Pope Leo knows the phenomenon of migration well, not only in the United States, where his disagreement with the solutions adopted by Donald Trump is well known, but also in Peru, where for eight years he was bishop of the diocese of Chiclayo (in the photo by Julio Reano for AP, while celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi, in the city’s stadium).
In Peru there is a particularly massive influx of migrants from Venezuela, among whom are many women forced into prostitution. And to address this problem, the then bishop Robert F. Prevost set up in the diocese a “Comisión de Movilidad Humana y Trata de Personas.”
Over the years of its activity, in the San Vicente de Paúl reception center opened on the outskirts of Chiclayo by the Commission together with the Vincentian Family and Caritas, more than 5,000 immigrants have found help and temporary hospitality.
But in addition there was an activity aimed specifically at women forced into prostitution, to tear them away from bars and brothels, to offer them job opportunities, to help them regularize their immigration status, to assist them in their illnesses, to support them in caring for their children. Prevost also held days of spiritual retreat with them, which were very well attended. He celebrated Mass, heard confessions.
To this activity of the then bishop of Chiclayo, until now very little known outside of what was his diocese, the Argentine newspaper “La Nación” dedicated a report on May 17, with the byline of María Nöllmann, who met on the dusty outskirts of Chiclayo, in her adobe house with tin roof, a mother with her two children, Silvia Teodolinda Vázquez, 52, who with “padre Rober” – as she familiarly called him – shared five years of efforts in helping prostitutes.
“The day I met ‘padre Rober’,” Silvia recounts, “he told me something beautiful. It was a work meeting. When it was over, he came up to me and, with his warm tone, said: ‘Silvia, I understand that this activity is very difficult for you, because of everything you experienced as a young woman. I am so grateful for what you are doing for these girls, and I bless you.’ I felt very emotional.”
Silvia, in fact, had also been a victim of trafficking. She had suffered the first sexual abuse from a neighbor when she was 11 years old. After that, the aggressor forced her to move to Lima, then to Piura, Trujillo, and Olmos, where she was sexually exploited for years in bars and brothels.
“They took my documents away. They forced me to call my family and say I was fine, that I was working as a cleaner in a house, but it was a lie. I couldn’t leave. They told me that if I left they would kill my mother. When my daughter was born, they started telling me that they would kill her too. I lived in fear,” she says in a low voice, to keep from being heard by her children.
At the age of 22, she met a nun from Lima, Dora Fonseca. “She asked me, ‘Are you Silvia? You’re a prostitute, right?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. She asked me where I worked, and I gave her the address. But I never thought she would come. I was very surprised that night when I saw her arrive at the bar, dressed in her habit. She said to me, ‘Daughter, we Sisters of Adoration have a house in Chiclayo for teaching various trades to prostitutes’.”
“It took me a long time to stop; I was scared. But I did it. They saved me, and I will be eternally grateful to them. They gave me clothes for my children, a job, and they helped me build a roof for my house. I will be eternally grateful to them because thanks to them I was able to move forward and become the person I am today. They were my second mothers.”
Silvia worked for more than 15 years with the Sisters of Adoration, helping prostitutes. And it was precisely through this activity that she met Prevost. It was 2017, and the then bishop of Chiclayo asked the nuns, and with them Silvia, to work together with the “Comisión de Movilidad Humana y Trata de Personas” that he had recently created in the diocese.
“We coordinated everything with him. He would arrive and we would talk with him, who at that time, for us, was the ‘padrecito,’ the little father.”
“It’s touching to see how many girls have managed to change their lives. Two of them have opened a beauty salon just around the corner, and every time I pass by there I’m happy to see them.” She says at least 30 women have been freed from sexual slavery since the commission began its efforts on their behalf.
The commission, in fact, did not stop with Prevost’s departure for Rome in 2023. “We are still working. We are setting up training workshops. We would like to give girls the freedom to choose other types of work, to finally be free,” she says. “When I then learned that ‘padre Rober’ had become pope, I wept for joy.”
We do not know if Leo XIV has seen the report in “La Nación” about his activity in the diocese of Chiclayo.
Surely he knows very well these words of Jesus: “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the harlots believed him; and even when you saw it, you did not afterward repent and believe him” (Matthew 21:31–32).
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
————
Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.