Saint Patrick and freedom fighters of the anti-slavery movement

 

© Jacob Popcak

By Fr. Shay Cullen, Founder since 1974

There have been celebrations held around the world this past week to mark the feast day of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. People displayed the Irish flag, wore green clothes, and pinned on them sprigs of shamrock, an Irish plant associated with Ireland’s conversion from paganism to Christianity. For some, it is a religious festival; for others, a secular tradition. In Chicago, which has a large Irish immigrant population, city officials turned the river green using dye. In Ireland’s capital Dublin, there were parades and parties joined in by thousands of people, yet few of them knew what they were celebrating or why. It should be a celebration of the bravery of a young man named Patrick, who was 16 when human traffickers abducted him in Wales in the year 410. They took him across the Irish Sea to Ireland to be enslaved. He was truly a victim of human trafficking — a common practice then that even persists today. Patrick then learned to speak Gaelic, the Irish language, and after some years as a slave herding sheep, he found the courage to escape and walked across Ireland to find a ship and worked his passage back to his home in Wales. He later became a missionary, went back to Ireland, and persuaded the rulers there to embrace the values of Jesus of Nazareth. Over time, these leaders were converted and freed their slaves. In the Philippines, there was a famous female freedom fighter named Gabriela Silang. She was the first woman who led a rebellion against Spanish forces in 1763 to free her people from oppression and slavery. After the assassination of her husband Diego Silang, she took command of his forces and fought to liberate the Ilocos region, until her capture and execution later that year. She is known as the “Joan of Arc of Ilocandia.” Jose Rizal was a highly educated and renowned ophthalmologist. He was also a novelist who exposed the oppression of his people by the Spaniards and inspired Filipinos to oppose colonial rule nonviolently through his writings. He exposed the injustices committed by the Spanish regime that imposed what can be called de facto slavery. Thanks in part to Rizal’s works, his fellow Filipinos rose up to oppose the Spaniards. However, American forces landed in the country after defeating the Spanish fleet on Manila Bay, and pretended to be supporters of the Filipino revolutionaries and made a treacherous deal with the Spaniards. They attacked the Filipino freedom fighters and waged a bloody war against them, committing many atrocities. The United States eventually conquered the Philippines in 1901. After granting independence to the Philippines in July 1946, America made it a neocolony, which it still is today. Consider: there are nine US military bases inside Philippine ones today, with the approval of the Philippine government, which is run by an oligarchy. American multinational firms, with Filipino tycoons, control the archipelago economically. There are more than 800 member-companies in the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines. Slavery: A way of life Slavery was a way of life in the US starting in 1661, when it was officially recognized by law in Virginia. The beginning of wealth generation in the US was built on slavery. But by 1804, all northern US states had passed legislation abolishing it. The southern states claimed it was their right to own people as personal property and put them to work without pay. More enlightened North American people who believed in Christian values believed that owning another human being was immoral. In December 1860, 11 southern states eventually broke away from the US to form the Confederate States of America. That sparked the American Civil War. Then-president Abraham Lincoln campaigned nonstop for Congress to pass the 13th amendment to the US Constitution to abolish slavery. The amendment was passed in January 1865, and he signed it. During the years of slavery, brave black men and women escaped slave-owning farms in the southern states and fled to northern ones to relative safety. One of them was the remarkable and courageous Harriet Tubman. She was born into slavery in 1822, escaped in Dorchester County, Maryland, and fled to Philadelphia. She was 27. She made secret return trips to the South and became a famous “rescuer of slaves.” She was supported in her rescues by the so-called Underground Railroad, a movement to rescue slaves and help them win freedom. In about 13 secret trips to slave-owning plantations at great personal risk, she rescued and led 70 enslaved people to freedom. She also provided specific instructions that helped and inspired another 50 to 60 more to escape on their own. During the Civil War, she became a leader of a black contingent of Union soldiers and helped lead the Combahee River Raid, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people. After a lifetime of saving slaves, Tubman died at about 93. Her legacy lives on and her life is dramatized in the Oscar-nominated 2019 film “Harriet.” In the Philippines, the Senate voted against the renewal of the treaty allowing US bases in the country on Sept. 16, 1991. The final US military ship, the USS Belleau Wood, departed Subic Bay on Nov. 24, 1992. The campaign to free the sex slaves in Olongapo City and close the US bases and convert these into economic freeports started in 1983 by the anti-bases campaign led by the Preda Foundation. After the bases closed in 1992, an estimated 1,000 women and children were freed from sex slavery in bars and brothels, where many of them were held in debt bondage. Today, 171,653 employees work with dignity at the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. However, human trafficking persists as a common crime in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world. There is a kind of economic slavery among the 17 million Filipinos who eat only one meal a day. Many are forced to be sex slaves in bars and brothels catering to local and foreign tourists. Slavery is very much still with us today. The United Nations Children’s Fund reports on child slavery estimate that 12 percent of children in South Asia — over 41 million — are involved in unpaid child labor. Modern-slavery figures are provided by the International Labor Organization and Walk Free Foundation. In Asia and the Pacific, approximately 29.3 million people live in slavery as of 2021. This region alone accounts for nearly 60 percent of the effectively enslaved people in the world.