Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Vatican Launches Website To Educate, Fight Human Trafficking
Vatican Launches Website To Educate, Fight Human Trafficking
Mar 17, 2026 8:21 AM

The Pontifical Science Academies has created a website to both educate and fight human trafficking. (Pontifical Academies are academic honor societies that work under the direction of the Holy See and the bishop of Rome, the Pope.)

The new website, www.endslavery.va, is one e of Pope Francis’ ecumenical Global Freedom Network held last year. This meeting included a joint declaration against trafficking, signed by Pope Francis and leaders of different munities. The website, #EndSlavery, will include Catholic and Anglican resources, according to Vatican News. The homepage features this statement from Pope Francis:

I urgently appeal to all men and women of good will, and all those near or far, including the highest levels of civil institutions, who witness the scourge of contemporary slavery, not to e plices to this evil, not to turn away from the sufferings of our brothers and sisters, our fellow human beings, who are deprived of their freedom and dignity. Instead, may we have the courage to touch the suffering flesh of Christ, revealed in the faces of those countless persons whom he calls “the least of these my brethren” (Mt 25:40, 45).

Visit #EndSlavery here.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
We must kill religion to save it
There are so many things wrong with this news item from Canada, I hardly know where to begin. But I’ll make perhaps the most obvious point of contradiction. This guy is “worried that the separation between church and state is under threat,” so he wants to initiate state control over religion, especially “given the inertia of the Catholic Church.” I’m not at all familiar with Canadian law. Is there something in Canada similar to the American Establishment Clause? ...
Textual interpretation
A week ago Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about the principles of constitutional interpretation, especially as represented by Justice Antonin Scalia. Fish takes issue especially with the notion that the text can have meaning “as it exists apart from anyone’s intention.” Fish essentially denies that texts are things that can have meanings in themselves, and it amounts to a philosophical denial of realism. Part of Fish’s problem is...
The school of fish
The recent blogpost by my colleague Jordan Ballor discusses an op-ed written by law professor Stanley Fish. I am more familiar with Stanley Fish from his days as a literary theorist, and perhaps a quick review of a younger Fish will contribute to the conversation. Fish is known for, among other things, an idea of literary interpretation he called munities’ that suggests meaning is not found in the author, nor in the reader, but in munity in which the text...
Great debate
Foreign Policy hosts this exchange on environmental issues and economics. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, gets the first word and Bjørn Lomborg, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, gets the last word. ...
Animal cruelty?
I’m not quite sure what to make of this local story: “Four people are charged for their alleged involvement in killing two bald eagles.” The details of the alleged crimes are as follows: “Prosecutors say two teenagers shot the eagles in the Muskegon State Game Area with a .22 caliber rifle in April 2004 and then chopped them up with a hatchet.” Since the bald eagle, one of the nation’s revered symbols, is an endangered animal, it is protected by...
CAFTA/Culture of Life: enemies?
John Paul II gave us all a tremendous gift by endorsing the terms Culture of Life and Culture of Death. But as with all great gifts, we must guard these terms carefully so as not to wear them out with misuse, robbing them of their relevance. Unfortunately, this is precisely what is happening in the current debate over CAFTA. A group called Catholics for Faithful Citizenship (PDF) claims the following: “Clearly, supporting CAFTA is inconsistent with upholding a culture of...
The hermeneutical spiral
Mr. Phelps takes issue with my characterization of Stanley Fish’s position as amounting “to a philosophical denial of realism.” Let me first digress a bit and place ment within the larger context of my post. My identification of a position that “words and texts have no meaning in themselves” is really just an aside within the larger and more important question about what measure of authority authorial intent has in the interpretation of documents, specifically public documents like the Constitution....
Labor (dis)union
The New York Times reports this morning that “leaders of four of the country’s largest labor unions announced on Sunday that they would boycott this week’s A.F.L.-C.I.O. convention, and officials from two of those unions, the service employees and the Teamsters, said the action was a prelude to their full withdrawal from the federation on Monday.” The withdrawal is the culmination of a period of dissatisfaction with the direction of big labor in the US. The leaders of the dissident...
CAFTA vs. ‘Distributive Justice’
The Interfaith Working Group on Trade and Investment, a Washington-based amalgam of left-liberal religious activists, has asked the U.S. Congress to reject ratification of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Here’s a representative statement: “Religious leaders boldly stood with impoverished people and called today for sustainable development in Central America and respect for the integrity of Creation.” Some of our best friends are impoverished? In this group’s statements, there’s scarcely an intelligible economic thought to be found or, for that...
Labor unions and free association
The Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have broken away from the plaining that the federation has focused too much on political activism in the face of declining union membership and influence. Dr. Charles Baird was a featured guest on yesterday’s edition of Kresta in the Afternoon on Ave Maria Radio, discussing Catholic perspectives on unionism and whether the modern American labor union movement patible with church teachings. Dr. Baird is Chair of the Department of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved