Pope Francis Laments 'Meaningless Lives' in Tying Human Trafficking to Climate Change Stephanie Kirchgaessner - The Guardian
go to original July 26, 2015

Pope Links Climate Change to Human Trafficking and Urges UN to Take Lead (wochit World)

Pope Francis said he had “great hopes” that a fundamental agreement to tackle climate change would be reached in Paris later this year and he believed the United Nations needed to play a central role in the fight against global warming.

“The UN really needs to take a very strong position on this issue, particularly the trafficking of human beings … [a problem] that has been created by climate change,” the pope said.

...“It’s not possible that it still exists, that we remain blind” to the issue of modern slavery, said Ana Laura Pérez Jaimes, who spent five years chained up and forced to work 20 hours a day in Mexico. She showed the mayors photographs of some of the 600 scars she suffered as an indentured servant, forced to iron for hours a day without food or water. She said she had to urinate in a plastic bag.

A fellow Mexican, Karla Jacinto, described how she was physically and sexually abused by her family and forced into prostitution between the ages of 12 and 17. She was forced to have sex with more than 42,000 clients before she was rescued.

...The meeting came about one month after the popular Argentinian pontiff released an encyclical – or church teaching – on the environment that called for the phasing-out of fossil fuels and for action to combat climate change and immoral consumption, which he said was putting humanity at risk.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Pope Francis Joins the Real Leaders in the Fight Against Climate Change (TakePart)

Photo: Tony Gentile/Reuters

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