Slavery
The relationship between the Catholic Church and slavery is one of the most complex, painful, and misunderstood themes in Christian history. It demands an approach that yields neither to the apologetic temptation of minimizing the Church’s historical complicity, nor to the iconoclastic temptation of ignoring the prophetic voices within it that rose up against this crime. The truth is dense, contradictory, and demands to be examined in each of its historical periods with the honesty that the victims of slavery deserve.
The ancient world and the origins of Christian thought on slavery.
Slavery was a universal reality in the ancient world. Greeks, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Semitic peoples—all practiced some form of slavery, and no significant philosophical or religious voice in the pre-Christian world condemned it outright. Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of ancient Greece, justified slavery as a natural institution, arguing that some human beings were by nature slaves and that it was beneficial for them to be ruled by others. This idea of natural slavery exerted an enormous influence on medieval Christian thought when Aristotle was rediscovered and incorporated into scholastic theology.
The New Testament does not explicitly and directly condemn slavery. The Pauline epistles, especially the letter to Philemon and passages from the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians that exhort slaves to obey their masters, have been used for centuries as biblical justification for slavery. The interpretation of these passages has always been disputed: some theologians argued that Paul accepted slavery as a social reality without morally endorsing it, and that the principle that in Christ there is neither slave nor free made slavery incompatible with the Gospel in its deepest sense. Others used the same passages to argue that the social order of slavery had apostolic sanction. This interpretative dispute spanned the entire history of the Church and was not resolved institutionally for over eighteen hundred years.
What early Christianity introduced that was genuinely revolutionary in relation to the ancient world was the recognition of the full spiritual dignity of the slave as a human person created in the image of God and redeemed by the blood of Christ. In the Christian communities of the first centuries, slaves and masters received the Eucharist together, which was a radical subversion of Roman social hierarchies. Some bishops and popes of the first centuries were of servile origin, which would have been unthinkable in any other institution of the time. The Church exhorted Christian masters to treat their slaves with humanity and to grant them freedom as an act of piety. Manumission was considered a meritorious work and was especially encouraged during Christian festivals. But the abolition of slavery as an institution was not proposed.
Patristics and the theological acceptance of slavery
The great Church Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries lived in a society where slavery was absolutely central to the economy and social organization, and their positions on the subject reflect both the moral horizon of their time and the limitations that this horizon imposed even on the most brilliant minds.
Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose influence on Western theology is unparalleled, accepted slavery as part of the post-lapsarian human order, that is, as a consequence of original sin. In *The City of God*, Augustine argued that slavery did not exist in the original state of human nature before the Fall, but that after Adam’s sin, the human condition degraded to the point of making necessary forms of coercion and domination that included slavery. It was therefore an evil, but an evil remediable only by eschatological salvation, not by immediate social reform. The Christian slave who served his master with humility and fidelity was more inwardly free than the master who allowed himself to be dominated by vices. This spiritualization of freedom, which shifted the problem from external liberation to internal liberation, had enormous practical consequences throughout the centuries because it provided a theological framework within which slavery could be tolerated without it seeming incompatible with the Christian faith.
Saint John Chrysostom, the great preacher of Antioch and Constantinople, was in some respects more critical. He went so far as to claim that slavery was contrary to God’s original intention for humanity and that the Christian ideal was freedom. He exhorted the rich to free their slaves and condemned abuses with a vehemence that cost him the sympathy of the aristocracy. But he, too, did not propose the abolition of the institution as such.
St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the 4th century, was possibly the Church Father who came closest to a direct condemnation of slavery as an institution. In a sermon on the Book of Ecclesiastes, Gregory argued forcefully that no human being can be the property of another because all are created in the image of God, who is priceless. He asserted that whoever buys a human being is insulting God, whose icon is the human person. These words were extraordinary for their time, but they did not have the immediate impact they deserved and remained a relatively isolated prophetic voice within the patristic tradition.
The Middle Ages and theological systematization
In the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas systematized the medieval Church’s position on slavery in a way that combined Aristotle with Christian theology. Following Aristotle, Thomas accepted that servitude was an institution of human law and not of natural law in its original state, but that it had become necessary and legitimate as a consequence of post-lapsarian human conditions. He carefully distinguished between light servitude, which was the condition of medieval serfs bound to the land, and full servitude, which was slavery in the Roman sense. He established that there were legitimate causes of slavery, including capture in just war, birth to a slave mother, and the voluntary sale of oneself for debt. This theory of legitimate causes of slavery was the legal and theological framework within which slavery was justified by Catholic theologians during the following centuries, including the centuries of great explorations and the Atlantic slave trade.
It is important to note that medieval European serfdom, while involving severe forms of exploitation and limitation of freedom, differed in important aspects from the racial slavery that developed in the Atlantic context from the 15th century onwards. Medieval serfs were not the personal property of their lords; they had rights recognized by customary law and the Church, and the Church forbade them from being sold separately from their families. The transition from medieval serfdom to Atlantic slavery represented in many respects a moral regression, an intensification of the dehumanization that medieval Christian tradition, with all its limitations, still prohibited.
The 15th century and the origin of the Atlantic slave trade.
The beginning of the Atlantic slave trade in the 15th century marks the moment when the Catholic Church’s complicity with slavery reaches its most serious and best-documented expression. It is the moment when the papacy, as an institution, provided the legal and moral legitimacy for a system that would become the greatest crime of mass deportation and dehumanization in human history.
The papal bull Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, granted King Afonso V of Portugal the right to conquer Saracens and pagans, to seize their property, and to enslave them in perpetual slavery. Three years later, in 1455, the bull Romanus Pontifex, issued by the same Nicholas V, confirmed and expanded these concessions, applying them specifically to conquests along the African coast and establishing a Portuguese monopoly on trade and conquest in those regions. The language of these bulls is unequivocal and does not allow for evasive interpretations: the Pope of Rome was granting authority to enslave human beings.
In 1456, Pope Callixtus III’s bull Inter Caetera confirmed the concessions of Nicholas V. In 1493, a bull of the same name from Alexander VI divided the non-European world between Portugal and Spain, creating the legal framework within which conquests and the slave trade would expand for centuries. All these bulls were issued with the stated intention of promoting the evangelization of pagan peoples, but in practice provided the legal and moral cover for a system of exploitation and enslavement of unimaginable proportions.
It is at this point that the distinction between papal infallibility and ordinary teaching becomes relevant from an internal theological point of view. None of these bulls were issued ex cathedra with the intention of defining a doctrine of faith or morals for the entire Church. They were documents of a legal and diplomatic nature that responded to specific political situations. But in practice they functioned as moral sanctions of slavery, and this technical distinction does not diminish the gravity of what was done nor the suffering that these decisions made possible.
The prophetic voices of the 16th century
The 16th century was the period of greatest contrast between the institutional complicity of the Church with slavery and the prophetic voices that rose up within it against this complicity. This contrast is in itself revealing of the nature of the Church as a human and divine institution at the same time, capable of simultaneously producing the papal bull that legitimizes the slave trade and the prophet who condemns it.
Friar Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican, preached in Santo Domingo on the fourth Sunday of Advent in 1511 the most explosive sermon in the history of colonial America. Before the Spanish colonists who enslaved the indigenous people of the Caribbean islands, Montesinos declared that the voice of Christ was in the desert of this island, and that all those present were in mortal sin because of the way they treated those innocent creatures. He affirmed that the indigenous people were not animals but human beings endowed with reason and soul, and that the colonists had no more right to exploit them than the Moors or the Turks. The sermon caused an immediate scandal, and the colonists demanded that the Dominican superior silence him. Instead, Montesinos preached again the following Sunday, reaffirming his positions with even greater vehemence.
Bartolomé de Las Casas is the best-known figure in this prophetic tradition within the colonial Church. Arriving in Haiti as a colonist and himself a landowner, Las Casas underwent a radical conversion after hearing a sermon by Montesinos and following a spiritual experience he describes as a sudden illumination of the injustice he was witnessing. For decades he traveled throughout Spain and the colonies, wrote treatises, preached sermons, appeared before the Council of the Indies, and fought tirelessly for the protection of the indigenous people. His most famous work, the Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, described in horrifying detail the atrocities committed by the colonizers and was one of the first documents in history to use language that today we would recognize as human rights.
However, it is necessary to be honest about a crucial limitation of Las Casas that is often forgotten in narratives that present him as a universal abolitionist. In some of his early writings, Las Casas suggested that the solution to the problem of indigenous slavery would be to replace indigenous workers with Africans, whom he considered more physically robust for colonial labor. He later deeply regretted this position, recognizing that the enslavement of Africans was as unjust as that of indigenous people. But the episode reveals how even the most lucid minds and the most generous hearts of the time could be partially blind to dimensions of the problem that seem obvious to us today.
Pope Paul III responded to the controversies generated by the American missions with the papal bull Sublimis Deus of 1537, one of the most important papal documents in the history of evangelization. The bull explicitly declared that the indigenous peoples of the Americas and all other peoples whom Christians might discover were fully human beings, endowed with reason and the capacity to receive the Christian faith, and that they could not be deprived of their freedom or their possessions, even if they were not Christians. It further declared that the enslavement of these peoples was null and void, and that it violated the natural rights that God had granted to all human beings. This was a declaration of enormous moral and theological importance.
However, the practical application of this document was severely limited by political and economic factors. The Spanish crown, which had enormous interests in the colonial system, reacted by pressuring Rome, and the bull was in practice suspended or largely ignored in concrete situations. The distance between Rome and the American colonies, the corruption of colonial officials, and the complicity of the local clergy rendered the protection of the indigenous peoples declared by the papal bull largely a dead letter in the territories where it was most needed.
African slavery and institutional silence.
While indigenous slavery generated at least some significant theological debate and produced recognized prophetic voices, African slavery in the Atlantic context was for a long time accepted with an institutional silence that is itself a form of complicity.
The theologians of the School of Salamanca in the 16th century, who were in many respects the most advanced moral thinkers of their time on issues of international law and colonial justice, debated slavery extensively. Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, and others developed theories of natural rights that were in many respects more advanced than anything that had existed before. But with regard to African slavery, most of these theologians, including Vitoria, accepted that capture in just war and the purchase of slaves from merchants were legitimate causes of slavery, provided the buyer was not responsible for the original injustice of the capture. This casuistic distinction between the injustice of originally enslaving a person and the legality of buying them after they were already enslaved allowed participants in the system to wash their hands morally while perpetuating it in practice.
The Jesuit Luis de Molina, at the end of the 16th century, went further than most of his contemporaries by seriously questioning whether the conditions under which Africans were captured and sold corresponded to the legitimate grounds for slavery established by theological tradition. He concluded that in many cases they probably did not, but that the bona fide buyer was not responsible for the injustices of the capture. This conclusion, although morally insufficient, revealed at least an awareness of the problem that many of his contemporaries preferred not to examine.
The Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval, who worked in Cartagena de Indias in the early 17th century as a missionary among African slaves arriving on slave ships, was one of the first to systematically document the conditions of the slave trade and raise questions about its legitimacy. His most famous disciple was Pedro Claver, also a Jesuit, who spent decades in Cartagena baptizing, treating illnesses, and defending the dignity of African slaves arriving on ships in conditions of indescribable suffering. Pedro Claver was canonized in 1888 and is the patron saint of missions among slaves. But it is important to note that neither Sandoval nor Claver condemned slavery as an institution, but dedicated their lives to alleviating the suffering of slaves within the existing system.
In Brazil, the situation was particularly serious. African slavery was the economic basis of the Portuguese colony for three hundred years, and the Brazilian Catholic Church, as an institution, was deeply involved in this system. Convents and monasteries owned a large number of slaves. The Benedictines, who were the wealthiest of the ecclesiastical slave owners in Brazil, had hundreds of slaves on their farms. There are records of Benedictine monasteries with more than three hundred slaves working on their sugar plantations. The Carmelites, Franciscans, and other orders also owned slaves. Bishops and priests individually owned slaves, which was considered perfectly compatible with the exercise of the priestly ministry.
The practice of baptizing Africans before or immediately after embarking on slave ships was widespread and mandatory according to Portuguese law. This practice, which mixed a sacrament with a system of dehumanization, revealed the moral schizophrenia of the system: the Church insisted on the duty to Christianize slaves, which implied recognizing that they were human beings with immortal souls, and at the same time accepted without question the reduction of these same people to alienable property. Baptism did not confer freedom but served to reassure the conscience of those involved in the trade, who could say that they were fulfilling the evangelizing mission.
The exceptions and the prophets
Within this framework of institutional complicity, there were exceptions that need to be rightfully remembered. The Capuchin friar Francisco José de Jaca and Father Epifânio de Moirans, missionaries in Cuba and Venezuela at the end of the 17th century, were possibly the first theologians to condemn African slavery absolutely and without the usual casuistry. Both refused the sacraments to slave owners and affirmed that slavery was always and in all circumstances contrary to natural law and the Gospel. They were persecuted by the colonial authorities and by the ecclesiastical hierarchy itself, which considered their positions subversive and impractical. Their texts remained unknown for centuries.
The Bishop of Olinda and Recife, Dom Vital Maria Gonçalves de Oliveira, in the 19th century, is an interesting figure in this context. Being one of the most uncompromising bishops of the Brazilian Church in defending ecclesiastical prerogatives against imperial regalism—an issue that led to his imprisonment—Dom Vital was not a prominent voice in the abolitionist debate, illustrating how courage in some battles does not automatically translate to all causes of justice.
Father Diogo Antônio Feijó, who became regent of Brazil during the minority of Dom Pedro II, was a priest who held reformist positions in various fields but did not distinguish himself as an abolitionist. Slavery was so integrated into the social and economic structure of Brazil that even the most independent ecclesiastical figures rarely questioned it in a fundamental way.
Gregory XVI’s bull and its limitations
In 1837, Pope Gregory XVI issued the bull In Supremo Apostolatus, which explicitly condemns the slave trade and the reduction of free people to slavery. The document is notable for its clarity and for the way it invokes the tradition of previous popes who had defended the freedom of indigenous peoples, presenting the condemnation of the slave trade as a continuation of that tradition. The bull states that it is contrary to the Christian religion, human dignity, and natural law to practice trafficking in human beings as if they were merchandise.
However, the reception of this bull revealed the deep divisions that the issue caused within the Church itself. In the United States, where the debate over slavery was heating up, bishops in the Catholic South argued that the bull condemned only the slave trade and not slavery as an institution, and that therefore a slave owner who did not participate in the trade was not subject to its condemnation. American abolitionists used the bull as an argument, but defenders of slavery in the southern United States, including Catholic bishops, interpreted it in a way that neutralized its practical scope.
The Bishop of Charleston, John England, one of the most intelligent and cultured American bishops of the 19th century, wrote a series of letters arguing that the Church had never condemned slavery as such, only its abuses, and that the existence of slaves on the properties of the popes themselves in earlier times proved that the institution was not in itself contrary to divine law. This interpretation, while historically questionable on several points, revealed how economic and social interests shaped the reading of ecclesiastical documents even among the most cultured and well-intentioned.
Abolitionism and the role of the Church
The 19th-century abolitionist movement had deep religious roots, but these roots were largely Protestant, especially in the Anglophone world. The Quakers had condemned slavery as early as the 17th century and were the first to exclude slave owners from their communities. British Methodism, under the influence of John Wesley, became a fundamental driving force behind British abolitionism. William Wilberforce, who led the parliamentary battle to end the slave trade and later slavery in the British Empire, was an evangelical Christian whose faith was the central motivation for his political struggle.
In Brazil, the abolitionist movement had important Catholic figures. Joaquim Nabuco, the greatest theorist of Brazilian abolitionism, was a fervent Catholic who saw slavery as a denial of Christian principles of human dignity. José do Patrocínio, the most eloquent of the abolitionist agitators, was the son of a priest and a slave, which made his abolitionist struggle also a personal claim to dignity. Father Antônio Diogo Feijó and other individual clergymen supported abolitionism, but the Brazilian ecclesiastical hierarchy as an institution was notably cautious and slow to pronounce itself clearly.
Princess Isabel, who signed the Golden Law on May 13, 1888, was a deeply devout Catholic who saw abolition as an act of Christian faith and was blessed by Pope Leo XIII for this act. But the law came almost half a century after British abolition and abolition in the United States after the Civil War, and was the result of a social and political movement in which the Catholic Church as an institution played more of a role as a late follower than as a prophetic leader.