Summit of Power and Supreme Dishonor (Church and Slavery part 7/final)

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.

In 1791, Saint-Domingue slaves rose up, led by Catholic ex-slave Toussaint L’Overture. The revolt ultimately leading to the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion. The newly-freed Haitians initially did not seek national independence—they had been partly inspired by the French Revolution. They, too, wanted liberty, equality, and fraternity. In 1794, France decreed “slavery of the blacks is abolished in all the colonies; consequently, it decrees that all men living in the colonies, without distinction of color, are French citizens and enjoy all the rights guaranteed by the constitution.” (Haiti gained full independence in 1804.)

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.