Lockdown measures have increased the difficulty for trafficking victims of escaping and finding help when they are held in situations against their will, says Caritas International.
“Immigration detention centres, where survivors of modern slavery often find themselves, remain operating at great risk to all those detained,” says Cardinal Vincent Nichols.
“I encourage you to seek, in every poor person whom you encounter, his or her true needs, not to stop at their most obvious material needs, but to discover their inner goodness,” Pope Francis told the faithful.
“Any man, woman or child who has been trafficked, or could be trafficked, clearly needs our unconditional love.”
Pope addresses the topic of slavery on the feast day of St Josephine Bakhita, patron saint of human trafficking victims.
“Despite the formal abolition of the slave trade, the exploitation of some human beings by others has not ended and now takes place in terrible new forms on a significantly large scale.”
Organised by the Santa Marta Group (preventing human trafficking and modern slavery), the conference has as its theme ‘Church and state working together to restore dignity to trafficked persons’.
There are cases of seafarers and fishermen being effectively imprisoned on their ships, not paid wages and held in a modern-day form of press-ganging and slavery, says Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster.
“People laughed when Archbishop Hughes began to plan a cathedral on what was then the remote 51st Street on 5th Avenue. They called it ‘Hughes’s Folly’, but time would show that ... Archbishop Hughes was ahead of the rest in anticipating the growth and future strategic importance of mid-Manhattan.”
The walk-in piece of public art is intended to get people’s attention. Its gift box exterior symbolises the way traffickers entice their victims with false promises.
On the Feast of the Assumption, Pontiff calls attention to women "forced to surrender in both body and spirit to the avarice of men".
In contrast to the “holiness, solitude and peacefulness” of the French Marian shrine, daily lives are typically drenched with stories and images from social media, newspapers, magazines, television and films.
Group's efforts to free the victims of new forms of slavery, rehabilitate them, and unmask the traffickers and those who create this market praised.
God’s dream for his creation is to see it fulfilled “in the loving union between a man and a woman, rejoicing in their shared journey, fruitful in their mutual gift of self”.
Catholic Primate says New Year's resolution should include personal and public awareness of what trafficking is and how it can be prevented.
Message for ‘World Day of Peace’ tackles human slavery, migration, slave labour, organ trafficking, those forced into prostitution, and child soldiers.
Following St Paul's admonishment in 55AD, ‘Let the women be silent in the churches’, the equality between women and men in the early church began to change.
This social plague remains all too real in today’s world Pontiff warns.
Washington official stresses the important role the Church has played in defining trafficking as a crime against humanity.
"The trade in human persons constitutes a shocking offence against human dignity and a grave violation of fundamental human rights”.
