Saturday, May 1, 2021

Two Slaveries and the Church

 

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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