Slavery

[fix]

How do you not get it? Its so simple. Neither this nation or any other nation at the present time has ever believed that the offense was equivelant to murder either in the commission of the act, the conviction (it has never required a grand jury), nor by the penalties laid out. This is where we stand regarding secular societies. Only the Church recognizes the gravity of this matter and thus the battle must be waged on the terms that the Church can address.

Truth is truth my friend. It can’t be watered down to play to those who are immersed in sin. I see no reason it is not murder. All you argue is that certain states in the past have had lenient sentences in your opinion.

Those who resort to violence against the providers as well provoke me to violence against themselves for being so hypocritical in thier endeavors.

Who is calling for violence? Be careful when you use the word hypocrite. You may be accusing yourself, as well.

 

[itsjustdave1988]

Here’s a Catholic Answer’s *This Rock *magazine article, entitled “***Let My People Go: the Catholic Church and Slavery” ***by Mark Brumley: catholicculture.org/docs…cfm?recnum=1201

Here’s an excerpt:

"However,** there are circumstances in which a person can justly be compelled to servitude against his will.**

Prisoners of war or criminals, for example, can justly lose their circumstantial freedom and be forced into servitude, within certain limits. Moreover, **people can also “sell” their labor for a period of time (indentured servitude). **

These forms of servitude or slavery differ in kind from what we are calling chattel slavery. While prisoners of war and criminals can lose their freedom against their will, they do not become mere property of their captors, even when such imprisonment is just. They still possess basic, inalienable human rights and may not justly be subjected to certain forms of punishment—torture, for example. Similarly, indentured servants “sell” their labor, not their inalienable rights, and may not contract to provide services which are immoral. Moreover, they freely agree to exchange their labor for some benefit such as transportation, food, lodging, et cetera. Consequently, their servitude is not involuntary.

The Second Vatican Council condemned slavery (i.e., chattel slavery)Here’s a 1999 article which bears the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur of the Catholic Church, which addresses Church teaching on slavery:

Slavery and the Catholic Church
users.binary.net/polycarp/slave.html

… there are different forms of slavery. Even though repugnant to our modern sensitivity, servitude is not always unjust, such as penal servitude for convicted criminals or servitude freely chosen for personal financial reasons. These forms are called just-title servitude. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which brought an end to racial slavery in the U.S., does allow for just-title servitude to punish criminals: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Even today we can see prisoners picking up litter along interstates and highways accompanied by armed guards. Also the 1949 Geneva Conventions allow for detaining power to use the labor of war prisoners under very limiting circumstances (Panzer, p. 3). However, such circumstances are very rare today. During biblical times, a man could voluntarily sell himself into slavery in order to pay off his debts (Deut. 15:12-18). But such slaves were to be freed on the seventh year or the Jubilee year (Lev. 25:54). The Church tolerated just-title servitude for a time because it is not wrong in itself, though it can be seriously abused. The Popes did, however, consistently oppose racial slavery which completely lacks any moral justification.

 

[jmm08]

itsjustdave1988: Thanks for the links.

 

[Becky]

Cephas:

Also, in a one or two of pauls letters.(maybe philemon) he writes to a Christian who has a christian slave…whats that all about…?

Roman slavery was a lot different than the slavery of the American South.

I’ve never heard that the RCC supported modern slavery either.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannia an interesting tidbit of history is US Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney who authored the Dred Scott decision was a Roman Catholic.

 

[kfarose2585]

Dave, thank you for clarifying things for me! I now understand why I thought that the Church supported slavery/involuntary servitude, and that’s because it did! It just wasn’t in the sense that I was thinking, or apparently in the sense that the initial posters were thinking either. I feel much better now. Thank you thank you thank you.

 

[Contarini]

kfarose,

Here’s my take on this–I’m not Catholic, BTW, although I’ve hovered on the brink of converting for quite a few years. I teach Western Civ and am facing once again this semester the challenge of trying to present this sort of complex and troubling issue as fairly as possible. On the one hand, many Christians tend to bend over backwards to acknowledge our past guilt, and sometimes this means that we actually exaggerate said guilt. On the other hand, whitewashing is not a Christian virtue. So here’s the fairest summary I can come up with.

The Catholic Church has always condemned the enslaving of people on the basis of race or some other unjust reason. In the ancient world, slaves might be prisoners of war, criminals, debtors, or victims of kidnapping. Only the last kind of enslavement was condemned by Christians–the other three were accepted in the same way that you or I would accept the existence of poverty–it wasn’t seen as a good thing but as part of what it meant to live in a fallen world. Christians did own slaves throughout most of Christian history, and slave-owning (as opposed to the enslavement of the innocent) was not regarded as sinful per se. At the same time, while ancient slavery was often brutal and degrading, slaves could earn their freedom and frequently did so, and slavery was not based on race (though for obvious reasons many slaves tended to come from “barbarian” populations who had been defeated by the Romans in battle).

In the Middle Ages, the slavery of the ancient world disappeared in Western Europe–the slaves who had worked late Roman plantations had their status “upgraded,” inasmuch as they were no longer regarded as property who could be bought or sold, though they weren’t allowed to leave the estate and thus were not entirely free. This institution of serfdom itself disappeared later in the Middle Ages. There was a general consensus that it was wrong to hold fellow-Christians as slaves. Slaves properly so called were therefore almost always non-Christians from other parts of the world. These slaves, though, usually converted to Christianity and were freed within a few generations. Slavery never took a serious hold in Christian Europe.

When vast areas of the world were discovered by Europeans for the first time in the 15-16th century, this opened up much wider possibilities for slavery, since the inhabitants of these areas were not Christians and hence “fair game.” Nonetheless, the Church repeatedly declared (as Rodney Stark has shown in Christianity Today) that non-Christian populations could not be enslaved just because they were non-Christians or because they were not subject to European rulers. These declarations had a limited practical effect. There were loopholes (slavers could always claim that the enslaved people had attacked Christians or had otherwise deserved their enslavement in some way; and in Africa many if not most of the slaves were prisoners of war or had otherwise been already enslaved by other Africans, so again it could be claimed that they were somehow “justly” enslaved). And Catholic countries didn’t always pay much attention to what the Church decreed (Portugal was particularly flagrant). By this time Europe was divided religiously and the Papacy was increasingly dependent on the support of Catholic monarchs, who posed as the champions of the Faith while interpreting the Faith to their own advantage. But the Church did clearly condemn the enslavement of people based on race, or for that matter religion. And Catholic countries generally had less rigid divisions among the races and made the freeing of slaves easier than in Protestant slave-owning societies such as the southern United States.

 

[Contarini]

The record of American Catholicism, though, is pretty dismal. American Catholics almost unanimously (as far as I know) supported the institution of slavery. When Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade in no uncertain terms ("*We, by apostolic authority, warn and strongly exhort in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare bother unjustly, despoil of their possessions, or reduce to slavery Indians, Blacks or other such peoples"), *Bishop John England of Charleston argued that this was not a condemnation of the institution of slavery but simply of the slave trade, and that the Church had historically supported slavery. Modern people have too quickly accepted England’s interpretation. Still, one could wish that the Church had historically been less ambiguous, and that in the 19th century the Popes had clearly condemned England’s interpretation and had spoken out in favor of the movement to abolish slavery in the U.S. Unfortunately, by the mid-19th-century the Popes saw the general movement toward democracy as a threat to the Church, and however strongly they condemned the slave trade, American abolitionism was not a bandwagon they wanted to jump on.

So the Church’s record really is mixed on this. But mixed is very different from a consistent support for slavery. The Church has never taught that slavery is the natural condition of certain races or nations. It has always condemned the slave trade as a great evil. And, as I said, Catholicism has frequently had the effect of ameliorating the evils of slavery or even causing it to wither away altogether.

In Christ,

Edwin

 

[kfarose2585]

Edwin, thank you for that rather enlightening history of the Catholic Church’s position on slavery. I am glad to know that the Church never supported slavery based on race or nation, though I am a little troubled that it allowed for the enslavement of non-Christians and prisoners of war. I know that the former was far from an unusual practice for many centuries, so I am more inclined to understand that, but what of the latter? How did the Church justify the enslavement of non-Christians? That doesn’t seem very “Christian” to me.