Vatican, religious sisters urge global mobilization against human trafficking

The Vatican today presented details on the first International Day of Prayer and Awareness Against Human Trafficking, calling for a global mobilization to assist victims and strengthen laws against traffickers.

It’s the latest in a long series of church efforts against what Pope Francis has called a “crime against humanity.” Although accurate statistics are hard to obtain, some experts estimate that more than 2 million people are trafficked each year, nearly half of them for prostitution. For traffickers and pimps, it is a $32 billion a year industry.

The day of prayer is scheduled for Feb. 8, the feast of Saint Josephine Bakhita, a Sudanese kidnaped by slave-traffickers when she was nine years old and who, after she was freed, joined a Catholic religious order.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said the prayer initiative was designed to expand awareness “to the very depths of this evil and its farthest reaches.”

The press conference featured a number of women religious, whose orders have taken up the fight against human trafficking by organizing assistance centers around the world. Maltese Sister Carmen Sammut said the anti-trafficking network known as Talitha Kum, established by religious order, now works in 81 countries, helping victims and working for more effective policies against trafficking.

“We are here because we want to encourage all people of good will to join forces so that this terrible global phenomenon can be stopped. Today thousands of children, women and men are sold into slavery, forced labor, prostitution, trafficking of organs,” she said.

It is common, she said, for shady organizations to lure young people into believing they will find jobs abroad, and then trap them in abusive modern forms of slavery.

Several of the speakers said that while such evils are often publicly denounced, the level of trafficking in many countries is increasing. In Italy, for example, the number of street prostitutes on the rise, and those involved are increasingly younger.

Last December, Pope Francis and leaders of other churches and faiths signed a joint declaration calling for the end to all forms of human slavery. The pope also denounced human trafficking in his World Peace Day message for 2015.

Vatican conference to examine new approaches to women’s issues

Even before it began, this week’s Vatican-sponsored meeting on “Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference” sparked debate on a variety of issues: women’s specific characteristics, the meaning of “generativity” vs. “maternity,” and even whether plastic surgery represents a form of aggression against women.

At a press conference Monday, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, whose Pontifical Council for Culture is organizing the conference, waded into these and other controversies. He was navigating difficult waters. It is problematic, I think, for any Vatican official to talk about women’s equality when Vatican decision-making remains an all-male, all-clerical domain.

Nevertheless, Ravasi has opened some new and interesting areas of discussion. The meeting’s working document, for example, suggests that the church’s traditional image of women “does not correspond to reality” today, and that some women may be leaving the church as a result.

“Why with their great presence have women had so little impact on the Church’s structures? In pastoral praxis, why are we giving women only those tasks of a somewhat rigid scheme, the fruit of ideological and ancestral left-overs?” the document asked.

It concluded: “A realistic objective could be that of opening the doors of the Church to women so that they can offer their contribution in terms of skills and also sensitivity, intuition, passion, dedication, in full collaboration and integration with the male component.”

For the Vatican, however, collaboration and integration clearly do not include women’s ordination. The document underlined that in the meeting’s program, “there is no discussion here of women priests, which according to statistics is not something that women want.” Nor do most women want the bishop’s “purple biretta,” it said.

The real question in Rome is whether Pope Francis’ planned reform of the Roman Curia will bring women to executive roles in the Vatican, something that until now has been rejected because – as Pope Benedict once explained – decision-making in the church has been linked to holy orders.

The panel at the Vatican press conference included four women who helped prepare the document, all of them Italian and all of them successful in their careers. They offered some qualifications on the document’s assertion that non-therapeutic plastic surgery can indicate a “refusal of the body” and a denial of the natural aging process; the women said much depends on a woman’s motives and attitude toward such surgery. (For the record, the working document did not exactly assert that “plastic surgery is like a burqa made of flesh,” although it cited the line as an opinion worth discussing.)

The pontifical council deliberately avoided the term “maternity” in its working document, preferring to talk about what it calls a quality of “generativity,” which refers to the life-giving, nurturing and educating role of women – not only in bringing babies into the world, but also extending to other social relationships and even business activities.

The document insists that equality must not mean trying to erase real differences between men and women – differences, for example in problem-solving, emotional reaction and ways of cooperation. But it seemed to suggest that a favorite Vatican term used to describe the men-women relationship, “complementarity,” may be open to revision, asking: “Can the categories of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘complementarity’ be an interpretative key and possible way of life, or must we find other categories?”

The conference will also examine violence against women, including domestic violence, as well as selective abortion of females.

Pope Francis will meet with the conference participants on Saturday, and is expected to give a speech that will draw close attention.

Ten years after John Paul II’s death, focus in Poland shifts to Francis

I’ve been in Warsaw for the last few days, doing interviews for the launch of the Polish edition of The Vatican Diaries. As expected, there were many questions about Pope John Paul II (and about Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who is seen as the protector of the late pope’s legacy.)

The most common question was how John Paul II could be a saint, considering the sex abuse scandals that came to light only late in his pontificate. One of the chapters of my book details the painfully slow Vatican response to accusations against Legion of Christ founder Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, who was given strong support by Pope John Paul. Only in late 2004 did the Vatican reopen an investigation that eventually confirmed Maciel’s sexual abuse of seminarians and a lifetime of lies.

Clerical sex abuse remains a current topic in Poland, where some 27 priests have been convicted in recent years, in cases that have drawn much publicity and generated much criticism of the hierarchy.

But my Polish interviewers also inevitably came around to Pope Francis – his agenda, the resistance he faces and his chances for success. It was in Poland that I realized that it was 10 years ago this month that John Paul II’s illness took a serious turn for the worse, leading to his death several weeks later. For many younger Poles, he is a figure from the past, someone they never knew. Pope Francis is the name on everyone’s lips.

In Poland as elsewhere, there’s been open criticism of Pope Francis and some of his more controversial statements by conservative commentators. These are primarily Catholics who felt empowered under Pope Benedict and his Catholic identity focus, and who feel disoriented under Francis and his “who am I to judge” approach. I’m convinced they are a minority, but they are a minority with a voice.