In other countries of the Western Hemisphere, slavery continued.
The New World wasn’t so new anymore; it was becoming settled in its traditions
and institutions. And that included generational, race-based, chattel slavery. French Jesuits used plantations run by slaves
to fund their schools and missions in the Caribbean. Child slaves were
auctioned off for a Catholic charity in Brazil. A Benedictine order in Brazil
owned more than 4,000 slaves. European economies relied on the resources and
free labor of New World plantations. The colony of plantations called Saint-Domingue
was the most profitable French colony in the world, producing more wealth than
the 13 American colonies. It was this wealth that cause leaders in the New
World, including clergy, to ignore the Church’s growing condemnation of
slavery.
In 1686, the Holy Office of the Inquisition addressed the
morality of enslaving innocent Africans and sending them to the New World. It
rejected the practice of enslaving Africans as well as trading those already
enslaved. Slaveholders were directed to emancipate and compensate Africans
unjustly enslaved. This was mostly ignored.
In 1741, Pope Benedict XIV issued Immensa Pastorum
Principis against the enslavement of native peoples in the Americas. It
includes apostolic briefs directed to the King of Portugal and the bishops in
Brazil. It excommunicated anyone who enslaved a native Brazilian. Yet it did
not address African slaves. The papal bull was mostly ignored in Brazil.
Napoleon reinstituted slavery in France, though it was again
abolished in 1848. Despite such setbacks, abolition was gaining support in
France along with other European countries. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 pushed
for a suppression of the slave trade. Like the southern U.S. states, the
biggest opposition came from places like Spain and Portugal whose colonial wealth
depended on that trade and free labor.
In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI issued a strong condemnation of
slavery in In Supremo Apostolatus, where he directed “We warn and adjure
earnestly in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the
future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce to servitude,
or lend aid and favor to those who give themselves up to these practices, or
exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not men but
rather animals, having been brought into servitude, in no matter what way, are,
without any distinction, in contempt of the rights of justice and humanity,
bought, sold, and devoted sometimes to the hardest labor.”
It acknowledged the history of slavery and how the
trans-Atlantic slave trade developed under Catholic countries during
colonization: “We say with profound sorrow - there were to be found
afterwards among the Faithful men who, shamefully blinded by the desire of
sordid gain, in lonely and distant countries, did not hesitate to reduce to
slavery Indians, negroes and other wretched peoples, or else, by instituting or
developing the trade in those who had been made slaves by others, to favor
their unworthy practice.” I bet you can see where this is going; it was mostly
ignored. And when it couldn’t be ignored, it was dismissed.
Catholic bishops in the Southern U.S. focused on the word
"unjustly". They argued that the Pope did not condemn slavery if the
enslaved individuals had been captured justly and that this prohibition did not
apply to slavery in the U.S. They made arguments that
as long as slaves were well cared for and baptized into the faith, then slavery
was morally licit. They also argued that “nativity,”
that is, being born into slavery, is a “just” cause of slavery, as being born
into slavery was not being seized and forced into it.
Bishop John England of Charleston in particular defended American
slavery, arguing that Pope Gregory XVI was only referring to slaves from Africa
imported by the Spanish and Portuguese, not slaves of African descent
domestically traded in the United States.
Northern bishops mostly tried to stay out of the slavery issue to
avoid angering either side. They said they did not want to wade into politics
and wanted both sides to find a peaceful solution. In doing so, they minimized
the seriousness of the immorality of slavery and the Church’s obligation to
stand up for the poor. They also made the argument that In Supremo
Apostolatus did not apply to American slavery, thus instructing their
congregations to ignore it. In some cases, it was only read or
published in Latin, so the average parishioner did not even know what the pope
had said.
There were priests who spoke out more vocally for abolition.
Father Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette, the first native Louisianan ordained a
priest, gave several sermons in New Orleans in 1850s condemning slavery.
However, this caused so much animosity among the congregation that Father
Rouquette left New Orleans to mission to the Choctaw.
But as the Civil War broke out in America, it became clearer
that the Church opposed the slavery present in the United States, and that the
U.S. bishops were just looking for excuses to maintain the status quo. They
feared losing power and donors more than they believed in standing up for the
enslaved. They wanted to avoid violence through civil war or slave rebellion,
which is a fair concern, but they used that fear to find justifications for
chattel slavery. Despite Catholic priests serving as chaplains in the
Confederate army and Jefferson Davis naming an ambassador to the Papal States,
the Vatican never recognized the Confederacy.
Foreign bishops called out the Americans and those who did
not speak out against slavery. Irish leaders organized a petition with 60,000 signatures
of Irish-American support of abolition. Bishop Felix Dupanloup, the bishop of
Orleans in France, admonished those who viewed the American Civil War as a
solely political or economic conflict. He pointed out that there were “still four million slaves in the United
States...eighteen centuries after the Cross.”
Some American leaders found their voice too. In an
1863 Catholic Telegraph editorial Archbishop John Baptist
Purcell of Cincinnati wrote, “When the slave power predominates, religion
is nominal. There is no life in it. It is the hard-working laboring man who
builds the church, the school house, the orphan asylum, not the slaveholder, as
a general rule. Religion flourishes in a slave state only in proportion to its
intimacy with a free state, or as it is adjacent to it.”
The institution of chattel slavery crumbled in the late
nineteenth century. Brazil was the last Catholic country to abolish slavery,
in 1888. By then, it was politically safer for leaders to speak out definitively
against slavery. But it shouldn’t have been a political choice; the moral
choice was always the same. Some made the right call and fought against an
unjust system, some felt too trapped by the system to speak out, and some never
saw the injustice and made excuses.
Today, the catechism states, “The seventh commandment forbids acts or enterprises that
for any reason - selfish or ideological, commercial, or totalitarian - lead to
the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and
exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity. It is a
sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them
by violence to their productive value or to a source of profit.” (CCC 2414).
The Vatican II document “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” says, “Whatever is opposed to life itself… whatever violates the integrity of the human person…whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society… they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.”
I don’t know if
this series has done any good. It’s awful seeing Christians doing the wrong
thing and justifying it. It’s disheartening to see leaders of the Church give
in to greed and pride; wealth and ambition is a pithy price for your soul, much
less the thousands of souls lost by poor shepherds. Yet in researching this, I
saw the glimmers of light, of Christ’s promise that all are one in Him and the
faithful Christians who stood up for the dignity and freedom of their
neighbors. Even though slavery is now technically outlawed in every country,
the number of slaves today is estimated to be between 12 million and
29.8 million, through debt bondage, forced labor, and human trafficking.
And so we have to continue to be voices of light.
