By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
On a recent warm summer evening, a lovely young nun dressed in pink and wearing a simple white veil visited our church and told us some harrowing stories.
She said that every night in the Philippines, Catholic nuns like her change out of their pink habits, go undercover, and walk through dark city streets and alleyways rescuing women and children trapped in the cycle of human sex trafficking.
Sister Isabel from the Immaculate Mary Queen of Heaven Missionaries told us the nuns also use shelter, medical care, education, and vocational training to try to eradicate the root cause of all that trafficking—poverty.
The sisters’ charism (the Greek word used in the New Testament for “favor” or “gift”) is one of the most courageous I know. It started in 1996 when a female clothes shop owner and her six friends started looking for ways to lift women and children out of the prostitution they saw happening daily right in their own neighborhoods.
With the help and support of the local Catholic archbishop, these women left their jobs and homes in the Manila area and founded the religious order that now does this charitable work full-time.
Their mission statement is simple and clear: “We rescue children and young women, ages 8 and older, from prostitution. We provide educational assistance to these survivors and to the rural poor of the Philippines.”
It’s a big job. Prostitution is widespread in the Philippines. A decade ago, the country’s Commission on Women estimated some 800,000 persons there were sex workers. Half of them are children.
Sr. Clare Pedoche has told The National Catholic Reporter that the sisters, organized in teams of two or more, go into bars, brothels, and other places to meet with the female and underage sex workers. The sisters go “not to judge these women who work there, but to reach out to them and offer them a way out of prostitution should they want to get out.”
The nuns do not tell the women their job is bad, Sr. Clare says, but instead, “We listen a lot—and hard. We offer them a shoulder to cry on . . . we try to make them feel God’s love for all.”
One time a dancer asked Sr. Clare to stay until she had finished performing so they could talk more. It was difficult to watch, but the nun stayed because “she [the dancer] had told me she dances in the nude to earn money to feed her family and pay for her sick parents’ hospital bills.”
The need is great and almost seems endless. Sr. Clare has said it is common for a team of sisters and volunteers to rescue two women on one night only to learn that by the very next day, three more have taken their places.
Lest we think this problem exists only on foreign shores, when she visited our church in Cottonwood Heights, Sr. Isabel explained that California has one of the highest trafficking rates, mostly involving American citizens. For these reasons, Sr. Isabel’s order now operates a new rescue and rehabilitation home in Los Angeles too.
Despite these daunting challenges, worldwide the sisters in pink annually help thousands of women and children escape from sex trafficking. Few of the rescued go back to sex work afterwards. The sisters’ success rate stands at over 90%. That’s a cause worth supporting.
You can learn more here: Sisters in Pink, and you also can help the good sisters in their work here: Help the Sisters in Pink.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
