Abortion and slavery - the voice of the Catholic Church

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Dear CAF,

Today, the Catholic Church is extremely pro-life and is a public institution which openly speaks out against abortion to defend the rights of unborn children. The Catholic Church is one of the strongest voices speaking out against abortion today.

My question is - Did the Catholic Church speak out against black slavery in the United States when slavery was still a legal institution? Back when slavery was “okay” did the Catholic Church speak out against slavery as powerfully and clearly as it speaks out against abortion today?

In my history classes in school, I never hear about the Catholic Church’s opposition to black slavery in the united states. Did the Catholic Church actively and passionately speak out against black slavery?
 
The Catholic Church was okay with slavery (to my knowledge), as long as the slaves were treated fairly with adequate amounts of food and water (which never really happened if I remember correctly). the CC has always been against unfair treatment to any human being though.
 
papalencyclicals.net/Paul03/p3subli.htm
papalencyclicals.net/Greg16/g16sup.htm

Churches postion seems to vary in the last two thousand odd years, from seeming fairly ambivalent in the early church, where there was no distinction from slave or freemen in terms of being christian.
Moving through the medieval period onwards, slavery seems to have been tolerated in someway or other, as part of the crime/punishment code. A person could be made a slave rather than go to prison. Feudalism could be interpreted as a type of slavery.
Indentured labour among immigrants to America was not uncommon either.
Where a ‘slave trade’ may have been condemed ,individual catholics, governments of catholic countries, even religious orders seemed to ignore or carried on the practice.
Also, the Catholic Church is too general a term. While the pope may say one thing, others, as indicated may act differently. Irish Catholics in Ireland would have supported abolition, under the likes of Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Emancipation movement, whereas Irish immigrants in America competing with freed slaves for employment seem to be generally opposed. Same could be said of Protestantism also, some for and some notably against. But too big to make generalised statements.
All very general, and in no way a thorough examination.
 
Swiss_Guy said:
The Catholic Church was okay with slavery (to my knowledge), as long as the slaves were treated fairly with adequate amounts of food and water (which never really happened if I remember correctly). the CC has always been against unfair treatment to any human being though.
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Actually, chattel slavery is, and has always been, condemned by the Church. The Church however is not an institution devoted to economics, or to civics, or even to history. The Church can and does condemn economic CONCEPTS, or civics CONCEPTS, or historical CONCEPTS, etc. which contain moral wrongs.

When you start off with say one or two societies of hunter-gatherer and agriculture, who decide to ‘trade’ with each other, the two societies can easily decide on what commodities from each society would be ‘equivalents’. . .say, 2 bushels of corn equals one butchered mammoth or some such. If there were a poor crop season, but a ‘bumper crop’ for hunters, it would be morally wrong to stick to the 2 bushels for one. For that poor season, the societies would agree on a lesser amount of ‘crops’ in exchange, in order that both societies be ‘fed’ enough to engage in their trades in the next year. Also, if it were a heavy crop year but a bad ‘hunting year’, it would be morally wrong to stick to the 2 bushels for one mammoth, and the societiies would agree to a greater number of ‘crops’ in exchange.

But that’s easy peasy compared to today’s global economy with a huge number of variables. . .many societies, not all of them interested in fairness but more in making a ‘profit’.

Whereas charging ‘interest’ would have been wrong in the simple and smaller barter based economies, in the type of environment we have today, it would not be wrong at all. There is a lot more INVOLVED in the care of money, funds, etc. It is very complex.

Same deal with slavery. Jewish slavery was not ‘life long’ and slaves had rights.

As time went by, other cultures came along who had different ideas of slavery. It was considered morally ok to take ‘chattel slaves’, for example, to REPLACE the young men or women who had been killed in wars or skirmishes, and often these people could rise to freedom. But as time went by, and the economies began to grow, the village based economy was replaced by fiefdoms, and some of the lords grew greedy. Instead of allowing their workers to be able to gain freedom, they instituted harsh penalties and high ‘remittance’ costs.

And finally came the early industrial age. . .and the need for workers. In order to gain a higher profit by not having to PAY the workers, and with the opening up of markets (the New World) and the establishment of getting ‘free’, or slave workers (Africa, where Africans had been selling their own people among themselves for generations anyway), came the huge influx of chattel slavery. . .which the Popes and the Church SPOKE OUT AGAINST very early on.
 
Swiss_Guy said:
The Catholic Church was okay with slavery (to my knowledge), as long as the slaves were treated fairly with adequate amounts of food and water
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Not quite true.

The term ‘slavery’ also encompasses what we now call indentured servitude and prison labor.

The Church has not opposed the owning of one’s labor ( assigning prisoners to performing menial tasks, or indenturing oneself to another for a period of time, or in payment of a debt).

This is distict from the concept of chattle slavery, where a person’s status is degrated to that of merely property, and not that of a person created in the likeness and image of God.
 
An Other question how come as a i only found out about the practice of female genital mutilation as an adult?.where were all these missionaries for centuries .i never once heard them speak out against it we were always encouraged to donate to the foreign missions yet as a child i never heard the Churcht ake a stance on such a horrifying practice
 
NguyenKimPhat said:
Dear CAF,

Today, the Catholic Church is extremely pro-life and is a public institution which openly speaks out against abortion to defend the rights of unborn children. The Catholic Church is one of the strongest voices speaking out against abortion today.

My question is - Did the Catholic Church speak out against black slavery in the United States when slavery was still a legal institution? Back when slavery was “okay” did the Catholic Church speak out against slavery as powerfully and clearly as it speaks out against abortion today?

In my history classes in school, I never hear about the Catholic Church’s opposition to black slavery in the united states. Did the Catholic Church actively and passionately speak out against black slavery?
Click to expand...
If the question is whether the Church formally opposed chattel slavery during the 18th and 19th centuries, the answer is probably that it did (as others point out above). If the question is whether the Church as an institution really did much of anything to combat slavery in the US, I am pretty sure the answer is no. Some bishops did speak out against slavery, but it does not seem to have been an organized or particularly energetic effort. In fact, at least some American bishops owned slaves when slavery was legal and the Jesuits in the US owned slaves until the early 19th Century.
 
NguyenKimPhat said:
Dear CAF,
Today, the Catholic Church is extremely pro-life and is a public institution which openly speaks out against abortion to defend the rights of unborn children. The Catholic Church is one of the strongest voices speaking out against abortion today.
My question is - Did the Catholic Church speak out against black slavery in the United States when slavery was still a legal institution? Back when slavery was “okay” did the Catholic Church speak out against slavery as powerfully and clearly as it speaks out against abortion today?
In my history classes in school, I never hear about the Catholic Church’s opposition to black slavery in the united states. Did the Catholic Church actively and passionately speak out against black slavery?
Click to expand...
The Catholic Church never had separate Churches (buildings) for blacks.
Everyone was always welcome.

The Church has always been against the murder of innocents - this is from its beginning.
“Thou Shall NOT Kill” which is part of the natural moral law as well.

The two issues are not the same.

If your real question is - have individual Catholics ever committed sins - the answer is yes.
No one but Jesus and His Mother Mary have been without sin.

The US Supreme Court (1857) upheld slavery until after the Civil War. This decision was overturned by the 14th Amendment (1868).
 
Tantum Ergo wrote: “Jewish slavery was not ‘life long’ and slaves had rights.”

That was true of the Israelite slaves, but not of foreigners: "As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are round about you. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you…and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you, to inherit as a possession forever…" Lev. 25:44-46 RSV-CE. Emphasis mine.

Nor does the Bible necessarily endorse the implication that since what the owner owns is not the slave but the slave’s labor, that mitigates the harshness of slavery: “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies, he shall be punished. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be punished; for the slave is his money.” Ex. 20:20,21.

So a slave owner could beat his slave to the point of death with impunity, according to the Holy Spirit.

The church’s record on slavery, as in most things, is uneven and varies from age to age, which makes me suspicious whenever I read that “the Church has always taught” something. It ain’t necessarily so. For example, the decree “Dum Diversas” of Pope Nicholas V (15th century) authorized the kings of Spain and Portugal “by these present documents, and with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers…and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” Pope Calixtus III confirmed this in 1456 and Sixtus IV in 1481. Alexander VI extended it to America in 1493 and Leo X renewed it in 1514.Paul III reversed it in 1537, but when slaves sought sanctuary on Church property, the same pope declared that anyone of either sex, clerical or non-clerical, “may freely and lawfully buy and sell publicly any slaves whatsoever of either sex…and publicly hold them as slaves and make use of their work, and compel them to do the work assigned to them…slaves who flee to the Capitol and appeal for their liberty shall in no wise be freed from the bondage of their servitude, but…shall be returned in slavery to their owners and if it seems proper…punished as runaways.”
Pius V erversed this in 1566. So whom did God endorse? As late as 1866, the Holy Office could declare that “slavery itself…is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law…for the sort of ownership which a slave owner has over a slave is understood as nothing other than the perpetual right of disposing of the work of a slave for one’s own benefit…”
Understood by whom? Simon Legree?
The above, and more, can be found in Fiedler and Rabben, Rome Has Spoken, Crossroad, 1998, 81-86.
 
ANNE_2 said:
The Catholic Church never had separate Churches (buildings) for blacks.
Everyone was always welcome.

The Church has always been against the murder of innocents - this is from its beginning.
“Thou Shall NOT Kill” which is part of the natural moral law as well.

The two issues are not the same.

If your real question is - have individual Catholics ever committed sins - the answer is yes.
No one but Jesus and His Mother Mary have been without sin.

The US Supreme Court (1857) upheld slavery until after the Civil War. This decision was overturned by the 14th Amendment (1868).
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That is not quite true. While some Catholic parishes did fight against Jim Crow, most southern parishes did not. Many, if not most, southern Catholic Churchs were segregated during the Jim Crow era.
 
Swiss_Guy said:
The Catholic Church was okay with slavery (to my knowledge), as long as the slaves were treated fairly with adequate amounts of food and water (which never really happened if I remember correctly). the CC has always been against unfair treatment to any human being though.
Click to expand...
Well, I guess I should’ve wrote my previous post clearer. I know the Church has never approved of chattel slavery. I meant something like the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Isn’t that was slavery was like back 2000 years ago?? :confused: Either way, I’m not too knowledgable about slavery. It’s not my area of expertise if you know what I mean. :cool:
 
The Catholic Church was NOT okay with slavery.

Pope Eugene IV (1431 to 1447), issued a papal bull, Sicut dudum which threatened to excommunicate anyone who didn’t free slaves within the Canary Islands within 15 days after receiving the bull: “To restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands…These people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of any money.” Pope Pius II and Pope Sixtus IV also issued papal bulls condemning slavery in the Canary Islands, which did continue due to the lack of secular power exercised by the Popes.

Many saints condemned slavery - St. Patrick, St. Bathilde, St. Anskar, St. Wulfstan, St. Anselm. St Thomas Aquinas described slavery as a sin and in opposition to Natural Law, as all rational creatures are entitled to justice, “thus removing any possible justification for slavery based on race or religion,” and declared “one man is not by nature ordained to another as an end.” His position was upheld by a series of popes. Pope Paul III pronounced slavery a sin in 1537, and clearly stated it was satanic in origin:

**[Satan,] the enemy of the human race, who always opposes all good men so that the race may perish, has thought up a way, unheard of before now, by which he might impede the saving word of God from being preached to the nations. He has stirred up some of his allies who, desiring to satisfy their own avarice, are presuming to assert far and wide that the Indians of the West and the South who have come to our notice in these times be reduced to our service like brute animals, under the pretext that they are lacking in the Catholic faith. And they reduce them to slavery, treating them with afflictions they would scarcely use with brute animals. Therefore, We…noting that the Indians themselves indeed are true men…by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples—event hough they are outside the faith…should not be deprived of their liberty or their other possessions…and are not to be reduced to slavery, and that whatever happens to the contrary is to be considered null and void." **

His second bull excommunicated anyone who practiced slavery.

In 1639, Pope Urban issued a bull reaffirming Pope Paul III’s order that those who enslave others are excommunicated.

Even the Office of the Holy Congregation (i.e,. The Inquisition) condemned slavery in 1686, using the question and answer format with which those of us who grew up with the Baltimore Catechism are very familiar:

**It is asked:

Whether it is permitted to capture by force and deceit Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one?

Answer: no.

Whether it is permitted to buy, sell or make contracts in their respect Blacks or other natives who have harmed no one and been made captives by force of deceit?

Answer: no.

Whether the possessors of Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one and been captured by force or deceit, are not held to set them free?

Answer: yes.**

**Whether the captors, buyers and possessors of Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one and who have been captured by force or deceit are not held to make compensation to them?

Answer: yes.**
 
The Popes had little power at that time in the Spanish and Portugese colonies, and the Jesuits who tried to read the papal bulls were often met with violence. The Protestant Dutch and English slavers in the New World cared even less about papal decreees, and the largely anti-Catholic Protestant sects of early America would have laughed at an edict by the Pope.

Here’s a very even-handed article about the subject, by an Evangelical author who gives the Church its due:

christianitytoday.com/ct/…0.html?start=1

The Stono Rebellion in South Carolina was probably the largest slave rebellion in America, and was led by Roman Catholic men who were abducted iby slavers n the Congo. The Congo was Roman Catholic, having voluntarily converted in 1491, and had independent diplomatic relations with the Vatican; by the time of the rebellion, in 1739 being Catholic was as essential part of the Congolese identity as it is for the majority of Polish or Filipino people now. Captured by Muslims and sold and taken to the New World, they could not understand why the Protestant slave-owners who professed to be Christians would hold them as slaves.

The Congolese were literate and had some experience with the firearms of the time, with some having possibly served in African militias, and were able to kill 20 of the slaveowners’ militia that came to arrest them. The rebellion started on a day that was holy to them, September 9 (the feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s nativity), and they began marching with a banner that read “Liberty!” as they chanted the word in unison. Gathering (or pressganging) other slaves, they seized an armory and burned some farms before finally losing the battle with the militia (44 slaves killed, 20 slaveowners). The rebel leaders were beheaded and their heads placed on stakes on the road as a warning to other slaves. They also stopped importing slaves from the Angolan-Congo region and focused on raising domestically-born slaves. The rebellion may have inspired similar, smaller rebellions throughout the region, which frightened plantation owners. They also took some slight actions to reduce the risk of rebellions, including (rarely enforced) penalties for excessively cruel slaveowners, and the teaching of “Christian principles” (!) to the enslaved.

If you visit South Carolina, you can visit the site of the rebellion, which is a National Historic Landmark (and should probably be visited by any good Catholic) off of U.S. 17 near Rantowles.
 
St. Augustine himself led the battle against slavery and provided one of the earliest descriptions of the slave trade ans the Church’s opposition. In Letter 10 of the Divjak letters (discovered in 1975) , Augustine described the actions he and his parishioners took to free those taken by Gallatian slave traders, including using legal remedies against the slavers in Roman court, buying back those who had been abducted by slavers, and storming the slave ships and freeing the prisoners by direct action. He includes an interview he undertook of a young girl who had been captured by slavers in the letter.

***“But who resists these traders who are found everywhere, who traffic, not in animals but in human beings, not in barbarians but in Romans from the provinces? Who resists when these people from everywhere and from every side, carried off by violence and ensnared by deception, are led away into the hands of those who bid for them? Who will resist in the name of Roman freedom–I shall not say, the common freedom, but their very own?”

“No one can state satisfactorily how many fall into this same nefarious business because of the incredible blindness and greed and some kind of infection by this disease. Who would believe, for instance, that there is a woman among us here in Hippo who, as a matter of course, lures women from Gidda under the pretext of buying wood, and then confines, beats and sells them? . . . . A young man, scarcely twenty, an intelligent fellow, who kept the accounts for our monastery, was led astray and sold; only with the greatest difficulty was the church able to procure his freedom. . . .

Even if I wished to list all the crimes–just the ones we have had contact with–it would not be possible to do so. . . . There was not lacking a faithful Christian who, knowing our custom in missions of mercy of this kind, made this known to the church. Immediately, partially from the ship in which they had already been loaded, partially from the spot where they had been hidden prior to boarding, about 120 were freed by our people, though I myself was absent. Scarcely five or six were found to have been sold by their parents; of all the others, hardly a person could keep himself from tears on hearing all the various ways by which they were brought to the Galatians by trickery and kidnapping.”***
From: Augustine, Letters, Vol. 6 (1*-29*), Fathers of the Church, Vol. 81, trans. Robert B. Eno. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Hbk, 1989. ISBN: 0813200814, pp. 79-80.
 
Tantum_ergo said:
Same deal with slavery. Jewish slavery was not ‘life long’ and slaves had rights.
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I’m not an expert on Jewish slavery, or really slavery in general, but it is worth noting that in American slavery slaves did have rights. In Roman slavery slaves had no rights. The slave’s very life was owned by the master. And under this form of slavery Paul in his letter to Philemon sends back the slave Onesimus.
Brendan said:
The term ‘slavery’ also encompasses what we now call indentured servitude and prison labor.

The Church has not opposed the owning of one’s labor ( assigning prisoners to performing menial tasks, or indenturing oneself to another for a period of time, or in payment of a debt).

This is distict from the concept of chattle slavery, where a person’s status is degrated to that of merely property, and not that of a person created in the likeness and image of God.
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The difficulty for me with most condemnations of slavery is in considering two institutions that still exists in contemporary society and are still supported by the church. The first is parenthood. The parent controls the child like a master does a slave. The parent can compel the child to do its will. In fact in modern society the parent can do so until a more advanced age than in earlier times. The parent can compel the child to work. The parent can punish the child for disobedience, including (though this is diminishing) using corporal punishment. The parent can also relinquish his ownership of the child.

The other institution is the military. All states reserve the right to compel people to military service through the draft. Even if in the US there is no active draft the government reserves the right to conscript service. Regardless of how you enter the military once in your life is owned like that of a slaves. You can be compelled to work and especially to do particularly dangerous and deadly work. Refusing to work leads to punishment. Running away is punished and a still viable punishment is execution.
SGWessells said:
The church’s record on slavery, as in most things, is uneven and varies from age to age, which makes me suspicious whenever I read that “the Church has always taught” something. It ain’t necessarily so.
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I agree. It seems to me very difficult to say something like ‘the church has always taught it was wrong’. That seems to me reading into the past something that doesn’t seem to be there.
 
ANNE_2 said:
The Catholic Church never had separate Churches (buildings) for blacks.
Everyone was always welcome.
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I believe this is false. In the south, there were “black” Catholic churches and “white” Catholic churches. The fictional story, “The Black Sister” (hope that’s accurate) is a fascinating and poignant story of one local group of religious sisters who tried to integrate the churches in one tiny step by assigning a black sister to a white Catholic church. The story is about the community uproar this caused.

I did a very cursory googling of this historical period and it appears to be based on fact - there was segregation in Catholic parishes in the South.
 
sojo said:
I did a very cursory googling of this historical period and it appears to be based on fact - there was segregation in Catholic parishes in the South.
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Segregation was not and is not limited to the South. Even today Blacks and Whites have their own communities which includes churches. I do think there is far more integration than there was in the past.
 
TMC said:
That is not quite true. While some Catholic parishes did fight against Jim Crow, most southern parishes did not. Many, if not most, southern Catholic Churchs were segregated during the Jim Crow era.
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Please provide a link to your documentation.
Thank you.
 
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