono: Beautiful. Because in a world addicted to profit, forgiveness is the true rebellion.
Nelly Furtado: The way I see it, Joe, we can’t heal the planet until we heal the heart. And the heart of our system is sick with greed. It’s time to put usury where it belongs — in the dust bin of history.
Joe Canuck: (leaning forward) Then let’s call this what it is — the spiritual reset. Debt forgiveness not as charity, but as justice.
Bono: Exactly. Justice is love with legs.
Nelly Furtado: And maybe a melody. (smiles)
Joe Canuck: Then sing us out, Nelly — what’s the anthem of this new age?
Nelly Furtado: (softly, almost like a prayer)
“Money’s not my master, love’s my creed,
Forgive the debt, let the poor be freed.
What we owe to each other, not what we own —
That’s the seed that makes peace grow.”
Joe Canuck: (applauding) That’s it. The cure for financial leprosy is compassion — paid in full.