Black Slavery and the Catholic Church

Early first-century Christianity inherits a world in which slavery is universally practiced — Roman Empire, Greece, Persia, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia. Ancient slavery is not based on race but on legal status, war captivity, debt or birth. It affects Whites, Blacks, Asians and Europeans. In Italy, in the 1st century AD, the share of slaves is estimated at most at about one third of the population — a high estimate specific to the heart of the Empire and debated among historians; in the provinces and across the Empire as a whole, the proportion is markedly lower.^[1]

The newborn Church does not lead a social revolution in the institutional sense: it does not demand the immediate abolition of slavery in Roman law. But it affirms two principles that undermine its anthropological foundation.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." — Saint Paul, Galatians 3:28^[2]

"Perhaps Onesimus was separated from you for a while so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother: he is very dear to me, and how much more will he be to you, both as a man and in the Lord." — Saint Paul, Epistle to Philemon, vv. 15-16^[3]

These Pauline texts were not, in the context of the Roman Empire, an immediate political program of abolition. But they carried a logic: if the slave is a brother in Christ, the institution that reduces him to a thing contradicts the Christian faith. It would take centuries for this logic to produce its legal and political effects. That is the tragic paradox of Church history.

Gregory of Nyssa: the earliest condemnation

As early as the 4th century, Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-394) goes further than anyone else in the ancient Christian tradition. In his Homilies on Ecclesiastes, he condemns the very principle of one human being owning another — not only the abuses of slavery, but the institution as such:

In substance, Gregory rebukes the master for enslaving a being whose nature is free and endowed with free will, for legislating against the law of God — and asks him what price could ever be worth a man created in the image of God.^[4]

This condemnation of principle, in the 4th century, has no immediate effect. But it proves that the Catholic tradition contained, from antiquity onward, the resources to reject slavery radically — and that this rejection is far older than the 18th century of the Enlightenment.

What Thomas Aquinas taught — and its limits

Medieval Catholic theology does not condemn slavery as intrinsically contrary to natural law. Saint Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 57, a. 3)^[5] distinguishes natural law — which wills that all men be free — from the law of nations — that is, the rules that all peoples follow among themselves (in Latin: ius gentium) — which admits servitude as a consequence of just war. This distinction is crucial: Thomas does not say that slavery is good or natural. He says that servitude can be legally established under the common law of nations in certain circumstances — notably for the vanquished of a just war, whose lives are spared rather than taken.

This doctrine, inherited from Aristotle and adapted by Augustine^[6], could justify certain forms of captivity. It never claimed to legitimize:

• Hereditary slavery based on race
• The capture of innocent non-combatants
• The total dehumanization of the person reduced to servitude

Medieval theologians recognized clear moral limits: the master could not inflict excessive suffering, could not unjustly separate families, and could not treat the slave as if he were cattle.

"Slavery is not to be understood as conferring on one man the same power over another that men have over cattle." — Summary of the teaching of Cardinal Gerdil (1718-1802) by the Catholic Encyclopedia, art. "Slavery", 1912^[7]

Augustine: sin as the origin of servitude

Saint Augustine develops in The City of God a reading of servitude as a consequence of original sin. It is not the nature of man that orders him toward servitude — for all are naturally free and equal — but sin which introduced relations of domination into the world.

In substance, Augustine holds that the servile condition is, in justice, the result of sin: man, created in the image of God, was by nature ordered to rule only over beasts, not over man; hence Scripture shows the word slave appearing only with Noah branding his son's fault with the name of servant — a name introduced by sin, not by nature.^[8]

For Augustine, servitude is an evil following from sin, not a natural good. This reading left a doctrinal door open: if servitude comes from sin, Christian charity should tend toward liberation.

The problem of application

The medieval doctrine of just war as the sole source of possibly licit servitude had a dramatic practical limit: it allowed merchants to justify the trade by invoking fictitious African just wars. If African rulers sold their prisoners of war, so the argument ran, these were legitimately reduced to servitude. This rationalization was used even when the pretexts of just war were entirely fabricated — as the Dominican Tomás de Mercado would demonstrate as early as 1569 (see section VI).

The context: the late crusade and the Ottoman threat

The accusation most often levelled against the Catholic Church cites the two bulls of Nicholas V to the King of Portugal: Dum Diversas (18 June 1452) and Romanus Pontifex (8 January 1455). These texts are real, their historical impact is heavy, and it would be dishonest to ignore them.

Their context is that of the dying Christian East facing the Ottoman advance — Constantinople would fall in May 1453, between the two bulls — and of the late crusade: the papacy seeks allies for a counter-offensive, and Portugal, in full Atlantic expansion and at war with Islam, is one of the main partners. Nicholas V follows the logic of the medieval crusades: the enemy is defined as Muslim or infidel, and war against him is presented as just.^[9]

The exact text

The bull Dum Diversas (18 June 1452) authorizes King Afonso V of Portugal to invade, capture, vanquish and subdue the Saracens, the Infidels and the other enemies of Christ, and to reduce them to perpetual servitude (servitutem perpetuam).^[10] Romanus Pontifex (8 January 1455) confirms these rights and extends them to Portugal's African explorations and the peoples encountered on those coasts.

How to read these bulls honestly

Several distinctions are necessary — not to erase these texts, but to give them their exact meaning.

First distinction — the criterion is religious, not racial. The "Saracens" and "Infidels" targeted are defined by their military or political opposition to Christianity, not by their skin color. The 15th century does not yet know the concept of hereditary racial slavery that the Atlantic trade would institutionalize in the 16th-18th centuries. The logic of Nicholas V is that of the medieval crusade.

Second distinction — a non-invocation that remains a hypothesis. According to secondary literature reporting the thesis of the historian John Francis Maxwell, Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex were never formally invoked by slave-trading jurists and merchants as the legal foundation of the trade — the writings justifying the trade relying on economic arguments and the theory of just war, not on these bulls.^[11] Since the work could not be cross-checked page by page, this thesis remains an unestablished hypothesis: it cannot ground any argument and in no way lessens the historical responsibility of these texts.

Third distinction — the internal contradiction. Nicholas V did not revoke Sicut Dudum of Eugene IV (1435), which protected the inhabitants of the Canaries under pain of excommunication. The papacy therefore did not form a uniform doctrinal bloc in favor of the trade.

Fourth distinction — the scope of the term servitus. The Latin term servitutem perpetuam can designate military captivity and not necessarily the hereditary slavery transmitted to children in perpetuity that the Atlantic trade would institutionalize.

These distinctions do not absolve the text. They forbid making it the keystone of a thesis according to which the papacy theologically founded the Black trade. The record is ambiguous — which is not an absolution, but a necessary nuance for an exact historical judgment.

Eugene IV and the inhabitants of the Canaries

Even before the discovery of the Americas and the rise of the Atlantic trade, Pope Eugene IV (1431-1447) writes a bull that constitutes the first explicit papal condemnation of slavery in the modern era. The bull Sicut Dudum, dated 13 January 1435, is addressed to the prelates of the Canary Islands and Spain.

Its context: the Guanches, the indigenous population of the Canaries, suffer raids by Spanish and Portuguese slavers from the early 15th century onward. Some have converted to Christianity or are in the process of conversion. Eugene IV orders their immediate liberation and the return of their property, under pain of excommunication, within fifteen days.^[12]

"We order each and every one of those who have hitherto made Canarians — men or women — their slaves or subjects, or who still hold them captive or deprived of their property, to restore their freedom fully to the Canarians, in whatever state they may be, and to return their property to them, within fifteen days of the promulgation of these letters." — Eugene IV, Sicut Dudum, 13 January 1435^[13]

This text is remarkable: it is several decades earlier than the massive Atlantic trade. It lays down a principle of natural law applicable to non-European peoples. And it uses the strongest weapon of ecclesial authority — excommunication — to impose it.

Paul III and Sublimis Deus (1537): discovered peoples are men

In 1537, Pope Paul III promulgates Sublimis Deus (2 June 1537) and the accompanying letter Pastorale Officium. Faced with the debates sparked by the conquest of America, he affirms that the Indians and all other peoples discovered or to be discovered are true human beings, capable of receiving the faith, and cannot be deprived of their freedom or their property.^[14]

"The Indians themselves, and all other nations which may later be discovered by Christians, even if they live outside the Christian faith, are not deprived nor can they be deprived of their freedom or of the ownership of their property, and must not be reduced to slavery." — Paul III, Sublimis Deus, 2 June 1537^[15]

The principle is formulated in universal terms: "all other nations which may later be discovered". A necessary qualification: the bull targets first the Indians of America; whether its formula also covers deported Africans — and should have condemned the Black trade from the 16th century onward — remains debated, and Rome never imposed this extension. Had this text been applied to the letter to Africans deported from the 1540s-1600s onward, the Atlantic trade would have been theologically impossible to justify.^[16]

The painful question raised by this chronology is not: "did the Church have the necessary moral principles?" It had them — from 1435, from 1537. The question is: "why were these principles not systematically extended to Africans and applied with the same force for three centuries?" The answer lies in colonial interests, political compromises and the weakness of pontifical authority in the face of Catholic temporal powers.

16th-19th centuries: the organization of a large-scale crime

The Atlantic trade is the largest forced displacement of populations in human history before the 20th century. According to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database — the reference academic database built by historians David Eltis, David Richardson and their collaborators — some 12.5 million Africans were forcibly embarked between 1501 and 1866, and some 10.7 million landed alive in the New World.^[17]

• About 1.8 million perished during the crossing (Middle Passage), a mortality rate of about 14-15% at sea.^[18]
• The main countries of destination: Brazil (5 million), English-speaking Caribbean (2.7 million), Spanish-speaking Caribbean (1.6 million), English-speaking North America (400,000).
• The main transporting nations: Portugal and Brazil (5.8 million), Great Britain (3.3 million), Spain and Cuba (1.6 million), France (1.4 million).^[19]

The Catholic powers — Portugal, Spain, France — thus organized the transport of more than half of the total transatlantic trade.

The responsibility of local Catholic institutions

Religious orders and slave ownership. The Society of Jesus owned plantations with enslaved workers in the West Indies and Louisiana. In 1838, the Jesuit Province of Maryland sold 272 slaves to Louisiana planters to pay off Georgetown University's debts — a fault publicly acknowledged by Georgetown in 2016.^[20]

Catholic masters and the sacraments. Catholic slave owners could receive the sacraments while exploiting persons reduced to servitude. Baptized slaves were instructed in the Catholic faith while remaining merchant property. The local Church rarely had the strength or the will to impose coherence between doctrine and social practice.

The Code Noir (1685). The Catholic French crown adopted in March 1685 the Code Noir, an edict of Louis XIV regulating slavery in the French colonies. It contains protective provisions — a ban on separating families converted to Christianity, an obligation to baptize slaves — but without challenging the very principle of human property.^[21]

What this proves — and what it does not prove

This record proves that States claiming to be Catholic were the main organizers of the trade; that local Catholic institutions sometimes took part in slavery; that the universal Church did not impose its own principles with the necessary force. These facts are undeniable.

This record does not prove that the Catholic Church taught that the racial slavery of Blacks was legitimate or good. It proves that Catholics acted in contradiction with the principles their own faith contained. The fault is real, but it judges the men and institutions that committed it, not the Gospel they claimed to follow. This is a crucial distinction: the Church can teach truly and see its members betray that teaching — which is a tragedy, not a refutation.

The historian David Brion Davis, who is no Catholic apologist, notes that Christianity introduced into slaveholding societies growing doctrinal frictions and moral contradictions that made the institution ultimately unsustainable.^[22]

Antonio de Montesinos: the first abolitionist sermon (1511)

The first known Catholic voice to rise publicly against the enslavement of Indians in America is that of a Spanish Dominican, Brother Antonio de Montesinos, in Santo Domingo (today Haiti). In December 1511, he preaches a sermon that will mark history:

"I am a voice crying in the wilderness of this island. Hear me with all your soul and all your senses. This voice, which will be the newest you have ever heard, will tell you: you are in a state of mortal sin and you live and will die in this sin because of the cruelty and tyranny with which you oppress this innocent race. Tell me, by what right, by what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude?" — Brother Antonio de Montesinos, O.P., sermon for the 4th Sunday of Advent, Santo Domingo, December 1511^[23]

This sermon causes an immediate scandal. The colonists complain to King Ferdinand of Spain. Montesinos is summoned to Madrid to justify himself. He holds his ground. It is he who awakens Bartolomé de Las Casas to the question of the dignity of enslaved peoples.

Bartolomé de Las Casas: a complex journey and a documented repentance

Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) is the best-known figure in the defense of the Indians in Spanish America. His life illustrates both the possibility of a radical moral conversion and the slowness of that conversion in the face of a still partly invisible injustice.

Las Casas is first a colonist and owner of Indian slaves in Cuba. In 1514, at age 40, he converts to the defense of the Indians after long meditation on Montesinos's sermon and chapter 34 of the Book of Sirach. He gives back his Indians and devotes his life to their defense.

The point often cited against him: in a 1516 memorandum to Cardinal Cisneros, he suggests — among other measures — that colonists could be allowed to import African slaves to replace the mistreated Indian workforce. This suggestion is a real error. But Las Casas himself explicitly acknowledged it in his Historia de las Indias:

"This counsel, to grant license to bring Black slaves into these lands, the Clerk [Las Casas] first gave, not noticing the injustice with which the Portuguese took them and made them slaves; with which afterwards he was not content, judging that they had been captured unjustly and tyrannically, for the same reason holds for them as for the Indians." — Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, book II, chap. 129, written c. 1527-1561^[24]

This acknowledgment of error is explicit. Las Casas ended up understanding that the injustice he denounced for the Indians applied equally to Africans. His trajectory moves toward an ever more universal condemnation of racial slavery.

Tomás de Mercado: the critique of the African trade (1569)

The Spanish Dominican Tomás de Mercado (d. 1575) publishes in 1569 in Salamanca his Tratos y contratos de mercaderes, reissued and expanded in Seville in 1571 under the title Suma de tratos y contratos — the first complete doctrinal treatise including a systematic critique of the slave trade. He analyzes the slave commerce in West Africa and concludes that the pretexts of just war invoked by merchants are, in the vast majority of cases, fictitious or fabricated. In substance, Mercado judges that the alleged wars justifying the captures are almost all unjust, that the suppliers engage in a veritable manhunt and that the captives thus obtained are held against all justice.^[25]

This text is crucial: it shows that a Catholic theologian at the heart of the Spanish empire, a century before the great phase of the trade, saw the injustice clearly and named it. The doctrine of just war was not invoked in good faith by merchants — it was instrumentalized.

Attribution note — the historian Enrique Dussel attributes to Alonso de Montúfar (c. 1489-1572), Dominican Archbishop of Mexico from 1551 to 1572, a letter to King Philip II around 1560 against the importation of Africans, a mention taken up by English-language literature. Since neither the full text of this letter, nor an archive, nor an independent scholarly study has been found (research as of October 2026, with no new result to date), this point cannot ground any argument.^[26]

Francisco José de Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans: the radical condemnation (1681-1682)

The two Catholic theologians who go furthest in the 17th century are two Spanish Capuchin friars. In 1681, Francisco José de Jaca (d. after 1696) writes his Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros — the first Catholic treatise affirming that the slavery of Africans is an intrinsic sin, whatever pretext of just war is invoked. In 1682, Epifanio de Moirans (1644-1689) completes it with a parallel treatise.^[27]

In substance, Jaca holds that the slaves of the Indies were reduced to servitude against natural and divine law, and against the natural right of freedom with which every man is born.^[28]

Their radicalism costs them their freedom: imprisoned in Havana by the Spanish colonial authorities in 1681, they are transferred to Europe and send Rome a memorandum asking Pope Innocent XI for a formal condemnation of the trade — with no known public response.^[29] The fact that they wrote and resisted at the cost of their freedom shows that the Catholic conscience could go very far beyond the dominant practice.

Saint Peter Claver: serving those who could not yet be freed

Faced with the political impossibility of immediately abolishing the trade, the Catalan Jesuit Peter Claver (1581-1654) chooses the path of direct charity toward slaves. He devotes forty-five years of his life to the slaves arriving at the port of Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), the main entry port for slaves in Hispanic America.

According to biographical tradition, taken up by most lives of the saint, he baptized more than 300,000 African slaves — a traditional figure that no contemporary register can verify to the exact unit. He procured interpreters speaking African languages to communicate with them. He visited them in the slave ships upon arrival, bringing them food, medicine and dignity. He signed his letters: Petrus Claver, Aethiopum semper servus — Peter Claver, perpetual servant of the Ethiopians.^[30]

Claver did not combat the slave institution as a theologian or jurist. He combated it as a saint — by refusing to regard as things those whom society treated as merchandise. He is canonized in 1888 by Leo XIII, who declares him patron of African missions — precisely the year in which that same pope publishes his encyclical against slavery, In Plurimis.

Text and scope

On 3 December 1839, Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846) publishes the apostolic letter In Supremo Apostolatus, the first universal and explicit papal condemnation of the Black trade — that is, of the commerce in African slaves. According to the reported reading of historian John T. Noonan Jr. — pages not cross-checked at the source, one author's analysis and not an established Roman fact — the text condemns the trade without condemning domestic slavery as such; in any case, that is the restrictive reading that pro-slavery Catholics adopted to claim it did not target them (see § The difficult reception).^[31]

The text recalls the earlier condemnations of Pius II (letter of 7 October 1462 against the enslavement of Canary neophytes), Paul III (1537), Urban VIII (Commissum Nobis, 1639), Benedict XIV (Immensa Pastorum, 1741), then states the central condemnation:

"We reprove, then, by virtue of Our Apostolic Authority, all the practices abovementioned as absolutely unworthy of the Christian name." — Gregory XVI, In Supremo Apostolatus, 3 December 1839^[32]

Then it formulates the explicit prohibition:

"By the same Authority We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks." — Gregory XVI, In Supremo Apostolatus, 1839^[33]

The wording is unambiguous: defending the trade as licit is henceforth formally forbidden to every Catholic.

A late but decisive text

In Supremo Apostolatus arrives in 1839, after more than three centuries of Atlantic trade. This delay is legitimately deplorable. Several factors explain it without excusing it.

The papacy of the 16th-18th centuries wields a much weakened political authority against the Catholic colonial powers. The Iberian States had obtained through the padroado extensive rights over their missionaries and empires — which reduced the effectiveness of a Roman condemnation on colonial practices. The 18th-century papacy, weakened by Enlightenment attacks and the suppression of the Jesuits (1773), went through a period of particular institutional weakness.

But these explanations do not absolve the delay. Clear principles existed — Sicut Dudum in 1435, Sublimis Deus in 1537 — and were not applied with the necessary rigor. Colonial economic and political interests weighed on the paralysis of pontifical authority. That is a grave, documented and inexcusable failure of governance.

The difficult reception: Catholics who resist

Even after In Supremo, Catholics in the American slave States — notably in the US South — tried to minimize the scope of the text, presenting it as a private letter or as targeting only the transatlantic trade and not existing domestic slavery.^[34] This restrictive reading is attested as early as 1840 in the correspondence of John England, Bishop of Charleston, with the American government.^[35] This resistance illustrates the distance between the magisterium and its faithful — and stands as a perennial warning: a doctrinal condemnation has social effect only if consciences receive it.

The Holy Office reply (1866) — according to Noonan's analysis. The ambiguity does not end in 1839: according to the analysis John T. Noonan Jr. gives of 19th-century Roman doctrine — Roman text not cross-checked at the source, one author's analysis and not an established Roman fact — the Holy Office, questioned from Africa, replied in 1866 that servitude (servitus), though undesirable, was not in itself contrary to natural and divine law, maintaining the period's distinction between the condemned trade and existing domestic slavery. It is this distinction that Noonan describes as the persistent blind spot of 19th-century Roman doctrine.^[36]

Leo XIII: completing the condemnation (1888-1890)

Leo XIII (1878-1903) completes the work of Gregory XVI with two decisive documents, published in the context of abolition in Brazil (the last country to legally abolish slavery in 1888) and the African missions:

• In Plurimis (5 May 1888), encyclical to the bishops of Brazil: celebrates abolition and develops a theology of liberation grounded in the dignity of the human being created in the image of God.^[37]
• Catholicae Ecclesiae (20 November 1890): condemns slavery in the African missions and calls Catholics to work for its elimination.^[38]

The doctrinal heart of In Plurimis lies in a single sentence articulating the three foundations of human dignity and naming what slavery refuses to see:

"And with no regard for community of nature, nor for human dignity, nor for the divine image impressed upon man, it came about through the quarrels and wars that later broke out that those who prevailed by force subjugated the vanquished." — Leo XIII, In Plurimis, 5 May 1888, §4^[39]

Leo XIII thus explicitly grounds the condemnation of slavery on three converging pillars: community of nature (all men share one humanity), human dignity (each person bears an incommensurable worth), and the divine image impressed upon man (the imago Dei of the Book of Genesis). This is the Catholic doctrine of the dignity of the person in its densest formulation — and it makes racial slavery morally impossible.

Leo XIII also canonizes Peter Claver in that same year 1888, sending a clear signal: authentic Catholic holiness passes through service to the victims of slavery.

Catholics who worked for abolition

The narrative presenting the abolition of slavery as an exclusively Protestant or rationalist conquest misunderstands history. Catholics played a significant role in the European abolitionist movements of the 19th century.

Daniel O'Connell (1775-1847), Irish Catholic lawyer and politician, was one of the most ardent abolitionists of his time and publicly denounced American slavery.^[40]

"The most hideous crime that has ever stained humanity." — Daniel O'Connell, address to American abolitionists read in Cincinnati^[41]

Henri Lacordaire (1802-1861), French Dominican and restorer of the order in France, and Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870), an eminent representative of liberal Catholicism, joined the French Society for the Abolition of Slavery founded in 1834.^[42]

Frédéric Ozanam (1813-1853), founder of the Conferences of Saint Vincent de Paul and blessed of the Catholic Church, integrated the abolition of slavery into his vision of a transformative Catholic charity.^[43]

Cardinal Charles Lavigerie (1825-1892), Archbishop of Algiers and founder of the Society of Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers), launched in 1888 an international Catholic campaign against African slavery, supported by Leo XIII. He preached abolitionist sermons in Paris, London and Rome that had considerable resonance.^[44]

The Trinitarians and the Mercedarians: ransoming slaves

An often ignored aspect of the Catholic response to slavery: two religious orders were founded specifically to ransom slaves.

The Order of the Holy Trinity (Trinitarians), founded in 1198 by Saint John of Matha and Saint Felix of Valois, had as its first goal ransoming Christian captives of the Barbary pirates. The Order of Our Lady of Mercy (Mercedarians), founded in 1218 by Saint Peter Nolasco, had the same vocation. These orders operate in the opposite direction of the trade: they pay for the liberation of men reduced to servitude — even though their field of action was limited to Christian slaves in Muslim territories, not Africans deported to America.

Louis X of France and the liberating soil (1315)

A remarkable and little-known fact: by ordinance of July 1315, King Louis X of France offers emancipation to serfs — but within strict limits: the text targets only the royal domain, and freedom must be bought back, each serf agreeing with the crown on the price (peculium) assessed by a royal commission. The ordinance affirms that France is the "kingdom of the Franks" — "Franks" meaning "free men" — and that it would therefore be unfitting for a serf to remain in servitude there.^[45] This is thus not a general abolition of serfdom, which endures in France until the end of the Ancien Régime; but this partial and redeemable emancipation shows that the French Catholic tradition contained doctrinal resources for the liberation of serfs.

Gaudium et Spes §27: list of infamous practices

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) formulates in its pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes a list of practices that dishonor human civilization and offend God. Slavery figures there explicitly:

"...whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; ...: all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed." — Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, §27, 7 December 1965^[46]

The word is unqualified: slavery as such is infamous. Not certain abuses of slavery. Not excessively cruel slavery. Slavery.

CCC §2414: the natural-law formulation

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) develops the condemnation in terms of natural law and sin:

"The seventh commandment forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason — selfish or ideological, commercial, or totalitarian — lead to the enslavement of human beings, to disregarding their personal dignity, to buying, selling and exchanging them like merchandise. It is a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them by violence to their usefulness or to a source of profit. St. Paul directed a Christian master to treat his Christian slave 'no longer as a slave but as a brother, ... as a man, in the Lord' (Phm 16)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2414^[47]

No just war, no commercial pretext, no difference of religion or race can justify an exception. Racial slavery is qualified as a sin — not a regrettable abuse, but a direct offense against the dignity of the person and fundamental rights.

Gorée (22 February 1992)

In 1992, on the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America, John Paul II visits Gorée Island in Senegal, a symbolic memorial site of the Atlantic trade. After visiting the House of Slaves, he declares, at his meeting with the island's Catholic community in the church of Saint Charles:

"From this African sanctuary of Black pain, we implore forgiveness from heaven." — John Paul II, meeting with the Catholic community of Gorée, church of Saint Charles, 22 February 1992^[48]

It is one of the strongest gestures of a pope toward a historical crime. He does not minimize, does not relativize, does not distribute responsibilities among several religions. He asks forgiveness.

John Paul II had already visited Accra (Ghana) on 8 May 1980, during his apostolic journey to Africa, where he celebrated Mass (homily preserved on vatican.va): since the sometimes cited French wording of his remarks on the sufferings of ancestors could not be cross-checked word for word against the official text — none of the Accra texts of 8 May 1980 posted online contains it — it is not reproduced here as a quotation.^[49]

The Great Jubilee (2000): the official act of contrition

On 12 March 2000, during the Day of Pardon of the Great Jubilee, John Paul II pronounces in the name of the Church, in the homily of the Mass in Saint Peter's Square, an act of contrition for faults committed in the service of truth:

"Let us ask forgiveness for the divisions which have occurred among Christians, for the violence some of them have used in the service of the truth and for the distrustful and hostile attitudes sometimes taken towards the followers of other religions." — John Paul II, homily of the Mass of the Day of Pardon, Saint Peter's Square, 12 March 2000, §4^[50]

The theological meaning of these gestures

These acts of repentance call for a precise theological reading. John Paul II does not confess that the Church taught slavery as good — for it did not. He confesses that members of the Church, institutions of the Church, and sometimes representatives of the Church, betrayed the Gospel in their practice. This is an important but non-reductive distinction: the betrayal of a principle by those who claim it is the gravest form of false witness.

Catholic tradition distinguishes the Church as the Body of Christ — holy by definition as united to Christ — from the sinful members who compose it. This distinction is not an excuse: it is the truth that makes repentance possible. Forgiveness can be asked in the name of the Church only if the Church is both the subject that sins (in its members) and the subject that can repent (by acknowledging the gap with the Gospel).

Objection 1 — "Nicholas V authorized Black slavery via Dum Diversas"

The objection stated honestly: Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) authorize Portugal to reduce non-Christian peoples to servitutem perpetuam. These texts served colonial expansion and the trade. How can papal responsibility be denied?

Answer in five points.

Point 1 — The criterion is religious, not racial. These bulls do not target Africans as Blacks, but "Saracens and infidels" as politico-religious enemies in the logic of the crusade. The concept of hereditary racial slavery based on skin color does not yet exist in the language of these texts.

Point 2 — An unestablished non-invocation. According to secondary literature reporting the thesis of historian John Francis Maxwell — work not cross-checked page by page, unestablished hypothesis — Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex were never formally invoked by pro-slavery jurists as the legal foundation of the Black trade.^[51] Even if this reading were exact, it would not lessen papal responsibility: ambiguous texts that open the way to colonial abuses remain imputable to their authors.

Point 3 — The internal contradiction. Nicholas V did not revoke Sicut Dudum of Eugene IV (1435). The mid-15th-century papacy was not ideologically unified in favor of the trade.

Point 4 — The ambiguity of the term. Servitutem perpetuam can designate lasting military captivity — not necessarily the hereditary slavery transmitted to children in perpetuity that the Atlantic trade would institutionalize.

Point 5 — Doctrinal continuity. The papacy, before and after Nicholas V, published texts in favor of the dignity of enslaved peoples: Eugene IV (1435), Paul III (1537), Urban VIII (1639). These texts are not an exception in a history favorable to the trade — they are the doctrinal rule that ambiguous or misinterpreted texts contradicted.

What the objection rightly retains: the imprecise drafting of these bulls and their absence of clear condemnation contributed to an environment in which the trade could develop without explicit papal opposition for several decades. That is a real ecclesial governance fault.

Objection 2 — "The Thomist doctrine of just war justifies the trade"

The objection: Thomas Aquinas admits that the vanquished of a just war may be reduced to slavery. Catholic theologians used this doctrine to justify the trade. It is therefore a Catholic teaching.

Answer: the Thomist doctrine of just slavery lays down conditions that the Atlantic trade precisely did not meet.

First, the war must be really just: yet the great majority of captures in West Africa were not prisoners of just wars but victims of organized raids, kidnappings or sales by local chiefs. Tomás de Mercado had demonstrated this in 1569 with precision, on the basis of direct testimony.^[52]

Second, scholastic theory admitted individual captivity — not a hereditary racial regime based on skin color, transmitted to children's children in perpetuity.

Third, dissenting theologians are numerous from the 16th century onward: Montesinos, Mercado, then Jaca and Moirans in the 17th. The position was not unanimous in the Catholic world.

The abuse of a doctrine does not prove that the doctrine authorized that abuse. The flawed reasoning that invoked fictitious just war was a manipulation of theology, not its legitimate expression.

Objection 3 — "Las Casas suggested importing African slaves"

The objection: Las Casas, the great defender of the Indians, proposed importing Africans to replace them in forced labor. This proves that even the most committed Catholics did not see the problem of African slavery.

Answer: the fact is real — Las Casas made this suggestion in a 1516 memorandum. But the objection omits two decisive elements.

First, Las Casas himself acknowledged his error and repented of it. In his Historia de las Indias, written c. 1527-1561, he writes that he was wrong to make this suggestion, for the same reason he condemns the slavery of the Indians.^[53] The repentance is documented, explicit and late — but it is there.

Second, this error is that of a man in full moral conversion, whose conscience had not yet grasped that the injustice he saw for the Indians applied equally to Africans. His overall trajectory moves toward an ever more universal condemnation of racial slavery — not its acceptance.

Las Casas is an example of the slowness of the moral development of a conscience confronted with a partly invisible structure of injustice — not proof that Catholicism accepted African slavery.

Objection 4 — "Religious orders owned slaves"

The objection: the Jesuits in Louisiana and Maryland, dioceses and local Catholic institutions owned slaves. The Church was directly involved in the system.

Answer: the fact is real and grave. Georgetown University formally acknowledges it. Religious orders, like the Jesuit Province of Maryland, sold slaves to finance their institutions. This is a direct betrayal of the Gospel by institutions that should have been its witnesses. There is nothing to minimize.

What the objection must still hear: the fault of the members of a Church does not prove that the Church teaches that this fault is good. The Catholic Church teaches the doctrine of human dignity — which is precisely what makes it possible to judge the fault as a fault. It is because human dignity is part of Catholic teaching that slave ownership by Catholics is condemnable in light of their own principles. The fault can only be judged in the name of the rule — and the rule was clear.

Objection 5 — "The Church condemned only in 1839, too late"

The objection: In Supremo arrives in 1839, after more than three centuries of trade. If the Church had really had the necessary moral principles, it would have condemned much earlier.

Answer: the objection is partly right and partly wrong.

What is right: the delay of the explicit universal condemnation is real and inexcusable. Clear principles existed and were not applied with the necessary rigor. Colonial economic and political interests paralyzed pontifical authority. That is a grave fault.

What is wrong: the claim "the Church condemned nothing before 1839" is historically false. Several papal interventions had preceded In Supremo: Sicut Dudum of Eugene IV (1435)^[54], the letter of Pius II to the Bishop of Rubicón (7 October 1462)^[55], Sublimis Deus of Paul III (1537)^[56], Commissum Nobis of Urban VIII (22 April 1639)^[57], Immensa Pastorum of Benedict XIV to the bishops of Brazil (20 December 1741)^[58] — interventions notably listed by Joel Panzer in The Popes and Slavery (1996).^[59]

The true finding: the papacy had the doctrinal tools from the 15th century onward to condemn the trade; popes issued partial or limited condemnations; but the universal, explicit condemnation directly addressed to the African trade came only in 1839. The delay is one of ecclesial governance compromised by political pressures — not of a teaching favorable to the trade.

Objection 6 — "In Supremo was not infallible and is not binding"

The objection: In Supremo is not an ex cathedra definition. It therefore does not impose itself as obligatory truth of faith and may be contested by Catholics.

Answer: this objection confuses extraordinary infallible magisterium with authentic ordinary magisterium. Infallibility is required only for solemn definitions of truths of faith — which the Church does only very rarely. The great majority of Catholic teaching is transmitted by the ordinary magisterium, which obliges the faithful to religious assent without formal infallibility.

In Supremo, in condemning the Black trade as contrary to natural and divine law, is consistent with the constant teaching of the Church on the dignity of the human person. Its lack of formal infallibility does not make it optional.

Moreover, the condemnation of slavery in Gaudium et Spes (1965) and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2414) now constitutes a teaching of the universal ordinary magisterium — whose theological weight is considerable and which is no longer contestable by any Catholic in good faith.

This non-infallibility objection was invoked above all by Catholics in the American slave States in the 19th century to justify their resistance to papal condemnation. It reveals more about their economic interests than about theology.

• The Evangelization of the American Indians — Catholic mission, Bartolomé de Las Casas, rights of indigenous peoples and Spanish colonization.
• Does History Argue in Favor of Catholicism? — overview of the strengths and failings of the Church in history.
• The Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church — sin of members, truth of the Church, reform process.
• The Decadence of the Borgia Popes — scandals of leaders and the distinction between men and doctrine.
• Outside the Church There Is No Salvation — mission, universal salvation and human dignity.
• The Church and Science — other great historical accusations against the Catholic Church.