In both countries, there's one Catholic for every 200 people, as opposed to roughly one for five in the United States.

The Nov. 19-26 trip will be the pontiff's fourth to Asia, following South Korea (2014), Sri Lanka and the Philippines (2015), and Bangladesh and Myanmar (2017).

Though his first priority will be to boost the small local Catholic communities, Pope Francis is bound to focus most of his 18 scheduled speeches - all in Spanish - on issues close to his heart and which heavily affect these countries.

The wide range of topics likely will include human trafficking and the exploitation of women and children in Thailand's sexual tourism industry; the death penalty; corruption; and the high number of suicides among young people.

He's also expected to call for peace and nuclear disarmament, especially during stops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and care for the environment.

Just to put some of these priorities into context:

• Sex tourism: Both girls and boys as young as ten years old are forced into prostitution in Thailand, either by local pedophiles or foreign sex tourists. Often they're forced to service five to ten clients a day, constituting what Pope Francis condemns as "modern day slavery," and a "crime against humanity." UNICEF describes child prostitution as "one of the gravest infringements of rights that children can endure."
• The death penalty: The pontiff recently changed the official compendium of Catholic teaching to reflect that capital punishment is never admissible. However, it's still allowed in Japan. The local Church has invited Iwao Hakamada, an 86-year old man who spent 48 years on death row, to meet Pope Francis. This former boxer and Catholic convert was released in 2014 when DNA analysis proved the evidence against him could have been planted.
• Suicide: According to a 2018 government report, 250 elementary and high school-age children in Japan took their own lives between 2016 and 2017 for a variety of reasons including bullying, family issues and stress. It's the top cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 39, and Japan's suicide rate is the sixth highest in the world.
• Peace: While in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world's only two cities to have experienced nuclear weapons, Francis is expected to reiterate his calls for nuclear disarmament. Though post-war Japan has a history of pacificism, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is currently attempting to revise the constitution to allow for rearmament. (The Nippon Carta Magna, article nine, states that the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right, aspiring "to an international peace based on justice and order.") Continue reading

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In not complying, the Philippines remains in Tier 2 of the United States' Global Trafficking in Persons' report, a situation that Philippines Justice Secretary Leila de Lima described as "a glass half full."

The Philippines has been in the Tier 2 group since 2001, and in 2004, 2005, 2009 and 2010 was put on the 'watch list'.

"The Tier 2 status officially recognises a country's significant efforts to adhere to benchmarks prescribed by the US State Department and [to] meet the minimum standards," De Lima said.

Despite the Tier 2 rating, the US recognised the country's progress in cracking down on human trafficking, said De Lima, who heads the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking.

Tier 1 countries are fully compliant with the minimum standards of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

In the 2012 edition of the Global Trafficking in Persons report, the US State Department says that human trafficking in the country persists, with people from the provinces being trafficked in urban areas for forced labor and exploitation in the commercial sex industry.

Filipino migrants workers topped the list of victims of "violence, threats, inhuman living conditions, non-payment of salaries, and withholding of travel and identity documents," the report says.

The US State Department report also highlighted the continued problem of tourists who come to the country for sex with children.

"Child sex tourism remained a serious problem in the Philippines, with sex tourists coming from Northeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and North America to engage in the commercial sexual exploitation of children," the report says.

"Increasingly, Filipino children are coerced to perform sex acts for Internet broadcast to paying foreign viewers."

Child sex tourism aside, the report also saw an increasing incidence of children in conflict-stricken areas being used as soldiers by rebel groups.

Source

• ucanews (Story and image)

Benedict said that admiring the beauty of other people, cultures and nature, can lead to God and be the occasion of an experience of faith.

"Tourism, together with vacations and free time, is a privileged occasion for physical and spiritual renewal; it facilitates the coming together of people from different cultural backgrounds and offers the opportunity of drawing close to nature and hence opening the way to listening and contemplation, tolerance and peace, dialogue and harmony in the midst of diversity."

However in the same letter he strongly condemned sexual exploitation and the trafficking in human organs, and warned that tourists must not trample on the rights of people, particularly the poor, minors and the handicapped.

Sex tourism, Benedict said, "is one of the most abject of these deviations that devastate morally, psychologically and physically the life of so many persons and families, and sometimes whole communities."

He likewise sounded a similar warning about people trafficking.

"The trafficking of human beings for sexual exploitation or organ harvesting as well as the exploitation of minors, abandoned into the hands of individuals without scruples and undergoing abuse and torture, sadly happen in a context of tourism."

The pontiff urged the Church and anyone involved in pastoral care for tourists to support the goodness involved in tourism, to be alert for these abuses and to oppose them.

Sources

• VIS
• AFP
• Image: 100% NZ Pure