Catholics internationally joined an online prayer marathon this week to mark the world day of prayer against human trafficking.
Held on the feast day of St Josephine Bakhita, it included a message from Pope Francis, who instituted the day in 2015.
Organisers included Talitha Kum, the network of consecrated life against human trafficking of the International Union of Superiors General and the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organisations. The 2021 theme, “An Economy without Human Trafficking”, highlighted “the dominant economic model of our time” as “a key cause of modern-day slavery” and called for “new economic experiences that oppose all forms of exploitation”.
Spain's Catholic bishops have demanded an end to the pandemic of human trafficking, warning that new forms of exploitation are emerging as new forms of poverty are discovered.
“Trafficking means recruiting, transferring, displacing, hiding or receiving people through threats, force or other types of coercion such as kidnapping, fraud, deception and abuse of power,” said the message, signed by Bishop Juan Carlos Elizalde of Vitoria, president of the Church's Migration Commission.
“Potential victims are people from impoverished families with small incomes in marginalised rural and urban areas, especially women engaged in small-scale agriculture and street-vending, as well as labourers, cleaners and those working in unskilled jobs and services.”
The message said women and children were generally the “main objective” of traffickers because of their “marginalisation and lack of material resources”, and tendency to belong to invisible social sectors, adding that the Church was demanding that this reality be unmasked.
“Just as we discover new forms of poverty, so different forms of trafficking emerge,” the Church said. The Catholic Church has repeatedly urged firmer action against trafficking in Spain, where investigations and prosecutions have increased in last two years, but are impeded by a lack of co-ordination between the country's 17 autonomous regions.
Loading ...
