Knights of Peter Claver and Ladies Auxiliary to host webinar on modern slavery

On Saturday, March 13th at 1pm CST, the Knights of Peter Claver and Ladies Auxiliary will host a virtual town hall entitled “Human Trafficking: Invisible Crime of Modern-day Slavery”.

The event is being organized by the fraternal order’s social justice arm, and will feature speakers from around the country, spanning the spectrum of services assisting victims and those at risk.

Gary F. Miret, an attorney from New York, will be featured, as will an FBI agent from Louisiana, Stephanie Bullard, who serves on a human trafficking task force in Shreveport.

Also slated to speak is Donna Hubbard, Bishop-designate of Temple of Glory Church of God in Georgia and head of Woman at the Well Transition Center, the re-entry organization she founded in 1998.

There will also be two speakers from Virginia: Karen Harrop, a licensed counselor specializing in victim assistance, and Deacon Albert Anderson, a Knight of Peter Claver from St. Joseph’s in Alexandria (a Josephite parish).

The Clavers’ event comes just over a month after the feast day of St Josephine Bakhita, one of the few modern (canonized) Black saints, and the patron saint of human trafficking survivors. She was kidnapped by slavetraders in 1877.

The Sisters of the Good Shepherd’s National Advocacy Center also hosted its “Shine The Light” conference on human trafficking this week, co-hosted by the USCCB and various other Catholic orgs.

It is said that there are currently around 40 million enslaved persons worldwide, with the numbers only being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interested parties can register for the KPCLA webinar here.

Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger, in priesthood formation with the Josephites, and a ThM student with the Institute for Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA).