So, are you contending that the New Testament approach to slavery is fundamentally different from the Old Testament approach to slavery? Is there anything in the New Testament that indicates that it is not OK for human beings to own other human beings as property thus demonstrating that the Old Testament approach no longer applies?
Jesus also didn’t say that slaves must honor their masters, obey them, be respectful towards them and serve them with singleness of heart. Paul wrote that and he also wrote some of the worst passages in the New Testament about women, too:
That’s one of the reasons I have a problem with Paul and don’t think that all his epistles reflect some sort of divine inspiration.
But if God disapproved of slavery, He could easily have forbidden its practice among the Israelites. They had a thousand years before the time of Jesus to change their ways.
This bull was not the start of the Church allowing slavery. The Church owned slaves. The one restriction the Church had was that Christians were not be enslaved (as evidenced in bulls like Dum Diversas and Creator Omnium).
To discard parts of the Old Testament that involve a supposedly unchanging God speaks poorly of God. It also requires going neck-deep into moral relativism, something you can barely go an hour on EWTN without being derided.
Oh, that again. Yes, I had all those “Paul really hated women” discussions in college with non-Catholics too. Again…putting the statements in their historical context and situational context of what was going on helps a lot, but you’ve demonstrated that you don’t seem to be interested in that type of thinking and just want to keep pointing to Awful Things in the Bible.
But Mike that is completely ignoring the encyclical Sicut Dudum, written in 1435 by Pope Eugene IV. As well as In 1591, Gregory XIV (r. 1590-1591) promulgated Cum Sicuti, which was addressed to the bishop of Manila in the Philippines and reiterated his predecessors’ prohibitions against enslaving native peoples.
This statement is partly correct. Yes, the protestant settlers did not attempt to assimilate the natives. The protestant settlers push them off their land and put them on reservations.
I agree. Esp when regarding the violent natives the Spanish encountered, who practice human sacrifice.
So, I take it that the Spanish Crown had jurisdiction over the Catholic Church in Spain and its territories and could dictate even to bishops and the various orders such as the Franciscans how punishments were to be carried out. It wasn’t the authorities of the Spanish Crown who ordered that these backsliding Mayan Indians be strung up and flogged with heavy rocks attached to their feet and burning wax splashed on their bodies. It was the head of the Franciscans in the Yucatan, Diego de Landa, who ordered all of this and he went on to be Bishop of the Yucatan. Here’s what De Landa wrote himself about how the Mayans reacted when he had all of their books confiscated and burned after he became Bishop:
This act of destruction carried out by De Landa is one of the greatest losses to our ability to understand Mayan civilization from before the Conquest. De Landa was much more zealous in his punishment of the Mayans who backslid than what the Spanish Crown would have liked since they were afraid that this could lead to rebellion.
In a way, they did. The Pope in 1492 was Alexander VI, the corrupt Pope who was Spanish and friends of the crown. It was not uncommon for the Spanish Crown to request bishop appointments from the Pope. And it was not uncommon for the Pope to appoint bishops who the Spanish Crown approved of.
