We recently had a lecture from a bishop. He was a member of the board of the Santa Marta Group, an organisation founded by Pope Francis in 2014 to help oppose the modern slave trade.
Its aim is to influence the influencers and to ensure that bishops worldwide are in touch with law-keeping forces. It goes a long way to ensure that Church and State are of one mind.
I told the bishop that, to my great surprise, I had recently met an ex-slave. He told me my surprise was totally uncalled-for: slaves are all too numerous in this country.
In my ignorance, I had assumed that, in Britain at least, slavery belonged to that time before Wilberforce did so much to abolish this horrible trade. I was wrong. With illegal drugs and arms sales, human trafficking is one of the three largest international crimes in the world, worth $150 billion per year. At the time of writing, about 50 million slaves exist, and the number is rising – now higher than at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade.
The anti-slavery movement has nearly as long a history as the slave trade itself.
It began after the legalisation of Christianity in the Roman Empire in 313 AD. By the end of the medieval period, the enslavement of Christians had largely been abolished in Europe, and by 1800 the Church reached a consensus in favour of the abolition of slavery.
The new Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, published in 1994, specifically forbids any acts or enterprises that lead to enslavement of human beings. They are not to be bought, sold or exchanged like merchandise in a heartless disregard of personal dignity.
It is not acceptable for one human being to own another as if he or she were a consumer durable: to be relentlessly and ruthlessly used while in working condition and then abandoned, without a backward glance – fly-tipped like a broken- down fridge.
I believe in living in the present, and I find myself wishing that more of the energy used to ferret out the slavery of bygone ages were given to stopping human trafficking in our own day.
No Oldie-readers are active in the slave trade, or so I hope.
But perhaps some of them, and here I include myself, are too possessive, domineering and oppressive in the way they treat others.
If this is the case, steps need to be taken. Instead of our arrogantly ordering other people around, a polite tone of voice goes a long way towards tempering our sense of entitlement and ownership.
And so do the magic words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, whether addressed to husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, children or employees.
