For years the reality of trafficking in human persons “was a kind of global family secret,” said Msgr. Pietro Parolin, the Vatican undersecretary of state. Now, thanks to greater public awareness efforts, more people know about this $12 billion industry that in 2005 put at least 12 million people into forced labor.

The effort to publicize this issue has been taken up by 30 women religious from 26 countries who at a recent conference in Rome formed the International Network of Religious Against Trafficking in Persons, a CNS story reported. Together with the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican and the International Organization for Migration, the Italian Union of Major Superiors, which represents 95,000 religious sisters working in Italy, have designed a training program to help foreign women escape forced prostitution.

Women religious have made a commitment “to take on the great moral evil of human trafficking,” Holy Names of Jesus and Mary Sister Susan Maloney told the conference, an effort she called the “great ministry of the 21st century.”