Religious network against human trafficking

(June 13, 2009) A four-day congress is starting in Rome on Monday to study how women religious can network to combat human trafficking. The International Union of Superiors General and the International Organization for Migration is organizing the June 15-18 meeting on the theme "Women Religious Networking against Human Trafficking." The meeting is the follow up of the first congress of 2007 which denounced that human trafficking was a crime that represented a grave offence against the dignity of the person, and a serious violation of human rights. The commitment to fight human trafficking came up in the 2001 plenary assembly of the superiors general union, which represents around a million members of Catholic religious congregations worldwide. Introducing the June 15-18 congress at a press conference in the Vatican on Friday, Augustinian Father Eusebio Hernández Sola of the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life said that the problem of human trafficking represents a new form of slavery of the twenty-first century, that offends not only the dignity and freedom of many women and minors, but also of youths and adult men, most of them from poor countries. "These new forms of poverty," he said, "remind us that religious life, by vocation, is called to play a prophetic role in society and the Church today."