Waging the long spiritual fight against communism in Eastern
Europe and Greater China left little room for self-reflection, which has now
come to the forefront of Catholic consciousness. If the Church had the power to
initiate an orderly transition from communism to democracy in Eastern Europe,
what power did it have, and did not use, to end human slavery? From today’s
lenses, the Catholic Churches’ role in 1800’s slavery appears to be participation
and implicit approval. This must be reconciled.
Looking back to the 1890s, in the same papacy of Pope Leo
XIII, the Church made a switch from being soft on chattel slavery to being tough
on the mental slavery of Marxist communism. By this time, the Church had been stripped
of its earthly powers, particularly the papal holdings in Italy (prompting the Leonine
Prayers in the Traditional Latin Mass). The world changed greatly at the dawn
of the 20th century. France underwent secularization around 1905. Hereditary
monarchy was discredited after WWI. For centuries and millennia, monarchs held
a special place in state religions, setting the ‘tone’ for the population, and occasionally
practicing intolerance towards religious minorities in their realm. For the
Church, there was a real threat that monarchy across Europe would be replaced
by communism, as happened in Russia. If monarchy was obsolete, and communism
intolerable; then democracy, or transitional autocracy (as in Portugal, Spain
or the Republic of China), had to be embraced. Unlike most events in world
history, the people would decide, through ballot box or popular uprising, their
self-determination.
In previous
generations, the Church’s worldly concerns as landlord and investor had created
a close intertwining of Church and the Spanish and French colonies, where
chattel slavery was a common practice. In
theory, slaves in French and Spanish colonies had more rights than slaves in
English and Islamic areas. In French practice, mixed-race children were born
free; while this was not the case in the American South at large. In practice,
life was harsh for all agricultural slaves. Work in the Caribbean sugar
plantations was known to be a virtual death sentence. Would the Church have
placated itself on false platitudes? Emphasis on pastoral care emerged in the
late 1800s, with focus on various groups such as immigrants, Black Americans,
and Pacific Islanders. In this context, a focus on human liberation became a
natural outcrop of charitable work to feed, educate, and care for the disadvantaged.
Leo XIII’s successor, the pauper-born Pope Pius X, would understand that proclamations
of human dignity had to be backed by action.
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