Keynote Address by Thank you very much…and all of you who work tirelessly to keep America safe and our society strong. It is an honor to follow a day of such distinguished speakers, and to address an audience of those on the front lines of the grim war against slavery in our time. President Bush’s words this morning reflect how much has been accomplished since last fall, when he announced at the United Nations that the global traffic in human beings would be a national and international policy priority of the United States. His words also reflect a candid appreciation of how difficult it will be to turn back an evil that is so prevalent in our world, so elusive and global in scope, so difficult to fathom in the twenty-first century. I must of course recognize Attorney General Ashcroft, who earlier today discussed the new resources the Department of Justice has committed to this fight. Prosecutions have increased dramatically. Events like these are destined to increase them even more. So I applaud the Attorney General, for maintaining pressure in this important area, even as other subjects command larger and more regular headlines. Each of you in this room exemplifies the best ideals of public service, whether your mission is law enforcement, health care, or social services. You are available at all hours to serve those most in need of compassion and justice: taking the calls on the hotlines, making tours of dangerous streets looking for victims, handling requests for legal papers to proceed against traffickers. And perhaps most difficult for me to ponder, the sleepless hours spent reflecting on what you have witnessed: man’s inhumanity to man; man’s inhumanity even to children. Each of you has my respect and my admiration. I thank you for the work you do which few can, and I pray for you, too, that God will continue to give you strength and wisdom to succeed in your efforts. Yours is a rare and most difficult calling. I believe that to answer it, you must be able to see your neighbor in every person you meet. I believe all of us must find our own response to this calling to help extinguish the horrors of human trafficking. By taking stock of our responsibilities to each other, premised on the inherent dignity of every individual, we can all share in the creation of a society that is more just in every way. In my past role as a canon lawyer for the Church, I worked within a structure that ensured that every person I met enjoyed certain rights of due process. The reality of human trafficking reminds us of those who have no such rights, no access to process. And that reality is much closer to home than most Americans in 2004 can imagine. When I became Archbishop of Newark three years ago, I entered an Archdiocese that is both one of America’s smallest in geographic area, and the most densely populated. We celebrate Mass in 19 different languages every Sunday. The Holy Father probably speaks them all, but I am still working on it. It is an area of incredible ethnic variety, an ever-changing crossroads of immigrants and newcomers. We also suffer the afflictions of many congested urban areas, tested by crime, drugs, family disintegration and unemployment. The deterioration of the social fabric since the 1967 riots has yet to mend, even as new groups of first-generation Americans have added vibrant colors to the tapestry. This much I knew and anticipated. But I was unprepared for the recognition that within these same borders lay the makings of a market in human souls. My education began earlier this year when a briefing team from the federal Administration on Children and Families visited, and outlined the scope and complexity of the problem. I learned how the Archdiocese of Newark was fertile ground for trafficking operations, with its pockets of ethnic isolation and many avenues of entry from other nations. Certain kinds of businesses that flourish there, both legitimate and illegitimate, are labor-intensive trades in which modern slaves often toil: prostitution, restaurants, hotels, cleaning services, and others. Any doubts that this can, and does, happen here were dispelled two years ago in Plainfield, New Jersey, where four young Mexican girls ages 14 to 17 were kept as sex slaves. No one could dismiss this incident as being a small concern of the local vice squad: eight defendants were prosecuted for this crime, and two others eluded capture. An international criminal syndicate was at work, a nexus of depraved profiteering that did not shrink from ensnaring and marketing teenage girls to sexual predators. To understand the real nature of these crimes, it was necessary to “look beneath the surface,” as the excellent materials prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services call on us to do. This theme adds a dimension to the moral imperative that we be Good Samaritans to people who are in dire suffering. The man in the Gospels who fell among robbers lay injured in plain sight along a highway. As you recall, two clergymen passed him by and hurried on their way. They had to cross to the other side of the road so as to seem not to notice this helpless victim. The Good Samaritan stopped and took the injured man to a place of refuge. To combat trafficking, we must go further than the Samaritan. The victims of sexual slavery may sometimes be in plain sight along the side of a road, but most trafficked persons are not. Most live in fear behind doors locked by those who exploit them. If we are to find these victims and restore them to freedom and health, we must look again and again at what is before us. We must relentlessly search for what we hope in our hearts we will not find. Find it, however, we must. The economic magnitude of human trafficking is comparable, as we have heard once more today, to the illegal arms trade: it is exceeded only by the trade in illegal narcotics. This tells us that the victims are there. We must go where they are. The special cruelty of slavery defies comprehension by the modern mind. Cruelty exists in the act itself, which depersonalizes men, women and children. To make of any person a commodity, to use the sweat of their brow, the strain of their muscles, the abuse of their sexuality for the benefit of others, is the most base and basic form of exploitation. It abuses attributes that are in themselves gifts of the Creator given for the good of human beings: gifts of the ability to work, to love and to build families. Equally offensive to human dignity, these practices deprive victims of the ability to employ their gifts as God intended. Broken in body, broken in spirit, many victims take years or decades to recover what has been taken from them. Where sexual exploitation visits infection with HIV or other surpassing violence on these innocents, it can rob them of life itself. As Americans, such cruelty can shock us to the brink of denial. We are accustomed not only to enjoying our own freedoms, but to symbolizing freedom to others. I first grasped this in the early 1970s, when serving as a much younger priest in the Department of International Affairs at the National Catholic Conference. Today, the Lady in the Harbor just east of my office in the Chancery proclaims this aspect of our character. We associate this character with great acts of liberation. Through agonizing periods of civil strife that, for a time, would seem to belie our most deeply held ideals, this conviction in America’s ultimate character has sustained us as echoed by Sister Mary Ellen Dougherty's testimony on behalf of the USCCB before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Our freedoms are the product both of Providence, and of the generations of enterprise that Providence has inspired. In seeking to expand the scope of liberty in America, denial has ever given way to the determination of men and women emboldened by this history. These last two years, we in the Catholic Church have learned anew the terrible human cost of denial and evasion, but also the power of light brought at last into long-dark places. In confronting other ills in our society, we must draw strength from such light, and not let it grow dark now. Abraham Lincoln, schooled as he was in both the Word of the Scriptures and the acts of our nation’s Founders, exemplified the strength we need to confront our demons. He touched this chord of perpetual striving in our national character in his denunciation of slavery. Speaking by torchlight in Peoria, Illinois, 150 years ago, Lincoln warned his fellow Americans not just of the wrongness of slavery as a moral matter, but of its lethal contradiction of America’s unique destiny. “Near eighty years ago,” he told the crowd, “we began by declaring that all men are created equal, but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a sacred right of ‘self-government.’” He insisted that slavery was, [quote,] “fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw.” The fight was not over at Appomattox Court House, nor with the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments; nor with the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Of course, modern forms of slavery can no longer be defended by wrapping them in the cloak of popular sovereignty, state’s rights or “self-government.” But the fight continues, and necessarily so does progress. With the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000 and its reauthorization and expansion last year, Congress has recently acted twice on a thoroughly bipartisan basis to place U.S. policy actively on the side of victims, and to call other nations to account for their laws and public practice on these matters. Just last week the Florida legislature passed Senate Bill 1962, which we learned this morning was signed today by Governor Bush. We applaud him and call all states to adopt similar laws. Sound policy does not arrive by accident. After years of cooperation in Congress and between the executive and legislative branches, laws and programs are now in place that integrate the tasks of prosecution and restoration. The level of bipartisanship and cooperation across the political spectrum on the range of issues presented by human trafficking is truly impressive. The first coordinated law, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, was cosponsored by New Jersey’s own Chris Smith, a Republican; Congressmen Tom Lantos, a Democrat of San Francisco; and Hawaii Democrat Neil Abercrombie. This legislation was the handiwork of members of Congress from both parties, across literally the breadth of America. That is the only way forward on this issue. It is up to the rest of us now to act, to use the tools we have been given, to reach out to victims, to communicate to their captors that whoever they are, their days of owning human property are over, forever. I began with the assertion that all of us — people of faith, and all people of decency — must come together to answer in their own way the call that you in this room feel so acutely. The apostle James wrote in his letter to the early Christians that they must be “doers of the word, and not hearers only.” “The one who peers,” he admonished them, “into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres, and is not a hearer who forgets but a doer who acts — such a one shall be blessed in what he does.” Well, I believe that blessings like this must begin close to home. If there are two hundred trafficking victims within the boundaries of our archdiocese, we must find them. If there are two thousand, we must make ten times the effort to rescue them. No single agency or project of our various ministries can accomplish this task. I am therefore going to direct not only Catholic Health & Human Services of the Archdiocese of Newark, but every one of the 235 parishes in the Archdiocese to become acquainted with the purposes of the Campaign to Rescue and Restore Victims of Human Trafficking. We are working with the New Jersey Statewide Anti-Trafficking Initiative, which was founded last summer to link agencies across the state that are committed to win this fight. The State Attorney General’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s office, local law enforcement, non-governmental organizations, faith-based groups – indeed, a microcosm of the public-private partnership gathered here tonight – have joined forces to multiply resources and share expertise. Special thanks are due to the International Institute of New Jersey, which has translated materials into the languages that victims of trafficking and modern slavery most often speak. We must make it as easy as possible for these victims to know that aid and comfort have arrived. The Catholic Coalition to Combat Trafficking consisting of 20 national Catholic organizations also conducts public outreach and advocates on behalf of victims before our elected officials. I will also ask our pastors to communicate the goals of this campaign to every active religious and layperson in their communities. We are a four-county region of some 2.8 million people, 1.3 million of them Catholics. There should be no zones where this mission of love and redemption does not reach. That indeed was the message of His Holiness, John Paul II, when he arrived in the United States at Newark International Airport on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations nine years ago. You may remember the scene. He knelt on the tarmac and kissed the ground of this land of liberty upon his arrival, and he praised America’s founding ideals, urging us on. “Your power of example,” the Holy Father said to us, “carries with it heavy responsibilities. Use it well, America! Be an example of justice and civic virtue, freedom fulfilled in goodness, at home and abroad!” Today we should all understand the power of compassion and those who show and practice it. In addition to those I have mentioned, and so many others that I should like to, I must voice my admiration for Alex Acosta, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights; and Dr. Wade Horn, chief of the Administration for Children and Families, from whom I have learned so much about this issue. I am grateful as well to the Conference of U.S. Attorneys on Human Trafficking, who have created, in this Conference and others, valuable instruments to foster further exchanges among those determined to take action. I have learned much about the new partnerships between nonprofit organizations and agencies of government, and their ability to combine charity and justice to assist the victims and prosecute perpetrators. Let us continue to join our hands across political divisions and denominational lines, extending our hard-won heritage of “freedom fulfilled in goodness” until every shackle is undone, and every chain crumbled unto dust. Above all, let us stay firm in the knowledge that our own freedom is made more perfect in God’s light by the free company of our brothers and sisters. Let us never grow weary in pursuing the promise of America — a promise Lincoln described with unsurpassed eloquence, in his Second Inaugural Address: “To do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” Thank you.
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