Fr. Robert Nugent, controversial co-founder of the New Ways Ministry, along with Sister Jeanne Gramick, has penned an op-ed on a different issue: human trafficking:

They call it trafficking, although it has nothing to do with cars. The correct name is human slavery.

Slavery in 2006? If you were one of the more than 50 million Americans last fall who watched Lifetime network’s powerful and disturbing film "Human Trafficking," you know what I mean.

For me, as I suspect for many Americans, it was the first real close-up look at the horrendous, but often invisible plague of the buying and selling of human persons.

Some, mostly women and children, are forced into the commercial sex trade that apparently has a ready market here in the good, old USA. Others are coerced into manual labor on farms, plantations and sweatshops at pitiable wages, and even as domestic servants in our homes.

Young boys are conscripted into forced military service as "boy soldiers" not only to fight but to sexually service the soldiers. And our own State Department suggests that 50,000 to 70,000 women and children, some as young as 5, are trafficked annually in the United States.

Many come from regions such as Southeast Asia and Latin America and, more recently, from Central and Eastern Europe.