Mary, Mother of Sorrows

Mary, Mother of Sorrows.  We are reflecting on the third sorrow, the loss of the child Jesus in the Temple.   On the cross, Jesus said to Mary: “Woman, behold your Son” (Jn 19: 26-27).  From that moment onward, Mary became each person’s mother.  Imagine the most wonderful, caring, compassionate mother you can imagine. That is the kind of mother Mary is to each one of us. Let’s put Mary in today’s world.  Every single day, Mary loses a son or a daughter to human trafficking.  According to UN-Gift, Global Initiatives to Fighting Human Trafficking, a United Nations agency, 1.2 million children are trafficked every year. Many of those children are trafficked for sexual exploitation and others into forced labor or into becoming child soldiers.  Those trafficked into the sex slave are sold to pay off family debts or forcibly recruited on the streets to work in brothels, where they may be required to have sex with 30 men each day. Some prostituted children are just 5 years of age.  The estimated global annual profits made from the exploitation of all trafficked forced labor are US $31.6 billion.  Forty-nine percent of those profits occur in industrialized economies.    42% of those recruiting victims are men, 42% are women and 6% are both men and women. In  54% of cases the recruiter was a stranger to the victim, 46% of cases the recruiter was known to the victim.

Mary, I believe, weeps over the loss of those children, the injustices heaped upon them, the sin of the traffickers, the social sin of our countries, the muteness on the part of government, church, societal leaders and, perhaps, our own indifference to this plague that is destroying the moral economy of our world.

In the Magnificat, Mary prophesizes:  “[God] has used the power of his arm, he has routed the arrogant of heart. He has pulled down princes from their thrones and raised high the lowly. He has filled the starving with good things, sent the rich away empty. He has come to the help of Israel his servant, mindful of his faithful love—according to the promise he made to our ancestors –of his mercy to Abraham and to his descendants forever” (Lk 1: 51-55).

May this prophesy become a reality in our day!