The struggle for freedom

“Akwaaba”: this symbolic word, which in Ghana means “welcome”, but also “you’ve gone and you’ve come back”, marked the opening of the seminar on “I have seen the affliction of my people” (Ex 3:7): Slavery and the new slaveries”, promoted by the CCEE (Council of the European Bishops’ Conferences) and SICAM (Symposium of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar) and now being held at Cape Coast (Ghana) from 13 to 18 November. The meeting is being attended by over thirty bishops from Europe and Africa and various representatives of humanitarian organizations. It is also intended to celebrate the second centenary of the abolition of slavery: to this end a solemn commemoration will be held on Sunday 18 November. The inaugural ceremony, rich and colourful, in the style of Africa, was attended by the traditional king, the chief of Cape Coast, who wore his traditional dress draped over one shoulder, and a massive gold chain round his neck, as well as various local authorities. At the end of the meeting a proposal for action will be discussed. Drawn up by SECAM, it will be presented to the summit between politicians of the European Union and of the African Union due to be held in Lisbon in December.A STEP IN THE PROCESS. The seminar, as recalled by Monsignor ALDO GIORDANO, general secretary of the CCEE, continues a process already begun in 2004 with the Symposium between African and European bishops held in Rome (which will continue in 2008 with a meeting in Liverpool and a further symposium, probably in 2010). Its aim is to commemorate past forms of slavery “to learn the errors of the past and find new ways to combat the new slaveries of our time”. The auxiliary bishop of Cape Coast Monsignor MATTHIAS NKETSIAH recalled that the blame for the slavery of Africans must also be shared by Africans themselves, for they were “involved in the slave trade, and sold the slaves that others purchased”: “So we must say a ‘mea culpa’ and reproach also ourselves. We must learn from this lesson and use it to bear fruit in countering the modern forms of slavery that especially involve women and children”. According to Cardinal THEODORE SARR , Archbishop of Dakar, this meeting “is the realization of a dream, that of apostolic collaboration between European and African bishops”. THE CHURCH MUST ACT NOW. “As Europeans we ask forgiveness for our responsibilities in the immeasurable tragedy of African slavery. But it is not enough to seek the culprits of the past. The Church must dedicate herself in our time to the task of liberating our contemporaries from the modern forms of slavery and not lay herself open to the charge in a hundred years’ time: ‘You failed to act’. In this situation Christians are called once again to be witnesses and protagonists of liberation”, declared Cardinal JOSIP BOZANIC , Archbishop of Zagreb and Vice-President of the CCEE, in tracing the history of slavery in the Greek and Roman world, in ancient Israel and at the dawn of Christianity itself. FROM HISTORY TO COMMITMENT. In Greece, for example, slavery was “accepted and justified by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle” because “the Greeks considered themselves superior by nature to barbarians”. But the peoples most prone to the “slave mentality” included not least the Romans, who enslaved prisoners of war, with numbers that ranged from the 20,000 of the First Punic War to a million and a half men deported from Gaul by Julius Caesar. “On the island of Delos, the largest slave market of the Roman world – recalled Cardinal Bozanic – some 10,000 slaves were sold each day and slaves amounted to 30% of the population, rising to as many as 70% in some periods”. The Romans employed slaves in the copper, lead, silver, iron and gold mines, or for domestic work in the cities, with draconian punishments for anyone who tried to escape or for stealing. In ancient Israel, on the other hand, not only “foreign slaves” existed (prisoners of war or purchased on the slave market) but also Israelite slaves who had to be freed after six years. Yet the Old Testament is replete with a message of liberation, especially the book of Leviticus, with its institution of the jubilee year “that permitted each person to return to his original possessions and freedom”. The first Christians had initially accepted slavery as a “de facto situation”, even if “the early Church never maintained that the condition of the slave could descend from the natural order of things”. But it is in contemporary Europe, insisted Bozanic, “with new and dramatic forms of slavery that violate the dignity of the human person”, that “Christians are called once again to be witnesses and protagonists of liberation”. In the following debate Cardinal THEODORE SARR , Archbishop of Dakar in Senegal, agreed that “the challenge is accepting the historical aspect that the Church failed to tackle, paying a great deal of attention to all those modern forms of slavery that we still fail to recognize”.A GOD-LESS SOCIETY? “The opposition we have to put up with in Europe today, both as Christians and Catholics, recalls the persecutions against the Church in its early days”, said the Most Rev. TOM BURNS , bishop ordinary of the armed forces of Great Britain. Bishop Burns identifies “a new form of slavery”, that of a society that “can do without the Church” and “would like to deprive people of the freedom to follow God, and their conscience, and to live according to the values of the Gospel”. “Our secularised society – he emphasized – wishes to do everything without God: especially in schools, in hospitals, in prisons, in the armed forces, wherever the Church and the State come into contact with each other on a daily basis”. In spite of that, he added, “we remain steadfast in our values and principles, in our dedication of time to prayer and in the pastoral and charitable acts that speak of God’s presence in this secularised world”. OUTCRY FROM MOROCCO. The new forms of slavery include the Moroccan women who are deceived by false contracts of work and forced to prostitute themselves in the countries of the Gulf; the children who in Tangiers hide themselves below trucks or in containers to try to emigrate; the countless sub-Saharan Africans who die in anonymity during their long marches through the desert or their voyages in makeshift boats. Bishop VINCENT LANDEL of Rabat (Morocco) is all too familiar with these new forms of slavery. Of French nationality, and at the head of a small community of 40,000 Christians in a preponderantly Muslim country, he told SIR Europe that the prostitution of Moroccan women in the countries of the Gulf “is rapidly expanding; it is becoming the ne plus ultra . In those countries the demand is not for a prostitute, but for a Moroccan woman, whatever the price. How many young women have been deceived by false contracts of this type!”. “All these migrants have become commodities, objects of trade – says the bishop of Rabat -. The European countries pay for them to be sent home; they are treated as commodities by traffickers and abandoned at sea whenever any difficulty arises, leaving the boats to drift with the waves; and we Europeans are only willing to accept the manpower and brains we need. But what happens to the others?”. In the view of the bishop of Rabat, there also exists a migration from North to South that constitutes a “kind of slavery”: “enslavement to money, to the benefits provided by the outsourcing of businesses, to tax exemption. Many people for instance come to live in Morocco just in order to pay less tax”. For all these reasons, he says, “an international solution needs to be found, dictated by such organizations as the UNO, UNESCO, UNICEF and the World Health Organization”. “Each person has the right to go and live and work wherever he wishes – says Bishop Landel – but first and foremost he has the right to live a dignified life in his own country”. We in the Church, he concludes, “must continue our pastoral mission of outcry”.WHAT HAS CHANGED THE FAMILY . In Europe “the social pact from which the family drew its strength has been placed in doubt, due to the prevalence of some aspects of the economy and consequent political choices”, says Bishop GIOVANNI GIUDICI of Pavia. Aspects and policies such as “productivity and the new organization of work – explains Msgr. Giudici, who is also member of the Italian Bishops’ Commission for the meeting with the Churches – involve rigid and restrictive hours, daily dispersal of members of the family, reduced size of homes, and the movement of individuals and populations in search of work”. In this situation “the family’s need for stability, for continuity in the education of children, for economic conditions to support large families and for the provision of proper educational services are not considered important”. In this situation, he concludes, Christians “who sometimes are no less prone to error than everyone else, are called to a process of strengthening their own faith, their own Christian convictions”, as testified, for example, by the many groups of Christian families that join together to mutually help each other.