Sometimes the best defense of Western Civilization is a thorough confession
When I was a
kid, Western Civilization seemed as eternal as the ancient granite hills
threading through my hometown. Christian churches were packed on Sunday. Even
forms as minor and ephemeral as jokes and song lyrics assumed, in the hearer,
proficiency in a cultural heritage from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare to NASA.
You couldn't understand Cole Porter or Johnny Carson without having been
baptized into this heritage. The day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and no
one sat that out or even made rude comments or eye-rolls. Classroom walls
featured silhouette profiles of Washington and Lincoln.
That everything had changed hit me hardest when I was teaching. I might casually allude to a line I assumed everyone knew, like, "In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void … and God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Or, I might use a phrase like "ex nihilo," or "fiat lux." And I would be met with complete incomprehension. The Vietnam War. Nothing. The Greek Miracle. Blank stares. Normandy Beach. Huh?
My students'
minds were not empty. They were full of data of which I had previously been
unaware. For example, the Nazis were all Christians, their only victims were
Jews, and World War II was the inevitable consequence and culmination of
Christianity. Americans were the only people who ever practiced slavery. Black
people were the only people who had ever been enslaved. The Founding Fathers
were nothing but a bunch of oppressors and they never did anything worthwhile
for anyone.
My students
knew that there were fabulous alternatives to Western Civilization that could
be adopted as soon as we tossed into the garbage heap all that oppression and
racism and stupidity our white, benighted elders had saddled us with. We could
replace greedy, destructive capitalism with compassionate socialism. We could
replace weird, wicked Christianity with peaceful, meditative Eastern religions,
or nature-loving indigenous spirituality, or sexy, feminist Neo-Paganism, or
clinically clean, always correct, completely rational Science.
When teaching
writing, as someone of immigrant stock for whom Standard English was an adopted
and idolized tongue, the key to America's great blessings, I wanted to focus on
technical excellence, like proper use of the predictive nominative. But I found
myself in tugs of war with students and campus superiors certain that any
aspect of Western Civilization, including use of the predict nominative, was
racist, sexist, and oppressive. In passing this civilization on to students, I
was passing on a filthy rag pregnant with contagion.
The Crusades,
the Inquisition, the Witch Craze, the Atlantic slave trade, and Nazism were all
proof that the West was rotten to the core.
I hadn't
trained as an historian. I went in search of answers. I discovered a couple of
things. One was that propagandistic invocations of the Crusades, the Witch
Craze, and the Inquisition to discredit Catholicism often relied on material
produced centuries ago by Protestants in power struggles with Catholics. The
Dutch and the English competed with Catholic Spain. The Black Legend
denigrated Spain and Catholicism.
Here's an
example of how one nugget of anti-Catholic propaganda made its way into
Wikipedia. Friedrich Spee (1591 – 1635) was a German Jesuit. At the height of the witch craze, Spee risked
his life writing a passionate, influential anti-witch-craze book, Cautio
Criminalis. New Atheists Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer cited in their
recent, bestselling books an anecdote they got from one source, Charles
Mackay's 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds;
see here.
Mackay falsely describes the heroic Spee as a religious fool. There is no
support for Mackay's character assassination. Why, then, did Mackay include it
in his book? Perhaps because, as one blogger alleges, "Mackay
was a prominent member of a clique of British historians characterized by their
anti-Catholicism." Pinker and Shermer repeat this invented slander, and it
is now found on Wikipedia's page devoted to Spee.
In 1999, Yale
University Press published The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision.
This
book "firmly rebuts a variety of myths and exaggerations that have
distorted understandings of the Inquisition." Author Henry Kamen is of
English, Burmese, and Nepali descent and he was born in Rangoon, Burma.
Eurasian Kamen can't be accused of bias toward his own ethnic group in his
deconstruction of the anti-Spanish Black Legend. He is, simply, a real scholar
– "one of the most important living historians of Spain," according
to the Atlantic
Monthly. Kamen, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is
courageous enough to tell the truth. Kamen appears in the 1994 BBC documentary,
The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition, viewable here.
Kamen's work
has not trickled down to popular consciousness, though. People are more likely
to understand the Spanish Inquisition through the work of Monty Python than
Henry Kamen, or from films like Goya's Ghosts. Academy-Award-winning
Milos Forman directed Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman in a lurid, fictional
tale of a priest who tortures and rapes an innocent woman. Bloggers might point
out the film's inaccuracies – see here
– but a sexy priest torturing a sexy movie star packs a punch that a dry
rebuttal never can.
The Spanish
Inquisition was criticized by contemporaneous Christians outside of Spain,
including popes. Jesus never recommended to his disciples that they force
conversion or kill people for their faith. Why, then, did this Inquisition take
place? Muslims invaded Spain in 711 AD. As Darío Fernandez-Morera demonstrates
in his excellent book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, reviewed here,
Muslim Spain was not the paradise some insist it was. The Reconquista or
Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula lasted until 1492. Spain decided
that peace and prosperity required homogeneity. We don't have to approve of the
Spanish Inquisition to understand the historical circumstances that contributed
to its creation. Any population after centuries of warfare between
practitioners of different religions might crave demographic purity. In fact
many colonial-era American Protestants craved the same, and, after Europe's
religious wars, banned Catholics from living within their borders.
The Crusades
were not, as one of my students passionately insisted, a bunch of Catholics,
for no good reason, marching off to murder Muslims. Any real understanding of
the Crusades begins not with the obvious Medieval exaggeration, that, in the
1099 Siege of Jerusalem, Crusaders murdered so many Muslims that "blood
reached horses' knees." Both Crusaders and Muslims exaggerated casualty
figures. Muslims, eager to commodify their defeat, want to say that 70,000
died; the number defies historical realty and Jerusalem's estimated population
size. Crusaders wanted to boast of their prowess, as warriors, in mowing down
the enemy.
Any real
understanding of the Crusades begins with this: Islam had been waging
no-holds-barred, genocidal warfare against Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians,
Pagans, Buddhists, and Hindus for hundreds of years before the Crusades began.
Dr. Bill Warner's "dynamic battle map" plots jihad assaults on the
classical world of the Mediterranean basin. It's here. As Warner shows,
the entire history of the Crusades is tiny in comparison to jihadi activity.
Robert Spencer
provides more background here.
Spencer writes, "Early in the eighth century, sixty Christian pilgrims
from Amorium were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of
Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as
spies." Both Muslim officials and Muslim criminals robbed Christians, the
first in the jizya tax extorted from Christians and Jews. Muslims
forbade public display of the cross and forbade Christians from informing
others – including their own children – of their faith. Christians' and Jews'
hands had to be stamped with an identifying mark. The Crusades were intended to
make the Holy Land safe for Christians.
Again, though,
popular consciousness is more likely to be misinformed by movies like 2005's Kingdom
of Heaven than historical fact. Jonathan Riley-Smith, the late Dixie
Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge and an historian of the
Crusades, detailed
the many "ruthlessly" "distorted" inaccuracies of
Ridley Scott's film. Real Crusaders, Riley-Smith argues, followed a
"coherent theology" that to some extent "constrained" their
actions. "An expedition could not be launched to spread Christianity or
Christian rule, but had to be a defensive reaction to an injury perpetrated by
another." Crusaders were informed by Saint Augustine's concept of
"just war;" see here.
In Scott's film, on the other hand, "A cruel, avaricious and cowardly
Christian clergy preaches hatred against the Muslims and most of the crusaders
and settlers are equally stupid and fanatical." Kingdom of Heaven, Riley-Smith
alleges, is "dangerous to Arab relations." The film presents
"Osama bin Laden's version of history."
The Witch
Craze? I did enough research on that topic to teach a course on it. A video is here; an
article is here.
Just about everything we "know" is true about the Witch Craze has
been overturned by recent scholarship. Nazism? I published a
prize-winning, well-reviewed book that addresses, inter alia,
misunderstandings of what Nazism really was; I argued against
identifying Nazism with Christianity.
Pointing out
that historical events have been distorted for propagandistic reasons doesn't
mean that they didn't happen or that we approve of these events. Rather, I
would communicate the following to my students. "A fish doesn't know it is
in water." Most of my students had very limited notions of any historical
period except the present and any culture except their own. They didn't know
about non-Western genocides, for example in Cambodia or Rwanda. They didn't
know about largely Muslim Nigerians, in the late 1960s, starving two million
largely Catholic Biafrans to death. They didn't know about Muslim Indonesians,
in the last quarter of the twentieth century, committing atrocities against
tens of thousands of Catholic East Timorese. They didn't know about Pakistan's
mass atrocities against Bangladeshis in 1971. Blessed by Muslim imams,
Pakistanis raped hundreds of thousands of women. Pakistanis mass murdered
Bangladeshis, especially Hindus. Pakistanis drove an estimated eight million
Hindus into exile. I regularly read in the New York Times and the New
Yorker about Indian PM Narendra Modi's "Islamophobia." One does
not have to approve of Modi to wish that the mainstream press would provide
some background. Islamophobia in the subcontinent has roots going back 1,400
years.
Pop culture and
even students' own professors peddled an image of non-Western peoples and
cultures as uniformly benevolent. For example, see the 2015 Canadian
documentary, Haida Gwaii: On the Edge of the World. This documentary
depicts the Haida people as peaceful, egalitarian, artistic, and in harmony
with nature. White people came along and exploited the forests and the
fisheries and left devastation and injustice. Modern-day Haida are shown
reconnecting with their superior, ancestral culture by carving totem poles and
starting fires without matches.
The documentary
does not depict a central fact of Haida culture. According to the Canadian
Museum of History, "The Haida were feared … because of their practice
of making lightning raids against which their enemies had little defense. Their
great skills of seamanship, their superior craft and their relative protection
from retaliation in their island fortress added to the aggressive posture of
the Haida towards neighbouring tribes." Haida were the "Indian
Vikings of the North West Coast." Each war canoe "carried a shaman …
to catch and destroy the souls of enemies."
Haida went to
war for slaves. "Most estimates put the presence of slaves between ten and
thirty-five percent of most Northwest Coast populations," according
to the Sealaska
Heritage Institute. An 1886 account
reports that, "slavery in its most shocking form has been thoroughly
interwoven with the social policy of the Indians of Alaska, and still exists in
many localities under circumstances of extreme cruelty. The life of the slave
is entirely at the disposal of his master or his mistress, and it has been
customary among them to kill one or more slaves on the death of a master, or on
the happening of some other event, such as the completion of a new house.
Boring the ears, or putting out an eye, of a slave, or some other mode of
marking the flesh, has been and is now a custom with some of the families of
these people … the object of such mutilation is to impress upon the slaves
their inferiority, and render their humiliation complete."
My message to
my students was not "Humanity sucks; abandon all hope." I insisted
that there were lights in the darkness, lights on which the civilization they
inherited was based. The Ancient Greeks broke from surrounding cultures and
insisted that "Man is the measure of all things" and Athens developed
a democratic system. The Jews worshipped one God, who, in an act of love,
created everything, ex nihilo, and pronounced it "good." He
wanted us to be happy. We all descend, equally, no matter our height or wealth
or skin color or language, from this one act of benevolent creation. Christians
believe that Jesus, god incarnate, suffered and died for us.
Westerners are
not a superior form of human. Even our role models do bad things. Peter denied
Jesus; Paul executed Christians. But the West gave us a system for dealing with
the inevitable bad that we do. We confess, we atone, we can rejoin society.
Those we have wronged can forgive, accept restitution, or, if restitution is
not possible, believe that ultimate justice is in God's hands, and move on.
The
Judeo-Christian tradition didn't just hand humanity a mechanism for dealing
with evil. It also provides incentive to do good. Saints Christopher, Francis
and Mother Teresa, did good deeds for people it's difficult to want to be
around. Saint Christopher carried a heavy child across a river; the child
revealed himself to be Jesus. Francis had a horror of lepers. To overcome his
resistance to the command to love, he embraced and kissed a leper. The leper
revealed himself to be Jesus. Mother Teresa ministered to dying humans
abandoned in the streets. She called their appearance a "distressing
disguise." When she helped them, she was sure, she was helping Jesus.
People who look upon needy people and see an opportunity to serve their God
behave differently from others who do not share this belief.
Jesus promised,
"Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, that you do unto me."
Those who follow this teaching believe not just that they are performing
service in gratitude to Jesus, who suffered and died for them. They also
believe that they earn an eternal reward.
Of course not
everyone in the West has fully believed, or believed at all, in Christian
teaching. But some have. And those who have held, or at least honored, this
belief, have also contributed to the establishing of hospitals, universities,
and charitable institutions. They have tried to determine how war can be waged
justly. They have challenged rulers to live up to Christian ideals.
In the long
run, a belief system that teaches the concept that we are all equally made in
God's image, in Hebrew, "b'tselem elohim," and in Latin,
"imago dei," is going to produce a certain kind of society. A
different kind of society will be produced by, for example, a belief system
that teaches that its own members are certified by Allah as "the best
nation produced [as an example] for mankind," and that Allah commands his
believers to rape, torture, pillage, and kill, even if those believers don't
want to commit any of those heinous acts – see Quran 3:110, 2:216, 5:33, 2:191,
4:24.
In 2019, Tom
Holland published Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
The book is reviewed here.
Holland, an agnostic, called Christianity a "depth charge" that,
slowly but surely, century by century, changed the world through the individual
acts of those who take the Bible seriously.
***
All
Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic
Church was published by
Orbis Books in 2022. Orbis Books is a Catholic publishing house, established in
1970. Oppression's author, Christopher J. Kellerman, is a Jesuit priest.
Oppression is 230 pages long, inclusive of an index and a bibliography.
The Journal of Global Slavery points out that the book fills an
important and unique niche. "This impressive and thoroughly researched
work is the first book-length study in English since 1975 to provide an
accessible, era-by-era exploration of the Catholic Church's historical
involvement with slave-holding and abolitionism." The book
"constitutes a new starting point for understanding the Catholic Church's
historical relationship with slavery."
I sought out
this book because an influential author and activist made a derogatory comment
about Catholics not having any problem with slavery. I was astounded. I thought
of the 1170 Gniezno door in Poland that depicts, in bronze bas-relief, Saint
Adalbert freeing Slavic slaves. I thought of Peter
Claver (1580 – 1654). Claver was born in Spain. At university, he wrote,
"I must dedicate myself to the service of God until death, on the
understanding that I am like a slave." He would eventually become "Aethiopum
servus," the slave of the Africans. In Colombia, he dedicated his life
to ministering to slaves newly arriving on foul and disease-ridden slave ships.
Claver learned African languages and informed the new arrivals that God loved
them and that they were of equal worth as any other human being.
Hearing that
slavery never bothered the Catholics, I thought, also, of Sublimis Deus,
a 1537 Papal bull that forbade the enslavement of Native Americans. I realized,
though, that I was hitting on highlights. I had never read a comprehensive
treatment of Catholicism's 2000 year history on the topic of slavery.
All
Oppression Shall Cease is
one of the best books I've ever read. Kellerman's prose is smooth and
economical. Kellerman manages a minor miracle: a deeply researched history of a
very controversial topic that engages many voices in just 230 pages. To achieve
that economy, and also to honor his subject, Kellerman forgoes melodramatic
language. He allows the gruesome facts to speak for themselves, without much
editorial commentary.
All
Oppression Shall Cease is
devastating. Kellerman is fearless and he lets the reader know what he is in
for from the first sentences. "The history of the Catholic Church and
slavery is not pretty in any aspect. It is really ugly, and there is no way to
make it look otherwise without being dishonest."
Oppression is in no way comparable to Kingdom of
Heaven or Haida Gwaii or Goya's Ghosts or Shermer's or
Pinker's Christophobic slander. Oppression is an exemplar of historical
writing. And it could make a reader lose his faith, or at least his fealty to
Catholicism.
This book,
devastating though it is, did not demolish my faith. I saw this extended,
reasoned cry of "I accuse" as support for why I am Catholic, and why
I became, to the extent that I am able, a defender of the West. In Catholic
school, I was told that every night I was to make an examination of conscience.
I had to look over my deeds of that day and note what I got wrong. I would take
those wrongs to the confessional. I would admit to another person my failings,
I would receive absolution, and I would resolve to be a better person. That a
Catholic priest wrote a book that places the Catholic Church in the dock and
finds it guilty as charged is a reflection of the best in Catholicism. Most of
Kellerman's book is straightforward history. In his conclusion, Kellerman acts
as a devout Catholic. He demands that essential step in any absolution of sins.
He demands atonement.
Oppression is dense with names, dates,
controversies, and quotes over the course of 2,000 years. There are heroes
here, clear-eyed Christians who recognized how slavery could never be made to
comply with the overall message of the entire Bible. Kellerman insists on
disabusing his reader of any false hopes. He makes clear that for over a
thousand years, those Christians who could and did publicly record
denunciations of slavery per se were a distinct minority, and they exercised
little to no influence. Rather, all too often, and very influentially,
Catholics, including popes, made statements that ranged between acceptance of
slavery as an inevitability in a fallen world, to Catholics who caused
believers to conclude that slavery was in no way inconsistent with Christian
faith.
Kellerman will
also not allow the weak excuse, "But everyone thought that way back
then." First, a church that declares itself a purveyor of transcendent
truth cannot hide behind that excuse. Second, there were people
"back then", non-Christian and Christian alike, who recognized
slavery as an intrinsic evil.
When doing my
feeble best to defend Western Civ to my students, I reminded them that just
because a person was baptized, that did
not mean that that person acted on, or believed, Christian precepts.
Hitler was a baptized Catholic. He rejected Catholicism as a teenager and
targeted the church for persecution. He replaced the cross with the swastika,
meant to represent his party's blend of nationalism and Neo-Paganism.
In Oppression,
the reader encounters men who have risen to the highest ranks of the
church. These true believers in Christianity managed to produce shockingly
absurd statements to support slavery. These statements were valued by slave
traders and owners.
Kellerman's
scrupulousness demands that he acknowledge that the Bible does not contain a
condemnation of slavery per se. Rather, the Old Testament contains instructions
on slave-holding. In the New Testament, Jesus interacts with slaves and does
not take those opportunities to condemn slavery. New Testament letter-writers
adjured slaves to be obedient to their masters.
Even so, the
Bible inspired slaves, abolitionists, and Civil Rights activists. Exodus, after
creation, is possibly the most famous and stirring narrative in the Old
Testament. In this book, God demands and receives the liberation of slaves. God
repeatedly says, "Let my people go." Freedom is a Biblical value.
Jesus commands his followers, "Love one another as I have loved you,"
and "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," Paul says, "There
is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and
female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
These
contradictory features of the Bible – its emphasis on freedom, equality, and
love, and its apparent acceptance of slavery – explain why both abolitionists
and supporters of slavery have turned to the Bible for support.
Kellerman
records how Christian authors in the church's early centuries followed the
pattern set by the New Testament. They took slavery for granted as part of life
after the fall and adjured slaves to be obedient and masters to be kind.
Augustine argued that slaves might deserve their fate because of some sin. A
few church fathers argued that slave owners should not have sex with their
slaves. In sum, "As far as we know, there were very few bishops and
theologians in the early Church who thought that slave-holding was morally
wrong."
Saint Gregory
of Nyssa, who lived circa 335 – 394 AD, "is the only Church theologian who
wrote abolitionist works that survive." He called slave-holding a sin and
instructed slave owners to free their slaves (See here).
"He developed theological arguments demonstrating slavery's sinfulness and
those same arguments would be employed by the abolitionist movement centuries
later." Slave owners, Nyssen argued, placed themselves above God. They
turned human beings into the equivalent of "four-footed things."
Psalm 8, he argued, lists the animals over which God had given humans dominion.
God never gave man dominion over man. Slavery defies the Bible because it
divides humanity in half. "If a royal birthday or victory celebration
opens a prison, shall not Christ's rising relive those in affliction?"
Nyssen asked. Kellerman acknowledges that Nyssen's ideas exercised little
influence.
On the other
hand, theologian David
Bentley Hart praises Nyssen's words as, as far as we know, unique.
"Nowhere in the literary remains of antiquity is there another document
quite comparable to" Nyssen's condemnation of slavery. "Certainly no
other ancient text still known to us—Christian, Jewish, or Pagan—contains so
fierce, unequivocal, and indignant a condemnation of the institution of slavery
… It is a passage of remarkable rhetorical intensity. In it Gregory treats
slavery not as a luxury that should be indulged in only temperately (as might
an Epicurean), nor as a necessary domestic economy too often abused by arrogant
or brutal slave-owners (as might a Stoic like Seneca or a Christian like John
Chrysostom), but as intrinsically sinful, opposed to God's actions in creation,
salvation, and the church, and essentially incompatible with the Gospel."
In contrast to
Nyssen, sixth-century Saint Pope Gregory the Great "thought that slavery
had been ordained by God and that the lord arranged people in the hierarchy of
the world according to their sinfulness." Gregory gave a teenage slave to
Bishop Felix. "You are empowered … to do whatever you want with him."
Abbot Smaragdus
of Saint-Mihiel (c. 770 – c. 840) told Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's heir,
that to be a good Christian king, he must not allow "captivity."
"Smaragdus quotes multiple passages from the Old Testament which, at least
in his mind, show that God does not like slavery." "Everyone should
let slaves go free," Smaragdus wrote. Alas, "Louis the Pious did not
follow Smaragdus' advice, and slavery remained in the Carolingian
kingdom."
Theologians of
the High Middle Ages were almost unanimously pro-slavery in their writing.
Thomas Aquinas never challenged slavery in any significant way. There was an
exception. Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus (1265 – 1308) was "the
heavyweight antislavery voice of the era … Scotus was a true abolitionist
theologian, and he provided all the intellectual arguments needed for the
Church to condemn slavery."
Portugal, a
Catholic country, dominated in the Atlantic slave trade (see here).
Kellerman points out that while, yes, the 1537 papal bull Sublimis Deus
forbade the enslavement of Native Americans, the Vatican gave the green light
to the enslavement of Africans. Native Americans, the Vatican believed, were
gentle people brought to the faith through persuasion. Africa was associated
with Islam, and, therefore, harsher measures were permitted. "The
beginning of the Atlantic trade in African slaves was approved by not just one
pope but four over the course of seventy-five years … Theologically speaking,
these documents gave the Portuguese free reign in conquering and reducing
people to slavery in Africa."
In the
mid-1500's, "major Catholic figures began to sharply criticize" the
Atlantic slave trade "and document its injustices." Dominican Friar
Bernardino de Vique questioned the morality of the trade. Dominican Friar
Bartolome de las Casas rejected the idea that papal permissions supported
Portuguese behavior in Africa. "A thousand mortal sins are committed"
in the slave trade. "Las Casas was the first of many Catholic priests and
theologians to speak against the trade's injustices … From las Casas onward, Catholic
theologians and writers would be nearly unanimous in their judgment that
terrible injustices were occurring on a massive scale in the trade. The only
real question of debate would be what to do about those injustices … the great
Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto" argued that owners must free their
wrongfully captured slaves. Catholics engaging in slave trading were
"slandering the faith." Two Jesuits refused to absolve, in the
confessional, any slaveholders."
Perhaps because
Kellerman is himself a Jesuit, he details Jesuits buying and owning slaves. But
he also mentions Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina who became in 1594, "the
first theologian to publish an in-depth moral analysis of the African slave
trade." Molina did not condemn slavery per se; rather, he recycled
previous defenses of it. He did, though, condemn some aspects of the Atlantic
slave trade as "unjust and evil … all those that operate [this trade] sin
mortally and are in a state of eternal damnation." That the slaves might
eventually become Christian was no excuse. The ends does not justify the means,
he argued. The king should issue a decree ending this trade.
Jean Bodin,
Pierre Charron, and Yves de Paris were three sixteenth / seventeenth-century
French, Catholic writers who condemned not just the Atlantic slave trade, but
also slave-holding. Pierre Charron, a priest, condemned slavery as
"monstrous and shameful." Early Christians did not call for
abolition, he wrote, because they were a minority in a world where slavery was
a widespread practice. "Easily and very smoothly over time"
Christians "abolished" past sins. Capuchin priest Yves de Paris
condemned slavery as a system that took "this living image of God, which
is animated by his grace, and made capable of his glory … to work like the
beasts." Alas, Kellerman writes, the Catholics protesting against slavery
that he lists "didn't make a dent" in Catholic slave-holding. Rather,
"Catholic participation in the slave trade was only expanding."
Capuchin priest
Epiphane de Moirans wrote "the sharpest Catholic theological takedown of
the Atlantic slave trade that had yet been written and perhaps ever would
be." Servi Liberi Seu Naturalis Mancipiorum Libertatis Iusta Defensio
– A Just Defense of the Natural Liberty of Slaves, from 1682, is a
"fiery and apocalyptic denunciation" of the slave trade. "God
will pour out divine wrath upon Christians for their grave sins." God,
Moirans writes, "will strike the Catholics … scourge them … make vengeance
until he finally annihilates them, and passing a judgment for the oppressed
Indians and Africans enduring injury, making Christians captives in his wrath,
driving out princes and missionary ecclesiastics, he will strip the Christians
kings of their dominions."
About halfway
through Oppression, Kellerman begins to address the American and British
abolitionist movements. These non-Catholic movements, Kellerman acknowledges,
turned the tide. Catholics learned from these movements and added their voices.
Kellerman details how the American and British activists relied on Biblical
concepts like imago dei, the equality of all before God, the command to
love, the need to evangelize all nations, and the book of Exodus to make their
case.
Many Catholics
were deaf to these arguments. Catholics in the U.S., including clergy and
church institutions, continued to own slaves and to publish defenses of
slavery, including racist defenses. In 1814, Pope Pius VII became "the
first pope to denounce the Atlantic save trade in any fashion." He sent
private letters to European royals. In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI released the
papal bull In supremo apostolatus. This document was the first public
papal condemnation of the Atlantic slave trade. Gregory "condemned any
participation in the Atlantic trade whatsoever." He even condemned mere
defense of the slave trade. Kellerman does not rejoice. He points out that Pope
Gregory acted, in 1839, on information that crusading priests, black and white,
had been presenting to the Vatican since the 1540s.
Oppression astounded me so much that I often made
audible harrumphs while reading it. As popes and empowered others began to
issue unambiguous, public declarations that inched closer and closer to
condemning slavery per se, my harrumphs increased, even as I read in a public
library. The newly emerging papal condemnations of slavery did something that
amazed this reader. They said things like, paraphrase, "As we Christians
have always said, slavery is bad." Kellerman calls this approach a
"radical historical rewrite." Kellerman courageously states,
"Gregory's version of history was not accurate." But, Kellerman says,
"It is very probable that the pope believed this version of history."
Here is an
example from In supremo apostolatus: "We say with profound sorrow –
there were to be found … among the Faithful men who, shamefully blinded by the
desire of sordid gain, in lonely and distant countries, did not hesitate to
reduce to slavery Indians, negroes … Certainly many Roman Pontiffs of glorious
memory, Our Predecessors, did not fail, according to the duties of their
charge, to blame severely this way of acting as dangerous for the spiritual
welfare of those engaged in the traffic and a shame to the Christian
name."
Kellerman has
just demonstrated to his reader that Catholics and other Christians have not
always and universally condemned slavery per se. And yet they believed they
did, or spoke as if they believed they did. Pope Gregory invokes the fourth
century Gregory of Nyssa, who did, indeed, articulately and on Christian
grounds condemn slavery. If only popes had followed Nyssen's words 1,444 years
previously.
The Bible tells
slave-owners to be good to their slaves. Kellerman says that this is like
telling a kidnapper to be good to his hostage. Kellerman quotes elderly former
slaves interviewed in the 1930s during FDR's presidency. Some former slaves say
nice things about their former Catholic masters. Others report vicious
treatment. One former slave says, "If'n you wants to know what unhappiness
means, jess'n you stand on the slave block and hear the auctioneer's voice
selling you away from the folks you love." The reality of that experience
makes a mockery of the concept of masters treating slaves kindly.
Catholic
abolitionism strengthened in the nineteenth century. Kellerman covers three
notable figures: Daniel O'Connell, an Irish statesman, Jaime Balmes, a Spanish
priest, and Parisian journalist Augustin Cochin. Balmes took an interesting
approach to the "the Church has always opposed slavery" position. He
said that earlier Christians might not have been aware of the long-term impact
of a belief system that preached full equality and demanded charity. "It
is not necessary to suppose," he wrote, "that the first Christians
knew the full force" Christianity would exercise on "the abolition of
slavery." "The sole force of Christian doctrines and the spirit of
charity that was spreading along with them throughout the earth attacked
slavery so vividly that sooner or later they had to carry out its complete
abolition, because it is impossible for society to remain for a long time in an
order of things that is in opposition to the ideas with which it is
imbued." Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the high impact abolitionist
novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, cited and praised Balmes.
French
journalist Augustin Cochin published L'Abolition de L'Esclavage in 1861.
Cochin's lengthy work included economic data supporting slavery's abolition.
Kellerman devotes his final historical chapter to Leo XIII, a fully
abolitionist pope. In 1888, Leo produced In plurimis, an encyclical
thoroughly denouncing slavery on Christian grounds, even as slavery was
abolished in Brazil.
Kellerman
closes his book with a carefully reasoned and fully supported appeal for
Catholic institutions to make restitution, as well as they can, to descendants
of slaves those institutions once owned. And Kellerman does not shy away from
the implications of his research. If the Church was wrong in the past – wrong
here meaning that popes advanced a position that defied Biblical teachings on
equality, human dignity, and charity – could the Church be wrong today?
Kellerman does not mention a few issues on which American Catholics disagree
with Church teaching. According to Pew polls, most American Catholics think
that homosexuals should be accepted. Most American Catholics think women should
be allowed to become priests, and most American Catholics think that priests
should be allowed to marry. Catholics have produced lengthy publications
addressing all of these issues. Their arguments are rooted in scripture and
tradition.
Danusha Goska
is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
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