The Church has taught error?

[LittleLes]

Genesis315:

We’ve demonstrated no such thing.

The word “slavery” as it is used today means chattel slavery, depriving someone of their humanity.

Yep, that’s the type of slavery that the Church taught was morally legitimate up until 1866 based on it’s erroneous interpretation of scripture (which it claims to infallibly interpret correctly).

And “chattel” slavery was to form of slavery supposedly permitted by God in Leviticus 25 (see the Catholic Bishops’ New American Bible ), the type practiced by the Hebrews, in early Rome, and in the American South prior to the Civil War.:tsktsk:

LittleLes

 

[dcdurel]

LittleLes:

Note: The Church’s teaching was that the institution of slavery is not contrary to scripture of the natural law.

Instruction of the Holy Office, June 1866 “It is not contrary to the natural and divine law for a slave to be sold, bought, exchanged, or given.”

The Holy Office is not the magisterium. It has no teaching authority. Thus your quote was not Church teaching.

But now, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches in #2414:
“The seventh commandments forbids acts or enterprises that…lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold, and exchanged like merchandisement in disregard for their personal dignity.”

“Veritatis Splendor” #80 "…the Church teaches that “there exists acts “per se” and in themselves, independently of the circumstances, are always seriously wrong by reason of their objects.” Gaudium et Specs is then cited as including slavery as such an act.

Summary: The Catholic Church’s former teaching on the divine and natural law approval of the moral licitness of slavery, which was a constant teaching until quite recently, has been changed.

Again, this is incorrect. The Holy Office is a group of theologians, who have no authority to teach for the Church, except for a time when they were known as the Pontifical Biblical Commission.
Other than this time, these theologians have absolutly no teaching authority for the Church.

Only the Pope and those bishops who are in union with the Pope have teaching authority. Scripture scholars, theologians, saints, doctors of the Church, etc, have no authority to teach for the Church.
Thus again, the Church has never taught error. And the Church will never teach error.

We have had over 2000 years of history in which the enemies of the Church have attempted to prove the Church has taught error. They have failed miserably.

 

[LittleLes]

In saying that slavery is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law the Holy Office is merely repeating a constant teaching of the Church, which is therefore “infallible” by way of the universal ordinary magisterium. Much as if it repeated one of the Ten Commandments.

You, like Genesis, are trying to side step the issue that the Church’s teaching was in error, by trying to now argue that it really wasn’t an infallible teaching. While that is a separate argument, as events have it was an infallible teaching. (Also note that the third Lateran Council endorsed the practice of slavery).

And there is this from the 17th century Franciscan moral theologian Leander writing in his definitive tome “Questions of Moral Theology:”

“It is certainly a matter of faith that this sort of slavery in which a man serves his master as his slave is altogether lawful. This is proved from Holy Scripture. It is proved from reason for it is not unreasonable that things captured in war pass into the ownership of the captors. All theologians are unanimous on this.”

The Church was in error in its constant teaching on the moral licitness of (perpetual) slavery. It changed this teaching and slave ownership became sinfull only recently.

LittleLes

 

[LittleDeb]

LittleLes,

I do not want to jump into the fray but I am really trying to understand your POV. It reads like you are trying to show The Church has taught in error because all forms of slavery are illicit. It has been defined by Genesis and dcdurel that there are terms of slavery which differ from your own.

You answered the funny one about baseball but I must have missed your statement on Prisoners of war and indentured servitude. I am confused by your references because I do not read in them the word perpetual that you included parenthetically. My understanding of indentured servitude was that it would be passed on to the child upon the death of the parent until such debt is repaid.

I look at it as the same as if my parents were to die in financial debt I would inherit their debt. I would then be a “slave” to their debt. Am I missing something in your statement? Does the debt company “own” me? In some ways yes. Do I hope they live by Scripture and treat me well? A very resounding yes!

Thank you Lord, my parents are still alive and are not in debt. I have never seen this particular subject discussed like this. I am enjoying following the trail. Please help me follow you by avoiding chasm leaps. I am not landing in the same place as you are on the other side. It seems more reasonable to follow Genesis because the steps are one in front of the other.

I hope to not offend. I am enjoying learning about an area I have not personally researched. I am of course a Catholic so I don’t believe The Church has ever taught in error, only people within it claiming to have authority have erred.

 

[LittleLes]

HI Midgetface,

The form of slavery approved by the Church and scripture is “chattel” slavery or “perpetual slavery” in which the offspring of slaves are enslaved. The Catholic Encyclopedia article (1912) on the ethical aspects of slavery gives a good explanation, but also still teaches the scriptural and natural law approval of slavery later reversed in the Catechism and by Vatican II (see also Veritatis splendor, section 80).

Chattel slavery was most recently practiced in the American South.

But now all forms of slavery are taught to be a sin against the seventh commandment and contrary to the natural law. Thus neither a prisoner nor an indentured servant may be “sold, bought, exchanged, or given.” And certainly their offspring are not automatically enslaved.

But those who cannot admit that the Church was in error in its original moral approval of slavery, its constant teaching until recently, use imaginative but fallicious arguments that the Church never really approved of slavery in the first place. But there are an overwhelming number of documents that proves that it did.

And your final paragraph contains one of those fictions. “The Church never taught, but only the people in it did” or words to that effect. While this may seem like a reasonable rebuttal, obviously the argument is flawed. Since churches don’t speak, of course only its members can. And in the case of slavery, they did.

LittleLes

 

[Axion]

An informative article on slavery and the church is here

christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/128/53.0.html

 

[Genesis315]

You have to look at the OT quote through the NT remember. Look how Jews are supposed to treat Jews in the veses around your Leviticus quote. They cannot hold their fellow Jews in chattel slavery. When Jesus came, Gentiles became accepted as well. From the NT on (the founding of the Church as a teaching authority), we see that chattel slavery is inconsistent with Church teaching.

 

[Genesis315]

LittleLes:

HI Midgetface,

Chattel slavery was most recently practiced in the American South.
LittleLes

The Magesterium never approved of chattel slavery.

But there are an overwhelming number of documents that proves that it did.

You haven’t presented them yet however.

Really? Is there any document saying that the Ten Commandments are infallible?

Yes. The one you posted about the Council of Trent and Scripture.

 

[LittleLes]

Genesis315:

You have to look at the OT quote through the NT remember. Look how Jews are supposed to treat Jews in the veses around your Leviticus quote. They cannot hold their fellow Jews in chattel slavery. When Jesus came, Gentiles became accepted as well. From the NT on (the founding of the Church as a teaching authority), we see that chattel slavery is inconsistent with Church teaching.

Hi Genesis315,

I rather expected that you would try this argument. Please reread Leviticus 25:40 et seq. Note that the chattel slaves were to be bought from neighboring tribes or aliens who resided with the Jewish people.

The seven year limit on slavery was applied by Jews only to other Jews. But not to any other people.

Please present your evidence that “chattel” slavery was inconsistent with Church teachings. I’ve already documented that it was supported by the Church as believed to be consistent with scripture and the natural law!

Council of Gangra 340: "If anyone, on the pretext of religion teaches another man’s slave to despise his master, and to withdraw from his service, and not to serve his master with good will and all respect, let him be anathema. " This is restated in the Decreum,1140.

So lets not pretend that slavery was inconsistent with Church teachings.

Shall we next review the papal documents beginning with Pope Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas (1452) in which “Apostolic Authority” is granted to perpetually enslave any “unbelievers”?

LittleLes

 

[LittleDeb]

“Slavery consists in this, that a man is obliged, for his whole life, to devote his labour and services to a master. Now as anybody may justly bind himself, for the sake of some anticipated reward, to give his entire services to a master for a year, and he would in justice be bound to fulfil this contract, why may not he bind himself in like manner for a longer period, even for his entire lifetime, an obligation which would constitute slavery? (De Justitia et Jure, disp. VI, sec. 2. no. 14.)”

newadvent.org/cathen/14039a.htm

Is this the quote to which you refer? This is what I meant when I talked about debt inherited from a parent. I am not immoral in “enslaving” myself to redeem their debt. I am only immoral in your use of the term.

Yes, chattel slavery has always been wrong. My small branch of family from Arkansas did not own slaves. They were true to Church teaching and were poor because of it. The ones whose descendants are no longer Catholic left The Church over this issue. It was still major when my Mom visited there in 1961.

I still think I am missing your point. Is this one of those “The Church didn’t write it down until this date…so it was invented in 1866” things? Jesus changed the understanding of the Mosaic Law not The Church.

 

[LittleDeb]

I will step out and listen for awhile. Papal documents are not my forte. Natural Law is my interest in this. It is one major reason I have stayed Catholic. It is the only place I have found that supports natural law on all fronts.

I will restate that my understanding is that Church teaching has always been that chattel slavery is wrong because Jesus taught that. The other forms seem to be a different interpretation of the term.

If I am incorrect I am sure someone will point it out.

 

[itsjustdave1988]

LittleLes,

You seem to be trying so very hard to prove that the Church has condemned all forms of slavery as intrinsically evil. I don’t believe you’ve presented a convincing argument, however.

Not all forms of slavery, such as just-title slavery, are intrinsically evil, and the Church has never taught to the contrary. I’ve read all the Vatican II documents and they don’t teach what you say they teach. Forced labor of prisoners is “slavery” by another name. It is just and accepted by both civil and ecclesiastical authority.

The following article has the Imprimatur of Most Reverend Fabian W. Bruskewitz, D.D., S.T.D. (1999). For us to accept your thesis, we would have to presume the good bishop rejected Vatican II. I don’t believe that thesis is very compelling.

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

 

[itsjustdave1988]

The 1866 Instruction of the Holy Office summarized the constant teaching of the Church on the moral licitness of slavery up until that time.

On the contrary, the Church tolerated just-title servitude for a time, as there was and still is nothing intrinsically evil about it. Yet, it can be seriously abused. The Popes did, however, consistently oppose racial slavery which completely lacks any moral justification.

As early as the early 1400s, Pope Eugene IV (1435) wrote to Bishop Ferdinand of Lanzarote in his Bull, Sicut Dudum:

…They have deprived the natives of their property or turned it to their own use, and have subjected some of the inhabitants of said islands to perpetual slavery, sold them to other persons and committed other various illicit and evil deeds against them… We order and command all and each of the faithful of each sex that, within the space of fifteen days of the publication of these letters in the place where they live, that they restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands…who have been made subject to slavery. These people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of any money…

Pope Eugene only condemned the practice in the Canary Island and not slavery in general.

Pope Paul III in 1537 issued a Bull against slavery, entitled Sublimis Deus, to the universal Church. He wrote:

…The exalted God loved the human race so much that He created man in such a condition that he was not only a sharer in good as are other creatures, but also that he would be able to reach and see face to face the inaccessible and invisible Supreme Good… Seeing this and envying it, 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 (Satan) has stirred up some of his allies who, desiring to satisfy their own avarice, are presuming to assert far and wide that the Indians…be reduced to our service like brute animals, under the pretext that they are lacking the Catholic faith. And they reduce them to slavery, treating them with afflictions they would scarcely use with brute animals… by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples - even though they are outside the faith - …should not be deprived of their liberty… Rather they are to be able to use and enjoy this liberty and this ownership of property freely and licitly, and are not to be reduced to slavery…

Pope Paul not only condemned the slavery of Indians but also “all other peoples.” In his phrase “unheard of before now”, he seems to see a difference between this new form of slavery (i.e. racial slavery) and the ancient forms of just-title slavery.

 

[LittleDeb]

itsjustdave1988:

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

Very cool! Great article.

 

[itsjustdave1988]

In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI issued a Bull, entitled In Supremo. Its main focus was against slave trading, but it also clearly condemned racial slavery:

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.

What people often fail to understand is that popes, in their formal and authoritative declarations, have always condemned unjust forms of slavery, without condemning all forms of slavery as unjust. This is true still today.

“Churchmen,” as RSiscoe put it, often misrepresent the teachings of the Catholic Church as promulgated formally and authoritatively by the Roman Pontiff, who is the visible source of sacerdotal unity in the Catholic Church. We are bound by the teachings of our lawful pastors, insofar as they are teaching in accord with their lawful pastors.

 

[chevalier]

Only the Pope and those bishops who are in union with the Pope have teaching authority. Scripture scholars, theologians, saints, doctors of the Church, etc, have no authority to teach for the Church.

Bishops have taught various things to their flock over centuries. Do we assume that if they teach something wrong they are out of communion with the Pope? Or that they weren’t actually teaching ex cathedra? I’m not rejecting infallibility, but this particular argument is weak because it can be made into supporting just about everything we want.

I look at it as the same as if my parents were to die in financial debt I would inherit their debt. I would then be a “slave” to their debt. Am I missing something in your statement? Does the debt company “own” me? In some ways yes. Do I hope they live by Scripture and treat me well? A very resounding yes!

You can’t be forced to return any debts above the value of the money you inherit. Your heritage can’t go below $0 without your consent.

Forced labor of prisoners is “slavery” by another name. It is just and accepted by both civil and ecclesiastical authority.

There’s a difference between becoming a slave because you have committed a crime and because your mother or father was also one. Prisoners retain personhood and human rights in Western countries except maybe in the States, where prisoners’ rights to modesty and privacy are less important than guards’ equal employment rights, so strip-searches can be performed by opposite sex officers (not like the police doesn’t do that, either). I’m not sure this is much akin to slavery on the formal side, but I’m quite sure it’s not really in accordance with the Catholic Magisterium (if I were the Pope, I would excommunicate any bishop for giving a quiet OK to that, let alone a formal fiat).

 

[LittleLes]

newadvent.org/cathen/14039a.htm

Is this the quote to which you refer? This is what I meant when I talked about debt inherited from a parent. I am not immoral in “enslaving” myself to redeem their debt. I am only immoral in your use of the term.

Yes, chattel slavery has always been wrong. My small branch of family from Arkansas did not own slaves. They were true to Church teaching and were poor because of it. The ones whose descendants are no longer Catholic left The Church over this issue. It was still major when my Mom visited there in 1961.

I still think I am missing your point. Is this one of those “The Church didn’t write it down until this date…so it was invented in 1866” things? Jesus changed the understanding of the Mosaic Law not The Church.

Hi Midgetface,

Nice try, but the 1866 Instruction of the Holy Office can’t be dismissed with the claim that the “Church didn’t write it down until this date argument…so it was invented in 1866” things.

That both scripture and the natural law supported the licitness of slavery was a constant teaching. Reread paragraph three of your cited on-line Catholic Encyclopedia under the Ethical Aspects of Slavery concerning the no “per se” condemnation of slavery, then read Veritatis Splendor, para 80’s reversal of this statement. And I have given some of the earlier documents, and can provide you with quite a few more.

There’s a short but good overview on Church teachings on slavery. I’ll not good at listing URL’s, so “search” under “Pharsea bind and loose.”

So all the 1866 Instruction of the Holy Office really was is a restatement of that teaching. But in the 1900’s this began to change.

LittleLes

 

[LittleDeb]

Hi Midsgetface,

Nice try, but the 1866 Instruction of the Holy Office can’t be dismissed with the claim that the “Church didn’t write it down until this date argument…so it was invented in 1866” things.

I wasn’t saying it was I was asking if it was. Then I saw your post near mine that referenced older documents and understood it was not. The article referenced by itsjustdave1988 is great for knowledgable history.

That both scripture and the natural law supported the licitness of slavery was a constant teaching, see the on-line Catholic Encyclopedia under the Ethical Aspects of Slavery. And I have given some of the earlier documents, and can provide you with quite a few more.

I did see it. The quote I referenced and its URL are from the Catholic Encyclopedia under Ethical Aspects of Slavery.

The important part of that is the idea of consent as another poster pointed out. If you are saying that Scripture and natural law are taught by the Church then we agree. I was trying to give examples of how we as humans (by natural law) enslave ourselves to others for different reasons. It is the abuse that is evil.

Another example: I choose to ecologically breastfeed my son. I am therefore a slave to his nutritional needs. He could get his needs elswhere but I have chosen to follow natural law that his early nourishment comes from me. If my husband chose to knock me out and force our child to feed from me I would then be my husband’s chattel.

The Church embraces the former and condemns the latter. That the Church has not from the begining been able to stop chattel slavery by no means says it has ever endorsed it. I look forward to your comments to itsjustdave1988 about that article.

 

[itsjustdave1988]

That both scripture and the natural law supported the licitness of slavery was a constant teaching.

This is still the theology of Catholicism.

According to the pope who convened Vatican II, and also the episcopacy present at Vatican II, and the teaching of the living magisterium after Vatican II, the council taught in accord with past Catholic doctrines. Vatican II was pastoral, in that it presented historical doctrines of Catholicism in a manner relevant and expedient to contemporary society, but remained in continuity with those doctrines.

The issue is comparative to “just capital punishment”’ There is such a thing as “just capital punishment” according to Catholic theology, just as certainly in today’s Catholicism as in past Catholicism. What changed is the pastoral approach, not Catholic doctrine, regarding capital punishment. The licit existence of “just slavery” too is still maintained by Catholic doctrine, though in pastoral practice it is opposed because of the risk to abuse.

Thus, both “just capital punishment” and “just slavery” can exist according to Catholic doctrine, but like just capital punishment, just-title servitude, though not intrinsically evil, can be seriously abused. For pastoral reasons, in view of the abuse that has occurred and will likely continue to occur, the Catholic Church opposes both slavery and capital punishment without declaring either to be intrinsically evil.

 

[LittleLes]

midgetface:

I will step out and listen for awhile. Papal documents are not my forte. Natural Law is my interest in this. It is one major reason I have stayed Catholic. It is the only place I have found that supports natural law on all fronts.

I will restate that my understanding is that Church teaching has always been that chattel slavery is wrong because Jesus taught that. The other forms seem to be a different interpretation of the term.

If I am incorrect I am sure someone will point it out.

Hi again Midgetface,

Clearly the Catholic Church has not taught that chattel (or perpetual slavery) was wrong until quite recently.The Catholic Encyclopedia article you URL’d tells you that.

And Jesus never addressed the issue.

LittleLes