Briefly Reviewed: October 2023

Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies

By David J. Endres, Editor

Publisher: Catholic University of America Press

Pages: 230

Price: $29.95

Review Author: Elizabeth Hanink

You do not have to be a proponent of critical race theory or a fan of the 1619 Project to admit that race has played a pivotal role in the history of the United States. What might be harder to acknowledge is the place of the Catholic Church in this history.

If you ask the average American Catholic about it, he would likely say slavery is brutal and wrong. If questioned further, he would assure you that the Church has always been against slavery, just as she is against contraception, abortion, and divorce. Pope Francis’s recent repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, by which Europeans who “discovered” new lands claimed them as their own, probably left many scratching their heads.

True, several early Church writers, including St. Cyprian and Tertullian, condemned the practice of slavery, as did the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Later ecclesial rejections of slavery included Pope Benedict XIV’s Immensa Pastorum Principis (1741) and Pope Gregory XVI’s In Supremo Apostolatus Fastigio (1839). But exceptions abound. Pope Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas (1452) allowed Portugal and Spain to enslave the “enemies of Christ” and lent approval to the slave trade in West Africa. A follow-up document in 1455 extended this reach to the New World. Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera (1493) approved the colonization and enslavement of all native inhabitants in the New World “by the authority of Almighty God.” Indeed, the teaching of the Church at her highest levels has been mixed, and, as with abortion, individual Catholics, including bishops and clergy, have contributed to this sorry history.

The distinction between owning slaves and trafficking in them supposedly contained in Pope Gregory’s bull provided a loophole that many, including Bishop John England of Charleston, South Carolina, found convenient. Ownership of enslaved persons by people of faith — especially the forced breakup of families — is evidence not only of slavery’s profound cruelty but the “moral quicksand of expediency and inhumanity that sooner or later trapped everyone who participated in the ownership and buying and selling of human beings,” wrote Fr. Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., whose The History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990) is cited at length in this new book.

Slavery and the Catholic Church comprises a series of essays by academic historians detailing how this story came to be. Divided into three parts and offering a richness of detail, the book covers enslaved persons and slaveholders, the debate surrounding emancipation and abolition, and, finally, the historiography of the subject.

The record of Church leaders is particularly shameful. Contributor James Fitz, S.M., writes, “Of the first eight permanent communities of women religious founded within the original boundaries of the United States, six had enslaved persons: three in Maryland (the Carmelites of Port Tobacco, the Visitation Sisters of Georgetown, and the Sisters of Charity of Emmitsburg) and three in Kentucky (the Sisters of Loretto, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, and the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine).” The Ursulines, Vincentians, and Capuchins all owned slaves. A most egregious incident occurred in 1838 when the Jesuit order sold 272 slaves ostensibly to offset Georgetown University’s debt. In fairness, most of these orders did at one time or another, some much earlier than others, re-examine their slaveholdings and attempt to make some restitution. Most recently, the Jesuits of Georgetown have set up a $100 million fund to atone for this injustice.

The book’s section on enslaved persons and slaveholders offers, as you might expect, speculation about how slaves themselves felt about the practice. They were kept almost completely illiterate, and, for the most part, no one cared what they thought or felt. Information about slaveholders is much more comprehensive: how many slaves they held and for how much they were bought and sold. As Catholics, owners were admonished to ensure their slaves were baptized, taught the faith, and attended Mass. Mixed marriages were forbidden, and marriage between slaves required the permission of their masters. Additionally, slaves were to be buried in consecrated ground. These instructions did not seem to carry over, with some exceptions, to encouraging sacramental marriages, and indeed, Catholics broke up slave families as readily as did unbelievers.

Although some Catholics did agree with the abolitionist movement, for the most part the virulent anti-Catholicism of that confederation kept participation low. Even the talk of emancipation brought forth anxiety at every level. Would a flood of freed slaves take jobs away from white people? Having been deprived of formal education and having no resources or land, how would the newly freed survive? What about compensation to slaveholders for the loss of valuable human property?

Perhaps most interesting in this record of a disgraceful past is the question of how we know all this. The sacramental records of the Church are a major source and reveal much that is uncomfortable to readers today. Whereas the official government census counted numbers, Church records reflect much more, including, in the Louisiana area especially, adherence (or not) to Code Noir, King Louis XIV’s legal regulation of relationships between colonists and the enslaved. In some places, separate books for blacks and others were kept. Catholic slavers who fathered children with enslaved women were noted, along with evidence of literacy, biological relationships, and manumissions. Substantial signs of a Catholic heritage across generations of blacks and whites alike can be gleaned from the ledgers. Segregation of graves can be deduced from funeral and burial records at cemeteries. In some cases, these notes are the only record of an enslaved person’s existence.

Even professional historians needed to learn to see things differently. With some exceptions, slavery in American Church history was largely invisible and unremarked upon until the mid-20th century. When it was noted, Catholic ownership of slaves was sometimes viewed as benign since Catholics would, of course, bring their enslaved to knowledge of the one true faith. And yet, there was some awareness if only in nomenclature: Those held in bondage were referred to as servant men or women, laborers, or “the family.” A reckoning of just how involved Catholics were in this deplorable practice was very late in arriving, and only relatively recently have Catholic historians begun to deal with the morality of slavery.

Whether there will ever be an end to the racism that fosters slavery is anybody’s guess. The effects of Original Sin do linger. But Slavery and the Catholic Church highlights how grave injustice can be revealed, repudiated, and, in some cases, partly ameliorated.

The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands

By Casey Chalk

Publisher: Sophia Institute Press

Pages: 201

Price: $18.95

Review Author: Thomas Banks

On a shelf in my library is an old copy of The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs by Henri Daniel-Rops. As might be guessed from its title, the book contains the narrative of the first four centuries of Catholic life: the first revelation and laborious development of the faith, the slow evangelization of the Roman Empire, and the persecutions that fell upon the members of this strange and novel sect, the members of which the historian Tacitus cuttingly described as “enemies of the human race.” The title of Daniel-Rops’s history has come to seem strange to me in recent years, and somehow outdated. In many corners of the world, persecution has come to be a more quotidian factor in Christian life than it ever was under even the most brutal of the caesars, whose intermittent campaigns against the Church were usually restricted by material exigencies, half-heartedness on the part of many magistrates, and the civilized and venerable proceduralism of Roman law. To read such documents as we possess, the men who signed the death warrants of the primitive martyrs often performed their duties with less than total willingness, and more than one victim appears to have been far more eager to die for his creed than his executioners were to dispatch him. The war of pagan Rome against Christianity, if indeed it can be called a war at all, was the conflict of bureaucrat against believer. In such a contest, the bureaucrat is nearly always the first to tire.

Casey Chalk has written a Church of the Apostles and Martyrs for our times. From its introductory pages I discovered that more than a quarter of a billion Christians in the contemporary world live under some kind of legal restriction, most often in the form of Sharia law. Chalk, a Catholic revert who found his way home after his exile in the Reformed Protestant tradition, recounts in this relatively short volume several biographical narratives of the troubled and often endangered existence of Christians in Muslim-majority states. Chalk appears to be a widely traveled man and has considerably more than a tourist’s knowledge of the people and places of which he writes. His capacity as a storyteller is not at all shabby either, though occasionally he tries with more than necessary urgency to capture the goodwill of his reader; for instance, upon Chalk’s first visit to Kabul, he informs us that “I soon fell in love with Afghanistan and the Afghan people. I developed a strong impulse to learn Dari, the predominant language in much of the country, and I devoured many books on Afghan history and many meals of Afghan cuisine, which seemed to me a harmonious blend of the surrounding Persian, Indian-Pakistani, Central Asian, and even Russian cultures.” To write thus is to wed the juvenile high spirits of a college freshman newly returned from a stint with the Peace Corps to the flavorless cosmopolitanism of a Rick Steves travel guide. When Chalk put in a superfluous footnote that “Such is Thailand!” I felt more certain than ever that sunny earnestness is the death of Catholic writing.

In the main, however, Chalk stays out of the way of his story. Contemporary history, especially in this time of the 24-hour news cycle, feels deceptively ephemeral and frequently unreal, but Chalk presents his protagonists’ lives and sufferings memorably, and it is a credit to him that he does so without contrived lachrymosity or obvious affettuoso attempts on the reader’s heartstrings. A few of those persons about whom Chalk writes are quite well known already — Asia Bibi in particular — while others are as yet unheard of, even in the ranks of their coreligionists. Chalk has done a commendable service in bringing these accounts to our attention and in reminding us — I myself am far too apt to forget — that the religion of Christ is not principally a First World faith anymore, and might not be again for many generations to come. Nor is this a grave misfortune. Quomodo sedet sola civitas (“How lonely sits the city,” Lam. 1:1), wrote the prophet.

If the Church is no longer at home in the metropolis, she is evidently flourishing like a palm tree in the far corners of the developing world. To this fact Chalk’s book is an estimable testimony.

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