Cases of usury have not been hitting the headlines these last years, and one may be led to think that it's hardly a social scourge anymore.

The number of prosecuted and convicted individuals charged with usury may have gone down these last years, as seems to have gone down the number of calls for help received by the Foundation for Social Welfare Services (FSWS).

That notwithstanding, usury is continuing to hit hard and wreak havoc within Maltese families. It is destroying lives, generating anxieties, causing separations and causing very painful forms of slavery. I state this with full conviction, as lately I have had a client or two finally speaking up and confiding in me how they have been unwittingly caught up in the snare of this almost forgotten social plague also affecting Maltese society.

Indeed, from what I could gather, victims of usury have different backgrounds, with some genuinely regretting having let themselves fall victim when they should have known otherwise, while others can practically be described as 'innocent victims'.

For example, I've had someone succumb to usury with a certain degree of guilt after wasting money dragged by gambling addiction and then asking the loan shark for money to continue in his vice. He certainly did not take responsibility for his actions.

Others reach a situation of economic hardship because they irresponsibly administer their possessions; in the end, they feel the urgency of fast money, and they easily fall into the hands of unscrupulous lenders.

But many others are caught up in usury simply by non-guilty situations.

There was that of the parents who did not get the money they needed to feed their children, of the young man who needed money to pay for the last year of his studies abroad and thus be ready for an important occasion on his career path, and of that woman who risked losing the house and sleeping on the street if she did not pay the rent bills.

For whatever reason, people out there are still living under the anguish of urgently getting money, which is offered to them without much paperwork but with murderous interests, with the hand of ruthless loan sharks.

Loaning exorbitant interest certainly produces a small relief: at least you pay off the urgent, and so one survives a few more days. But the price is very high: the money that could be obtained is associated with the pressure of criminal interests, which "force" to return much more capital than received.

Teaching people to live a simple lifestyle that knows how to distinguish between what is superfluous and what is necessary is the first step in preventing this evil.

Financial education must make people responsible for their actions and help them not to take on debts only to buy things that can easily be done without. The virtues of poverty and sacrifice need to be rediscovered. Poverty prevents one from becoming a slave to things, while sacrifice makes one not expect everything from life.

Education against usury involves instilling an honest and legality-driven mindset, along with a desire to help those in need through volunteer work.

There is, moreover, another little-known and little-discussed aspect of what is giving rise to usury as a last resort to one's financial problems.

It is certainly true that, under the existing system, our banks are not upfront, as they should be, about their money-creation activities. It is also true that, partially on account of the smokescreen that the banks are lending other people's hard-earned money, the charges that the banks levy under the existing system can be and often are onerous, excessive and/or exploitative for one reason or another.

But these negative aspects of the present financial system are symptoms or consequences of a more fundamental problem, rather than constituting, in and of themselves, the heart of the evil.

The root of the economic problem is not to be found in the mere fact that the private banks create the bulk of the money supply, nor in the mere fact that they then proceed to charge interest on the monies that they loan out. The root of the economic problem has to do with policy.

The financial system serves the wrong policy. The policy that the private banks currently administer is a self-serving policy instead of what might be termed common policy: that policy that would serve the best interests of each citizen.

Interestingly, the rise of the credit economy, which began to take hold in the late 15th century, was driven by the Franciscans. Alexander Lombard, provincial of the monastery in Lombardy, Italy, wrote a tractate on usury and outlined 12 cases in which lending at interest was acceptable and sometimes admirable. From there, a new banking system emerged: the Monte di Pietà, which operates also in Malta.

As originally conceived, merchants donated money to the Monte to be lent at very low interest to the poor. In this context, moneylending was a form of charitable activity and service to the poor; the interest charged served only to cover the costs of the enterprise. This sort of moneylending was framed as a public service, which helped to eliminate poverty by enabling the poor to establish small businesses.

In contrast, as Pope St John Paul II once pointed out, usury is a scourge of our time that has a stranglehold on many people's lives.

Mark Said is a lawyer