Pope Francis in his New Year address called on all nations to fight “modern forms of enslavement” and human trafficking, saying that millions of people today “are deprived of freedom and are forced to live in conditions akin to slavery.”
“All of us are called to be free, all are called to be sons and daughters, and each, according to his or her own responsibilities, is called to combat modern forms of enslavement,” Pope Francis said in his first Mass of 2015 at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican, RT reported. He stressed that millions of people– children, women and men of all ages – are deprived of freedom and are forced to live in conditions akin to slavery. The spiritual leader of the world’s billion-plus Catholics said he thinks and prays for those “who are made objects of trafficking for the sale of organs, for recruitment as soldiers, for begging, for illegal activities such as the production and sale of narcotics, or for disguised forms of cross-border adoption.”
The Pope also spoke of those people who were “kidnapped and held captive by militant groups, subjected to their purposes as combatants, or, above all in the case of young girls and women, to be used as slaves.”
According to the Global Slavery Index (GSI) 2014, an estimated 35.8 million men, women and children are trapped in modern slavery.
