The ministry of Talitha Kum International: abolish human trafficking

 

Talitha Kum International 2025 Annual Report  (Talitha Kum International)

Church

• human trafficking

Human Trafficking in modern-day: No one should be treated as a commodity

Talitha Kum International releases their 2025 Annual Report, revealing how human trafficking is growing hand-in-hand with the rise of technology: online exploitation and scams have become a 21st century means of entrapping people.

By Kielce Gussie

While “traditional” chattel slavery has been legally abolished, about 50 million people find themselves trapped in modern-day slavery.

Moreover, these practices of human trafficking and other forms of exploitation are a massive money-making scheme, generating $236 billion in illegal profits each year, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Organization of Migration (IOM).

Rather than slowing down in an ever-growing modern world, “this issue of human trafficking is increasing in a complex way,” Sr. Abby Avelino, MM, International Coordinator of Talitha Kum stressed to Vatican News ahead of World Day Against Trafficking in Persons on July 30. This year's theme is "Trapped Behind the Scam." 

Sisters all around the world partake in the mission to end human trafficking (Talitha Kum International)

Prior to the World Day, the international sisters-run network Talitha Kum released its 2025 Annual Report, outlining how they reached 1.21 million people around the world over the last year—a 29.6% increase from 2024.

Yet, even with the growing reach of Talitha Kum, the mission of ending human trafficking remains urgent as numbers are on the rise across Europe and Asia.

Pros and cons of technology

The 2025 Annual Report reveals human trafficking growing hand-in-hand with the rise of new technologies: online exploitation and scams have become a 21st-century means of ensnaring people.

“Many of the survivors that we encounter are being trapped on this issue of the complexity of the digital platforms,” Sr. Abby highlighted.

Survivors share stories of promises and recruitments online. Yet, when they arrive at the location, the job is fake, their passport is taken, and their freedom stripped

“This is the trend right now,” Sr. Abby explained. “The digital platform is being used by criminal organizations to trap young people because young people really would like to find better futures, better jobs.”

She is not the only advocate identifying the connection in online threats. The Director General of the International Organization for Migration, Amy Pope, spoke at a press briefing on July 28 about the increase in cases of online scam centers, “with victims from over 80 different countries, particularly across Asia.”

Pope explained the magnitude of human trafficking is immense. The New United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports billions of U.S. dollars in combined annual losses from scam offences. Across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, scam compounds are thought to have hundreds of thousands of trafficked workers.

Combatting the scams

One way Talitha Kum is working to fight these scams is by educating the very people who are the targets of online trafficking—young people. “We are trying to mobilize our network to educate not only young people, but anyone who can be trapped on these digital platforms,” the International Coordinator noted.

Through Talitha Kum’s Youth Ambassadors program, Sr. Abby said young people are trained and taught about human trafficking, how to identify it, and how to face it. Then, these ambassadors are sent out in their local communities and countries to help their peers do the same.

As traffickers have turned to using social media platforms, Talitha Kum in turn wants to counteract this through the same platforms. The network has created social media accounts, TV, and radio programs to educate the public about the dangers of human trafficking online.

Part of the solution

While the 2025 Annual Report dives into a number of areas regarding trafficking—from prevention and supporting survivors to access to justice, partnership and advocacy—Sr. Abby highlighted one in particular: support for the survivors.

Survivors are part of the solution. “It is not about rescuing,” she stressed. “We also need to give a platform to the survivors, for their needs, for opportunities, and for ongoing accompaniment in a really sustainable way.”

Together with this “survivor-centered approach”, Sr. Abby called for systemic change, which means addressing the root causes of the crime of human trafficking—why people fall into the trap and relocate to find a better future.

“People move because of poverty. People move because of inequality. People really move because of conflict. This is why we need to walk together in order to really build a world without human trafficking,” the International Coordinator stressed.

But the work to end this crime starts from the grassroots level, especially because, as Sr. Abby highlighted, the “global trend of traffickers is getting complex.” Therefore, prevention, advocacy, support for the survivors, and protection are essential.

World Day Against Trafficking in Persons is held on July 30 with the theme "Trapped Behind the Scam."   (Talitha Kum International)

Yet, more than that, she argued people everywhere and from all walks of life must call on local and world leaders to address the root causes perpetuating human trafficking.

Education is key

While an end to this crime is possible, it cannot be done by one person, one country, or one network alone. Education is one of the keys that will unlock the door.

“Even children, as young as possible, need to learn how the issue of human trafficking is spreading, not in the global context, not in the local context, but also in any aspect, on any level,” the International Coordinator argued.

Sr. Abby stresses that "even children, as young as possible, need to learn how the issue of human trafficking is spreading"

What is also essential to bringing an end to this global crime is recognizing that beyond the numbers, beyond the data are people, stories, and lives impacted. This is why working together is at the core of the mission of Talitha Kum.

This is at the heart of the mission of Talitha Kum: “No one is ever treated as a commodity.”

Pope Leo XIV includes an apology for slavery as part of his encyclical Magnifica humanitas

 

Pope Leo XIV issues historic apology for Vatican's role in slavery

• BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pope Leo XIV speaks to journalists aboard his flight bound for Algiers’ Houari Boumédiène International Airport on Monday, April 13, 2026, at the start of an 11-day apostolic journey to Africa. (Alberto Pizzoli/Pool Photo via AP)

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the role the Holy See played in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”

Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”

History’s first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.

The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo raised the trans-Atlantic slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling, such as the unregulated labor practices in procuring rare minerals needed for AI chips.

Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the Catholic Church’s complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”

“For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much-needed apology from the pope,” said Butler, who is Black.

Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings, beyond more generic apologies for the involvement of individual Christians.

“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”

The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.

In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.

The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.

Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514, according to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”

In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and weren’t to be enslaved.

In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, long after many countries had abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, even church institutions had slaves.

In acknowledging the Holy See’s role and the 15th-century papal bulls, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’”

Leo said that it wasn’t possible to judge the morality of the decisions with today’s standards.

“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he said.

The pope said that the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized.”

“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.

Leo said that the church must firmly condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution “if we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith.”

Kellerman, the scholar, welcomed Leo’s apology but said more needs to be done to further acknowledge and atone for how the Catholic Church legitimized and expanded slavery.

“Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admission and apology today,” he told The Associated Press. “Hopefully a future document will explain in more detail the church’s involvement with slaveholding. As a scholar I have some quibbles with the wording, but this is a truly remarkable moment.”

During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, which was the largest slave-trading center in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”

According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or a free person of color. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people; Gates wrote in The New York Times.

During a visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine at the site of an important hub of the African slave trade during Portugal’s colonial rule. While at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, Leo recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” Angolans endured for centuries, but he didn’t refer specifically to slavery.

Pope Leo XIV statement for World Day against Human Trafficking

 

File photo of Pope Leo XIV  (@Vatican Media)

Pope

• Pope Leo XIV
• message
• human trafficking

Pope Leo denounces human trafficking as a ‘crime against humanity’

Pope Leo XIV releases a message to mark the 12th World Day against Human Trafficking and pledges the Catholic Church’s commitment to confront and bring an end to this “grave crime against humanity.”

By Devin Watkins

Ahead of the 12th World Day of Prayer and Awareness against Human Trafficking, Pope Leo XIV has condemned the scourge of modern slavery, which has taken even more disturbing forms in our online societies.

In his message for the World Day, marked on Sunday, February 8, the Pope renewed the Church’s “urgent call to confront and bring an end to this grave crime against humanity.”

He focused on the Risen Christ’s greeting “Peace be with you,” saying these words offer “a path toward a renewed humanity.”

“True peace begins with the recognition and protection of the God-given dignity of every person,” he said. “Yet, in an age marked by escalating violence, many are tempted to seek peace through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.”

Human beings, he lamented, are often considered mere collateral damage in war as they are sacrificed for political or economic interests.

Pope Leo said the same disregard for human life fuels human trafficking, since armed conflict and geopolitical instability create opportunities for traffickers to exploit people on the move.

“Within this broken paradigm, women and children are the most impacted by this heinous trade,” he said.

The Pope went on to note the rise in “cyber slavery,” which sees people lured into online schemes and criminal activities like drug smuggling and fraud.

“The victim is coerced into assuming the role of perpetrator, exacerbating their spiritual wounds,” he said. “These forms of violence are not isolated incidents, but symptoms of a culture that has forgotten how to love as Christ loves.”

In the face of such pain and societal challenges, Christians must turn to prayer and awareness, said Pope Leo.

Prayer, he noted, is the “small flame” that gives us strength to resist injustice and indifference, while awareness helps us identify and overcome exploitative systems in communities and digital spaces.

“Ultimately, the violence of human trafficking can be overcome only through a renewed vision that beholds every individual as a beloved child of God,” he said.

Pope Leo XIV expressed his gratitude to the many people and networks that work to assist victims of human trafficking, some of whom are themselves survivors of the scourge.

In conclusion, the Pope entrusted the World Day of Prayer and Awareness against Human Trafficking to the intercession of St. Josephine Bakhita, whose life, he said, stands “as a powerful witness of hope in the Lord who loved her to the end.”

“Let us all join the journey toward a world where peace is not merely the absence of war, but is ‘unarmed and disarming,’ rooted in full respect for the dignity of all.

He may become the first black Saint from North America: Pierre Toussaint

Overlooked No More: Pierre Toussaint, Philanthropist and Candidate for Sainthood

He became wealthy working as a hairdresser in New York, then used his funds to free enslaved people, build churches and house orphans of color.

By Elizabeth Stone

• Published Feb. 18, 2024

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

In 1849, Mary Ann Schuyler, a wealthy New Yorker, was reminded fondly of her longtime hairdresser, Pierre Toussaint, while visiting a Roman Catholic chapel in Europe. “Send my love to him,” she wrote to her sister, Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. “Tell him I think of him very often and never go to one of the churches of his faith without remembering my own St. Pierre.”

By then, Toussaint, 68, had built a reputation as “the Vidal Sassoon of his day,” as Daniel W. Bristol Jr. wrote in “Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom” (2015): He had mastered the in-vogue hairstyles of the French — powdered hair, or false hair added on — as well as the newly-fashionable chignons and face-framing curls favored by the Americans. 

Throughout his life, he was dedicated to the church and to others — donating to charities, helping to finance the original St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and risking his life during epidemics to tend to the ill.

In 1997, nearly 150 years after his death, Pope John Paul II proclaimed Toussaint “venerable,” the first step on the road to sainthood. Some disagreed with the move, however, because they felt Toussaint, born into slavery in Haiti, did not resist his enslavement either there or in New York, and was therefore a poor candidate for sainthood.

Records vary, but Pierre Toussaint is believed to have been born in 1781 on a sugar cane plantation in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) owned by the Bérard family. His mother was Ursule, the mistress’s waiting maid. His father’s name is not known. Pierre was the name given to him by his owner’s father, Pierre Bérard.

In 1797, as an uprising against slavery became more violent, his owners fled for Manhattan, bringing along Toussaint, a teenager at the time, and several of his enslaved relatives.

Toussaint, who was literate, socially adroit and a talented fiddler, was apprenticed as a coiffeur and was permitted to keep some of his earnings; Schuyler and her sister-in-law, Eliza Hamilton — the wife of Alexander Hamilton — were among his earliest clients.

Male hairdressers were increasingly popular in France at the time, but in America, women’s hairstyling for those who could afford it was largely the province of the lady’s maid.

For Schuyler, chatting with Toussaint while he dressed her hair was always a pleasure. “I anticipate it as a daily recreation,” she told her sister, a well-known novelist of her day who would publish “The Memoir of Pierre Toussaint: Born a Slave in St. Domingo,” in 1854, the year after his death.

Both Bérards were wealthy and had brought funds to live on for a year, entrusting them to financial managers. But calamities ensued. While Toussaint’s owner, Jean Jacques Bérard, was in Haiti, he learned his plantation was lost, and he was planning to return to New York to tend to his remaining funds, unaware that they were gone. But he died in Haiti of pleurisy, an inflammation of the lungs. Soon after, Marie learned that she, too, was completely destitute.

Suddenly, young Toussaint was the only wage-earner in the household. For the next four years, he supported Marie, her new husband, her extended family and Toussaint’s enslaved relatives.

Over time, as Marie’s health began to fail, Toussaint encouraged her to entertain, knowing she was buoyed by guests. If she agreed, he would shop for treats like tropical fruits and ice cream before rushing back to style her hair. As a final touch, he added a flower, usually a japonica or a rose.

In 1807, while Marie was on her deathbed, she freed Toussaint. Now, with control over his time and money, he could shape his life.

In 1811 he bought the freedom of his sister, Rosalie, and of a woman named Juliette Gaston, whom he married. A few years later, he purchased a home on Franklin Street in Manhattan. When Rosalie died, he and his wife raised Rosalie’s daughter, Euphémie, as their own.

With his success, he became a philanthropist. He and Juliette opened their home to orphans of color, educating them and helping them get jobs. He donated funds to another Catholic orphanage, even though it did not accept children of color, and contributed funding to St. Patrick’s and other Catholic institutions. He received requests for financial help from enslaved men wanting freedom, impoverished seminarians, friends back in Haiti and strangers in trouble. He was also generous with his godmother, Aurora Bérard, who lived in Paris with little money.

He tended to the sick during various epidemics; at least once he brought an ailing priest to his home to nurse him back to health.

New York allowed slavery until 1829; before then, as a young Black man on the streets of Manhattan, he risked being abducted by bounty hunters and sold into slavery in the South. He was prohibited from using public transportation, putting him at greater risk as he traveled on foot throughout the day to his customers.

Toussaint was not sanguine about his circumstances; he mentioned how hard he had worked to master his “quick temper,” and he suppressed his talent for mimicry, recognizing that it could be “dangerous.” He probably exhibited what W.E.B. Dubois later characterized as “double consciousness,” remaining aware of how he was seen through white eyes, according to Ronald Angelo Johnson, a professor at Baylor University and an expert on racialized Haitian American diplomacy in the Age of Revolutions.

In a 2020 article, “Enslaved by History: Slavery’s Enduring Influence on the Memory of Pierre Toussaint,” Johnson argued that throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, biographers concentrated disproportionately on Toussaint’s enslavement and appeared “unable to discuss Toussaint’s life as a husband, father, businessman and philanthropist.”

What Toussaint said out loud was perhaps meant for white ears, particularly those of clients who had enslaved men and women in their households. And at least one comment suggested he was not entirely an abolitionist. Invited to lead a parade of men of color celebrating the passage of a law that would end slavery in New York, he declined, saying, “I do not owe my freedom to the state but to my mistress.” During the 1990s, such a comment led some Black Catholics to oppose Toussaint’s candidacy for sainthood, finding him to be an “Uncle Tom” and too accepting of enslavement to be a good role model.

And yet he did not adopt the usual practice of taking his owner’s surname. Instead, after Marie Bérard died, he chose Toussaint, giving himself the same name (and presumably in honor of) Toussaint Louverture, who initiated the revolution that abolished slavery and would lead to an independent Haiti in 1804:

When it mattered, Toussaint spoke up. At Juliette’s funeral in 1851, when it came time to transfer the coffin from the church to the adjoining graveyard at Old St. Patrick’s on Mulberry Street, Toussaint forthrightly asked that only the Black attendees follow the procession, though white attendees were welcome at the graveside.

Toussaint died two years later, on June 30, 1853, at his home. He is now believed to have been 72. At his funeral at Old St. Patrick’s, the attendees followed the same practice Toussaint had requested at Juliette’s funeral.

Toussaint’s story could have ended with his burial, but it did not. Fifty years later, Mary Ann Schuyler’s granddaughter Georgina established the Toussaint archives at the New York Public Library, including “The Memoir of Pierre Toussaint.’” There his papers languished until the mid-1930s, when Garland White Jr., an African American student from Montclair, N.J., told his confirmation teacher, Charles McTague, “You can’t name me one Black Catholic white people respected.” McTague, who later became a priest, took the challenge, finding a Jesuit priest, John LaFarge, who recalled that his grandmother had told him about the devout man who had been her hairdresser for many years.

Toussaint’s grave was found, and interest in him grew. It was eventually confirmed that the remains in the grave were Toussaint’s when experts compared the skull with a photograph of Toussaint once taken by Nathaniel Fish Moore, the president of Columbia College, an amateur photographer and the brother of one of Toussaint’s clients.

By 1990, Cardinal John O’Connor, who was archbishop of New York at the time, had Toussaint’s remains transferred to the crypt under the main altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, where he is the only layman and the only Black man.

As yet, there is no Black North American saint; Toussaint is one of six under consideration.