Popes and slavery.

Staten Isl., N.Y., Alba house, 1996, 137 pages, $7.95 (US)

REVIEWED BY FR. LEONARD KENNEDY, C.S.B.

The Toronto Star of June 13 of this year featured the existence of slavery in the Sudan: "Tens of thousands of tribespeople are being sold into bondage in the African nation." And it showed a picture of a missionary buying back 235 men, women, and children from slavery for the equivalent of about $17,000, an average of about $75 a slave. And we know that slavery has existed throughout most of history. It ended in England and its colonies, including Canada, only in the last century.

On April 6 of this year, commemorating the abolition of slavery in France in 1848, the Catholic bishops of France issued a paper stating that slavery is "an immense sin" and that even the Catholic Church was implicated in the system, noting however that numerous priests and religious and missionaries worked heroically against it.

In The Popes and Slavery the author defends the thesis that the popes regularly and strongly condemned slavery but that slave-owners and their governments refused to obey this teaching in both North and South America, and that Catholic bishops also failed to accept it. For the United States, Panzer draws a parallel between this situation and the present one concerning contraception: that the popes have regularly and strongly condemned contraception but that, especially since 1960, many Catholics as well as many Catholic theologians and clergy have refused to accept the teaching.

Panzer deals at length with the attitude of the American bishops towards slavery in the United States in 1840, only twenty-three years before its abolition, when they issued a pastoral letter after their gathering in Baltimore. In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI had issued the Constitution In Supremo which condemned slavery in very strong language. It ended with this statement: "We prohibit and strictly forbid any ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this trade in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what We have set forth in these Apostolic Letters." Yet John England, Bishop of Charleston, in 1840 wrote to the American Government that "no pope had ever condemned domestic slavery as it had existed in the United States" (emphasis added).

At the Baltimore Council of 1840 In Supremo was discussed by the bishops, though no mention is made of it in the Council's pastoral letter. Bishop England however wrote this in 1840 to the American Government:

If this document condemned our domestic slavery as an unlawful and consequently immoral practice, the bishops could not have accepted it without being bound to refuse the Sacraments to all who were slave holders unless they manumitted their slaves; yet, if you look to the prelates who accepted the document (for the acceptance was immediate and unanimous) you will find...they all regarded the letter as treating of the "slave trade" and not as touching "domestic slavery."

Panzer writes:

...Gregory XVI issued [In Supremo] with its clear condemnation of both the slave trade and slavery itself. Since that Constitution mentioned the documents of the previous pontiffs, it is hard to understand how the American hierarchy was not aware of the consistency of the teaching and its nature. All of these teachings nonetheless went unknown to the Catholic faithful of the U.S., perhaps through willed ignorance, or were explained away by many of the American bishops and clergy."

Thus Catholic slave owners, including religious orders such as the American Jesuits, continued to support the system until after the outbreak of the Civil War.

The modern question of contraception is illustrative of how hard of hearing Church people can be, as was the case with slavery. This intransigence also demonstrates other things. One, for example, is the claim made against Pope Pius XII that all he had to do in 1940 or 1941 was to speak out against the persecution of the Jews and it would have been halted. If Catholics refuse to listen to the popes on such a personal matter as family life, how much less the chance that anyone would have listened (and acted) in 1940.