Women Religious Tackle Human Trafficking

I've just arrived in Rome, where I'll be spending the summer teaching at the joint University of St. Thomas/Villanova law school summer law program, after a wonderful but exhausting five days treking through Germany, showing my kids where I grew up.  We spent the first couple of days with friends in Mainz, attending Mass at the beautiful baroque Church of St. Peter's, and admiring the astonishingly moving stained glass windows of Chagall at St. Stephen's.  (After years of pleading, the pastor of St. Stephen's, Fr. Klaus Mayer -- himself of Catholic and Jewish heritage, convinced Chagall -- all of whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust -- to make these windows, as an expression of German-Jewish reconciliation.  Chagall did them for free, but would NOT come and see them -- he would not visit Germany).

I am really not intending to write a travelogue, but you have to admit I kept the posting Catholic-related so far, didn't I?  But I really did have a Catholic legal theory-related reason to post, namely the news of this extraordinary conference going on somewhere very close to where I am now sitting.  It's a international conference of women religious working on stopping human trafficking and ministering to the victims of human trafficking.  From the Pope's message for the opening of the conference, he said it was important to bring about "a renewed awareness of the inestimable value of life and an ever more courageous commitment to the defense of human rights and the overcoming of every type of abuse."

Some descriptions from the ZENIT report on this conference struck me as a poignant reminder of the significance of this problem, and the importance of addressing not simply the legal structures that allow this exploitative industry to continue, but also the human dimension -- ministering to the victims.  The time and attention these women religious are devoting to this issue does seem to be to me, as Archbishop Veglio states, "prophetic."

In the Friday press conference presenting the conference, it was reported that 2.5 million people are affected by trafficking, which is a $150 billion business -- money that goes in the pockets of those who control the markets of prostitution, trafficking in organs, and forms of slavery that predominantly affect women and children.

In this context, Archbishop Vegliò affirmed, the Church has a role that is "not only important, but also prophetic."

He said that before all else, it is important to "know the factors that encourage and especially attract prostitution, and the strategies used by recruiters, traffickers, intermediaries and those who abuse the victims."

Then, in the commitment made by the religious to combat human trafficking, the Vatican official affirmed that personal and spiritual formation is needed, so that they know how to deal with difficult and broken lives that need to be reconstructed.