A few years ago, I went to a party in a convent. It was the nearest I will ever get to a nuns and tarts party, since there were nuns there and also sex workers, and young women and girls who were keen to be sex workers.

It was an unusual combination, but a lively one. There was dancing. There was laughter. There was a vast table covered in home-made dishes, some Italian, some Nigerian, some from Eritrea. The company was excellent. The food was delicious.

It was not what I was expecting when I was asked to do some work for a Catholic charity. I am not a Catholic, but work is work and the project had sounded intriguing. The Pope, I was told by the person who asked me to do it, was keen for “the sisters” around the world to get more recognition for the work they did. Which, given how much they were currently getting, I thought probably wouldn’t be hard.

The Pope, it turned out, was commissioning an exhibition of photos of nuns worldwide, giving a flavour of the work they do. My job was to write a report about some of the work being done in Sicily so the photographer could work out what she might need to create a visual portrait of what these remarkable women were doing.

And they were remarkable. Truly remarkable. I was accompanied for the week by Sister Gabriella, a German nun based at a convent in Rome. She had been a social worker in Germany. She didn’t wear a habit or a veil. She was highly educated and highly intelligent and I loved every minute I spent in her company.

The party I went to, on the second night of my stay, was at the convent I stayed in in Catania. It’s also a community and shelter for girls and young women who come into Sicily from Libya on small boats. It’s run by Sister Rosalia, who trained as an agronomist and worked for many years with poor women in Uruguay. When she joined the convent in Catania, she started visiting women in prisons. It was there she met a woman I’ll call Ola, who’s now a lynchpin of the shelter and who inspired a lot of the work they do.

Ola came to Sicily 25 years ago. Over coffee on the terrace of the convent, she told me that she thought she was coming to Europe to work in a restaurant. When she was sold to a friend of “the madam”, she explained, she refused to give her money, but was beaten, arrested and ended up in prison. It was Sister Rosalia who persuaded the judge to let her out, on the condition that Ola stayed at the convent. For some years she lived and worked there and helped Sister Rosalia and her fellow nuns open it up as a shelter for migrant girls and young women. Now married to a Sicilian, she still pops in every day. Many of the girls treat her as a mother.

The story of those girls is, I discovered, complicated. When Ola came over, most of the ones who were trafficked as sex workers didn’t know what they were signing up for. After interviewing many of the girls and young women who had made that journey, it became clear to me that that’s no longer true. Sometimes, it’s their parents who sign them up. They talk about the big houses their friends have been able to buy through their daughters’ earnings. Sometimes, it’s because they themselves want to be rich. Some of them are from very poor backgrounds, some are not, but they all think that making that journey will make their lives better.

Boy, are they in for a shock.

In Catania, and in Palermo, where I spent the second half of my week, I met girls whose legs had been burnt by the engines on the boats they had arrived on. Some had been on boats that had capsized. Some had seen fellow passengers drown. Most had spent months in what we can only call concentration camps in Libya, where they were raped, flogged and half-starved. “The first thing we do,” Sister Rosalia told me, “is give them physical care. When they arrive, they eat like animals because they are so hungry. After months, they calm down.”

The work, she said, was challenging. The girls are often angry and aggressive. Many of them are in their early twenties and technically free to leave the convent, but they have lied about their age to get “international protection”, so they claim to be under eighteen. Many of those who aren’t lucky enough to reach an NGO-funded camp or a convent will call the number of “the madam” they have hidden in their hair as soon as they arrive. They will soon find themselves sharing a bed with other migrants and working on the streets or in a brothel.

On a patch of waste land scattered with bushes, I met some of these young women. By this point, I was staying in a hotel in Palermo, near a convent that was basically a big flat. It was in the heart of Palermo, in an area largely controlled by the Mafia, but fighting it out with its Nigerian counterpart, Black Axe. These nuns are brave. They know what they are up against and it isn’t pretty. Black Axe want to keep those sex workers right under their thumbs, but the nuns still visit them several times a week. They bring them bottles of water and biscuits and pray with them.

When they saw us arrive, the young women with tiny skirts and braided hair rushed to join us. As the nuns prayed, they yelled out Bible verses and sang choruses. I have rarely heard such passionate prayers. I have rarely seen such sad eyes. The women don’t talk about what happens when they go back to the bushes, but it’s written on their faces.

What I realised, after my week in Sicily, is that the politics of migration are even more complicated than most of us think. Very few of the young women who set off on that long journey have much idea of what they’re in for, because those who send money home don’t tell the truth. But once they’re entrenched in their new life, very few take the options that are offered to escape from it.

The politics of religion are complicated too, and the politics of who is saving who. But what really struck me about the religious women I met was their humility and their integrity. “I discovered that we all have masks,” one of them told me. “We sell and buy relationships. We ask them to become free, and I can see how difficult it is for me to become free.” Another, who works largely with trafficked Nigerian women in a small town about an hour away from Palermo, said: “I felt I was very similar to the girls. God allowed me, through the experience of being exploited, to understand more of what it was be exploited in a different way.”

I thought of these women when I watched footage of the Pope’s funeral last week. The thing that struck me most was the plain wooden coffin. I have picked, or helped pick, coffins for both my siblings and both my parents and I can tell you that even plain wooden coffins don’t come cheap. But for a Pope used to pomp and the unimaginable wealth of the Vatican, a wooden coffin is a very clear symbol of what he stood for and believed.

This, after all, is the man who picked as his Papal name the name of a rich man who renounced his wealth. It’s the man who arranged for a group of 40 homeless people, convicts and migrants to bid a final farewell to him at the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, the one who went to wash the feet of prisoners four days before he died. (He was, by this point, too frail, but he wanted to.) It’s the man who, in his last days, gave €200,000 from his personal account to a pasta factory that operates at a juvenile detention centre in Rome.

I am no fan of the Catholic Church. I’m no fan of any church, or of any institution. All are run by humans, and flawed. But as the President of the United States marks 100 days of corruption, cronyism and fine-tuning of a regime designed to swindle the poor to make the super-rich richer, I know which side I pick.

Pope Francis was a polite man, but perhaps his finest act was when he essentially told JD Vance to fuck off. If Vance is a Christian, I’m the Pope. I have, at least, read the New Testament.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio had lived in Italy long enough to spot a mobster when he met him. He gave him and his regime short shrift, and so should we.

What did you think of the events surrounding the Pope’s funeral? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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