World Radio Day: Sr Eugenia's struggle against modern slavery
(Vatican Radio) Hello, I’m Philippa Hitchen and for this World Radio Day I want to
introduce you to someone who’s been a constant source of inspiration for me in my
work at Vatican Radio and for many other people around the world, united in the fight
against human trafficking….
Listen:
“Even though
we come from different backgrounds and different realities, we all have the same aim…to
save the dignity of these young women, to protect them and help them to regain their
life.” ‘I first met Italian Consolata Sister Eugenia Bonetti over a decade and
half ago, as the Church was preparing to mark a Jubilee year for the turn of the new
millennium. Short of stature and looking like so many other nuns in her grey habit,
veil and shoes, she was already a force to be reckoned with, an intrepid and indomitable
spokeswoman for the victims of trafficking and prostitution. In particular she saw
the potential for sisters like herself to offer a unique ministry of protection, healing
and prevention – not just here in Italy where the sex slaves end up, but also in countries
of origin where they’re first approached by traffickers promising jobs and prosperity
overseas. While most Church leaders were still unwilling to speak out, Eugenia was
already galvanizing sisters in different congregations to meet girls on the streets,
to understand the issues they faced and to open their religious houses for those seeking
to escape.
“Now we had many congregations who wanted to open the ‘Holy Doors’
of their convents – and they did it. We had several communities started during the
Jubilee where all over Italy we could receive these women, welcoming them, helping
them to heal the deep wounds they carry within themselves after their ordeal of being
bought and sold like commodities, so now we opened these communities and we started
working together.”
Eugenia told me her own dramatic story of how she first
got caught up in this work. After spending 24 years as a missionary in Africa, she’d
returned to Italy and was shocked to see how many African women were waiting for
clients on the roadside in her native city of Turin. One evening as she was leaving
the Caritas Centre where she worked, one of these girls turned up asking for help.
Eugenia told her to come back when the office opened the next day, but the girl followed
her to Mass and sat sobbing quietly in a pew at the back of the Church. It was a moment
of conversion that profoundly challenged all Eugenia’s ideas about her attitudes,
her religious ministry and her mission. In short, she told me, the girl whom she calls
Maria, became her catechist and teacher, helping her understand the complex routes
by which so many women end up trafficked from countries around the world, to be bought,
sold, beaten and raped, even dying or disappearing from the streets of our so-called
‘civilised’ nations.
“We really have to speak about this but instead what we
see, even in the media, is only women’s bodies. But women should rebel, should feel
indignant, we can no longer tolerate this but we really have to change mentalities,
to work with schools and educate young people, helping them to understand the meaning
of respect, the meaning of relationships and the dignity of every person”
I’ve
spoken many times to Sr Eugenia, as she’s developed the network of women religious,
written books, set up the ‘Slaves No More’ organisation and taken her powerful personal
witness to other anti-trafficking groups across the globe. I even watched her speaking
once at a women’s demonstration against sexism in the Italian government and was struck
by the respect she received from a strongly feminist crowd that doesn’t often have
much time for the Church.
Last autumn she met Pope Francis and gave him photographs
and personal letters from women who’ve been rescued from the traffickers but are now
being held in a detention facility here in Rome. She and her sisters also presented
the pope with a small blue and white rug that detainees had made by working strips
of paper bed sheet together with a plastic fork. I’ve no doubt she touched him as
deeply as she’s moved me with the urgency of her message to save lives and stamp out
this modern form of slavery.