At the Alliance to End Human Trafficking’s Sept. 28-30 conference in Chicago, three women with ties to the Washington area did their part in helping educate and inform the 100-plus participants about how they can continue in the struggle to eradicate a practice that ensnares an estimated 50 million people day in and day out.
“We are aware the impact of human trafficking on the lives of human persons, and we stand for the dignity of the human person,” said Sister Bridget Bearss of the Society of the Sacred Heart, which runs the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda. “We’ve always had a focus on labor, on labor trafficking, the impact of child labor.”
“The Gospel calls us to work toward the protection and dignity of all human persons,” said Sister Bearss, a Washington resident who is associate director for transformative justice for the Silver Spring-based Leadership Conference of Women Religious. “This issue permeates the lack of freedom and violence – particularly against women and children,” she added.
“Migration and human trafficking has been part of one of the issues concerning attention on the part of LCWR for a very long time – 20 years,” Sister Bearss said. “At LCWR we’re looking at the intersection of climate, racism and human trafficking.”
Sister Bearss’s predecessor at LCWR, Sister Ann Scholz, teamed up with Fran Esken-Royer, executive director of the Silver Spring-based National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, for a workshop called “Faithful Advocacy: Building the Beloved Community.”
Sister Scholz peppered her part of the workshop with references to Pope Francis, noting that his first pastoral visit after becoming pope was to the Italian island of Lampedusa, which for the past 20 years has become a primary European entry point for migrants, especially from Libya and Tunisia.
In his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti,” Pope Francis “invites us together as a single human family,” Sister Scholz said. “To encounter another is to experience the living God,” she added. “If we can embrace a culture of encounter, I really do believe we will meet God face to face. Our hearts will be broken, and we will be changed.”
Sister Scholz, who co-founded the Alliance 10 years ago under its original name, U.S. Catholic Sisters Against Human Trafficking, called those in attendance to act in solidarity. “Pope Francis says so beautifully in ‘Evangelium Gaudium,’ ‘An authentic faith is never comfortable or completely personal. It always involves a deep desire to change the world – to some who leave this earth better than when we found it.’”
“Inherent in any kind of advocacy work is struggle,” Esken-Royer said. “We must be prepared to be in it for the long haul. Sorry, guys.”
Esken-Royer outlined four factors needed for change: dissatisfaction with how things are now; an ennobling vision of where people are headed together; first concrete steps that can be taken toward the vision; and clear supports for follow-through. “When multiplied, these four factors combine to overcome resistance to change,” she said.
Part of the hard work is making legislative visits to talk to elected officials or their staffers. “Compromise is not a dirty word. Compromise is the essence of our democracy,” Esken-Royer said. If the officeholder seems intractable, she suggested it may be easier working with a staff member.
However, she added, “before we transform anybody, we have to transform ourselves, and that can be harder.”
