A Prayer to End Human Trafficking
Oh God, we didn’t see them.
But you did --
The hundreds and thousands of
human beings Trafficked each year to join the millions who are trapped in
modern-day slavery.
Under terrible conditions,
they work in factories, plough fields, harvest crops, work quarries, fill
brothels, clean homes, and haul water.
Many are children with tiny
fingers for weaving rugs and small shoulders for bearing rifles.
Their labor is forced, their
bodies beaten, their faces hidden
from those who
don’t really want to see them.
But you see them all, God of
the poor.
You hear their cry and you
answer by
opening our eyes, and breaking
our hearts
and loosening our tongues to
insist:
No mas.
No more.
Some
Principles of Catholic Social Teaching
Human dignity
The
principle of Catholic social teaching is the correct view of the human
person. "Being in the image of God, the human individual possesses the
dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone. He is
capable of self-knowledge, of self-possession and of freely giving
himself and entering into communion with other persons. And he is called
by grace to a covenant with his Creator, to offer him a response of
faith and love that no other creature can give."
Solidarity
Solidarity is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to
the common good, not merely vague compassion or shallow distress at the
misfortunes of others. Solidarity, which flows from faith, is
fundamental to the Christian view of social and political organization.
Each person is connected to and dependent on all humanity, collectively
and individually.
Charity
In
Caritas in Veritate, the Catholic Church declared that "Charity is at
the heart of the Church". Every responsibility and every commitment
spelt out by that doctrine is derived from charity which, according to
the teaching of Jesus, is the synthesis of the entire Law (Matthew
22:36-40). It gives real substance to the personal relationship with God
and with neighbour; it is the principle not only of micro-relationships
but with friends, family members or within small groups.
The
Church has chosen the concept of "charity in truth" to avoid a
degeneration into sentimentality in which love becomes empty. In a
culture without truth, there is a fatal risk of losing love. It falls
prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is
abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite.
Truth frees charity from the constraints of an emotionalism that
deprives it of relational and social content, and of a fideism that
deprives it of human and universal breathing-space. In the truth,
charity reflects the personal yet public dimension of faith in God and
the Bible.
Subsidiarity
Pope
Pius XI said, "It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed
and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and
commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise
and/or industry."
Distributism
Distributism holds that social and economic structures should promote
wide ownership of corporations and is the basis for anti-trust laws and
economic cooperatives including credit unions. Rerum Novarum,
Quadragesimo Anno and Centesimus Annus are Catholic Social Teaching
documents which advocate economic distributism.