Slavery and the Church

In response to Fr. Araujo’s question, I suppose I had the following things in mind:

First, these observations by John McGreevy:

Only a handful of American Catholic bishops supported immediate emancipation, along with some liberal Catholics in Brownson’s circle. . . . Only one Jesuit, Francis Weninger, publicly defended emancipation, perhaps because he had personally witnessed the horror of a New Orleans slave auction.

From the beginning of the [Civil War], Vatican officials maintained a studied neutrality, but the Jesuits at Civilta Cattolica traced the origins of the conflict to the mania for liberty and disrespect for authority endemic in liberal political culture . . . . The increasingly drastic measures by the Lincoln administration further alienated Roman observers. Pius IX, according to one 1864 British observer, ‘could not conceal from me that all his sympathies were with the Southern confederacy,’ and an American diplomat claimed that the Jesuits opposed negotiations with Garibaldi even ‘as they are and were, with few exceptions [opposed] to the cause of the Union.’ . . . In perhaps the surest sign of the Vatican’s disfavor, a writer for L’Osservagtore Romano compared the Republicans, or ‘radicali,’ to French revolutionaries and characterized Republicans as ‘inflamed by puritan and abolitionist fanaticism and motivated by a poisonous hatred.’

I also had in mind the following 1866 statement by the Holy Office:

Slavery itself . . . is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law. . . . For the sort of ownership which a slave owner has over a slave is understood as nothing other than the perpetual right of disposing of the work of a slave for one’s own benefit – services which it is right for one human being to provide for another . . . .

It is true that the Church did condemn certain means of enslavement, but, to quote Diana Hayes, “[b]efore the end of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, with few exceptions, the Roman Catholic Church did support and maintain with all its power, secular and spiritual, the enslavement not only of non-Catholics but of its own Catholic faithful.”