St. Bonaventure University provides a "core" course for every student entitled, "The Catholic-Franciscan Heritage" (popularly known as "Cat-Fran"). I got to teach two classes last week, my first to undergraduates. I chose as my topic, "Consumerism, Human Trafficking and the Franciscan Imagination."
We studied the range of modern human slavery: upwards of 30 million people, tens of thousands trafficked into the US every year. There are more slaves today than during the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade before the Civil War.
Human trafficking is big business - a $38 billion dollar a year industry.
I am going to be giving a public lecture on the topic in New York City in February.
St. Francis of Assisi provides inspiration and direction to this modern problem. St. Francis refused to allow his followers even to touch coins. In a time of incredible greed and violence, he didn't want people to be equated (or reduced) to the coins they held and the money they could accumulate. St Francis believed that no coin could adequately contain the beauty, dignity or value of any brother or sister.
But, consumerism and materialism has disenchanted our world. God's creation has been reduced to matter and we have turned it into "stuff." Without God as an objective background and foreground of things, humanity becomes nothing more than "stuff" that can be easily bought and sold, like every other commodity of life.
That's one of the reasons why we must resist consumerism as the all-encompassing narrative of our time. God remains our best protection and our refuge.
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