A priest named Father Flum said about this on slavery:
"
Thanks for the question. These types of inquiries direct me to study things that I may not otherwise look into. This question has been in the back of my mind for some time.
Despite our initial sense that neither Jesus nor St. Paul explicitly condemned slavery, I think you will agree with the evidence that they did condemn it in their own way.
First, recall that the sin of Adam was an abuse of freedom that led him into the slavery of sin. That slavery was promptly described by God in the form of curses. These curses they brought on themselves - they were the natural consequences of their actions. Due to the disorder that they introduced into their own lives, Adam and Eve became adversaries of sorts. Among the curses, we hear that Eve will have an urge for Adam and he will “lord it over her”. No longer mutually respectful, the struggle between them threatens to subordinate woman to man in a way that offends her dignity. This subordination is not the natural subordination that God intended between Adam (the “head”) and his wife, but rather a subordination that reduced Eve to the level of property.
Slavery is the treatment of one person as less valuable or of lower natural dignity than another, usually for personal profit. So, we see that slavery was being described by God as he announced the curses that they would suffer due to their sins. They would each seek to get out of the other what they wanted instead of working along the lines of the complimentarity that God intended when he made them male and female.
The identification of sin with slavery occurs early in scripture with Noah (see Gen 9:25).
Also, note that the great prefiguration of man’s redemption in the Old Testament is the flight from Egypt through the Red Sea. The Jews were being freed from their slavery in Egypt. Certainly what they suffered at the hands of the Egyptians was terrible and scripture describes it as such. Here we can see explicit condemnation of the treatment of men and women in slavery. Since this was a prefiguration of the redemption to be wrought by Christ, we can conclude that Christ’s coming as man was precisely to free man from the slavery of sin. The purpose of his coming was to abolish slavery.
Spiritual slavery can refer to the domination that man suffers at the hands of Satan due to man’s original submission to the treachery of the serpent. Original sin binds man’s free will, he is unable to do the good. St. Paul points this out and rejoices in the freedom that is afforded to the sons of men who aided by grace are freed from the yoke of Satan and can take up the yoke of Christ.
So then, there is another form of spiritual slavery! We can willingly become slaves of Jesus Christ and of his holy Mother. Indeed, many of the saints have written pacts where they have given themselves to Christ or our Lady as slaves (i.e. St Louis de Montfort)!
To come to conclusion, it is clear from the way scripture treats slavery that it is not natural or noble and Jesus came to free us from it. What began in spiritual slavery and resulted later in physical bondage was meant to be abolished by Christ (see Isaiah 61:1; Luke 4:19). But we still struggle with both."
Hope this helps!
