CompSciGuy #1
When I did actual research, I found that in fact while there were individual Catholics who did indeed oppose slavery all the way throughout history, the actual Holy See was very wishy washy on the subject, and it was only with great reluctance that the Church gradually began to accept teachings that were somewhat in line with the modern view of slavery, all the while making sure to make moral provisions for those who still wanted to own slaves, saying for example that it’s OK to own slaves as long as you treat them well, and even going so far as to excommunicate abolitionists. Only when abolitionism was common belief did the Holy See actually come out and condemn slavery altogether. I guess my point on this matter is that it is not impressive to hear a Catholic to say that the Holy See has the teaching authority of the Holy Spirit when really it seems to change its teachings all the time and generally go with the flow of whatever happens to be popular at the time and whoever happens to have the most power.
False.
Sir Arnold Lunn in his debate with Professor G G Coulton also attests to this fact:
“Christ had not condemned slavery, and St Paul had said, ‘Slaves obey your masters,’ and it was therefore inevitable that only experience could convince Christians that slavery was wholly incompatible with Christianity.”
Is The Catholic Church Anti-Social, Burns Oates, 1946, p 187].
In Ephesians 6:9 St Paul says:“Masters, do the same to them, and forbear threatening, knowing that He who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no, partiality with Him.” This equality before God encouraged the early Church to convert slaves – Pope Callistus (d. 236) had been a slave. With the demise of the Roman empire, the embrace of those in slavery continued and only ordination to the priesthood was denied.
“Priests urged owners to free their slaves, and by the seventh century there was considerable evidence of unions of free men and female slaves. In 649 Clovis II, king of the Franks, married his British slave Clotilda. After his death, Clotilda campaigned to halt the slave trade and to redeem those in slavery. On her death she was declared a saint by the Church.
“By the ninth century Charlemagne opposed slavery and the pope and many influential clerics strove for the freedom of slaves. During the eleventh century both St Wulfstan and St Anselm campaigned to remove the last vestiges of slavery from most of Christendom.” As the facts reveal slavery has always been condemned by the Popes, and with St Paul, the Church revolutionised the status of the slave from the first: (re Onesimus) “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother, especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.” (Philemon 1:16).
How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West
RODNEY STARK
As the non-Catholic Rodney Stark attests from the beginning that St Paul explained: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor fee, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Through all prior recorded history, slavery was universal —
Christianity began in a world where as much as half the population was in bondage. But by the seventh century, Christianity had become the only major world religion to formulate specific theological opposition to slavery, and, by no later than the 11th century, the church had expelled the dreadful institution from Europe. [My emphasis].
While the other world religions emphasized mystery and intuition, Christianity alone embraced reason and logic as the primary guides to religious truth. Christian faith in reason was influenced by Greek philosophy. But the more important fact is that Greek philosophy had little impact on Greek religions. Those remained typical mystery cults, in which ambiguity and logical contradictions were taken as hallmarks of sacred origins. Similar assumptions concerning the fundamental inexplicability of the gods and the intellectual superiority of introspection dominated all of the other major world religions.
