A Complicated Witness: The Catholic Church and Slavery

While Protestant voices were divided between oppressors and revivalist abolitionists, the Catholic Church’s stance on slavery in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries was more complex — a mixture of condemnation and complicity.

Rome issued occasional denunciations of enslavement, yet Catholic institutions were deeply entangled in the system itself. Bishops and priests often minimized or re-interpreted papal teaching, while religious orders owned enslaved people to sustain their missions.

The result was a complicated witness: a Church that proclaimed the equal dignity of all people before God yet failed to embody that conviction when confronted with the moral demands of freedom. The tension between creed and conscience — between the theology of human dignity and the politics of empire — marked Catholicism’s long struggle with slavery.

Early Condemnations and Early Evasions

In 1537, Pope Paul III issued Sublimis Deus, declaring that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were “truly men” and “capable of understanding the faith,” possessing natural rights to liberty and property. Enslaving them, the bull warned, was the work of “the enemy of the human race.”¹
Yet the decree’s impact was short-lived. Under pressure from the Spanish Crown, Rome quickly issued the letter Non Inde Ipsa (1538), which limited its scope. Colonists and clergy simply re-defined who counted as “Indigenous,” excluding Africans from the protection the bull implied. The Church had made a moral declaration — but it lacked enforcement, and empire supplied the loopholes.

Religious Orders and the Missionary Paradox

Catholic orders embodied both prophetic resistance and profound contradiction. Missionaries such as Bartolomé de las Casas denounced the brutal enslavement of Indigenous peoples, yet in his early writings he proposed importing Africans as a “solution.” He later repented, calling all slavery incompatible with the gospel.²

Others did not follow his conversion. By the seventeenth century, Jesuit plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean, and Maryland, as well as estates held by Franciscans and Dominicans, owned enslaved Africans and Indigenous laborers.³ These orders baptized, catechized, and educated the enslaved — while simultaneously treating them as property. Their theology proclaimed universal grace; their economics practiced selective humanity.

Papal Teaching in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

In 1741, Pope Benedict XIV issued Immensa Pastorum Principis, urging humane treatment of enslaved persons and forbidding the enslavement of newly converted Indigenous people, but stopping short of naming slavery itself as sin.⁴

After the Napoleonic wars, Pope Pius VII joined British diplomats at the Congress of Vienna (1815) in calling for an end to the transatlantic slave trade — condemning the traffic, not the institution.⁵

The strongest pre–Civil War statement came from Pope Gregory XVI, whose bull In Supremo Apostolatus (1839) condemned “the inhuman traffic in Negroes and all other men” and urged Catholics to suppress it.⁶ Yet US bishops such as John England of Charleston and Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia insisted that the papal condemnation applied only to the trade, not to domestic slavery.⁷ Papal principle again yielded to pastoral prudence and local politics. The moral voice of Rome was loud enough to be quoted but quiet enough to be ignored.

Catholicism in the United States: Compromise and Conscience

The contradiction became most visible in the American Church.
Maryland Jesuits, whose missions dated to the 1630s, owned hundreds of enslaved Africans. In 1838, they sold 272 men, women, and children to Louisiana planters to pay debts at Georgetown College (now Georgetown University).⁸ The sale financed Catholic education even as it violated the Church’s own teaching on the equal souls of all believers.

Across the South, bishops and priests defended slavery as part of the social order. In the North, bishops avoided taking sides, fearing disunity and alienating immigrant Catholics already suspected of disloyalty. Irish and German laity, seeking assimilation, often aligned with the pro-slavery Democratic Party and distanced themselves from abolitionist movements they viewed as Protestant and radical.

Yet within this compromised Church, enslaved and free Black Catholics preserved a living faith. They blended African spiritual traditions with Marian devotion, saints’ feasts, and Catholic ritual — creating a distinct Afro-Catholic spirituality.⁹ Their perseverance was itself a quiet theology: a belief that grace could outlast the sins of its institutions.

Theological Fault Lines

Behind these contradictions lay the logic of Catholic moral reasoning.

• Theological anthropology: Doctrine affirmed that every person bears the imago Dei, yet colonial practice re-classified Africans and Indigenous peoples as “naturally servile.”

• Moral casuistry: By distinguishing between the slave trade (an abuse) and slavery itself (a tolerated condition), theologians preserved intellectual coherence while evading moral courage.

• Ecclesial politics: Bishops feared that forceful condemnation would fracture the Church or endanger its property.

Thus a universal Church became provincial — defending its unity even at the cost of its witness.

After the Civil War: Toward Clarity

Only after abolition swept much of the Western world did Rome align fully with anti-slavery principles. Later social encyclicals, such as Leo XIII’s In Plurimis (1888) to Brazil and Rerum Novarum (1891), affirmed human dignity and implicitly repudiated slavery as contrary to natural law.¹⁰ But by then the moral damage was done.

For the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Catholic position can be summarized starkly:

Condemn the trade as immoral.
Denounce cruelty as unchristian.
But stop short of calling slavery itself a sin.

A Complicated Legacy

Compared with Protestant divisions — where revivalists made abolition a gospel issue while Reformed and Southern denominations defended bondage — the Catholic Church’s record was one of institutional caution and moral ambiguity. Rome condemned trafficking, yet Catholic orders profited from it; bishops re-interpreted papal decrees to suit local economies; and a Church that preached the sanctity of life failed to protect the lives enslaved within its own fold.

The Catholic witness on slavery was not silence but half-measure — a theology that knew better yet rarely acted. Between Paul III’s vision of human dignity and the Jesuits’ sale of souls lay the distance between belief and justice.

In that gap, enslaved Catholics bore the truest witness. They kept the faith the Church betrayed — singing, praying, and hoping that one day the gospel would mean what it said.

Their endurance stands as the Church’s unacknowledged confession:
orthodoxy without courage is moral failure by another name.

Notes

1. Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III, 1537, in Bullarium Romanum, vol. 5; English trans. in Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), 89–93.

2. Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, bk. 3; Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

3. Nicholas P. Cushner, Why Have You Come Here? The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 162–80.

4. Pope Benedict XIV, Immensa Pastorum Principis (1741), in Acta Benedicti XIV, vol. 1.

5. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 229–30.

6. Pope Gregory XVI, In Supremo Apostolatus (1839); English trans. in Claudia Carlen, ed., The Papal Encyclicals 1740–1878 (Raleigh, NC: McGrath, 1981), 203–5.

7. John T. McGreevy, Catholics and the American Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 33–38; see also John England, Letter to John Forsyth, 1840, Charleston Diocesan Archives.

8. Rachel L. Swarns, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church (New York: Random House, 2023).

9. Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 28–35.

10. Pope Leo XIII, In Plurimis (1888), sec. 4; Rerum Novarum (1891); Charles E. Curran, Catholic Social Teaching 1891–Present (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 6–9.

Bibliography

Carlen, Claudia, ed. The Papal Encyclicals 1740–1878. Raleigh, NC: McGrath, 1981.
Castro, Daniel. Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Cushner, Nicholas P. Why Have You Come Here? The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Curran, Charles E. Catholic Social Teaching 1891–Present: A Historical, Theological, and Ethical Analysis. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Davis, Cyprian. The History of Black Catholics in the United States. New York: Crossroad, 1990.
Hanke, Lewis. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949.
McGreevy, John T. Catholics and the American Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.
Swarns, Rachel L. The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church. New York: Random House, 2023.
Leo XIII. In Plurimis (1888); Rerum Novarum (1891).

Protestant Divisions vs. Catholic Complicity

A Comparative Table of Theology, Practice, and Witness (17th–19th Centuries)

Interpretive Summary

Both communions confronted the same moral crisis but responded differently.

• Protestants fractured publicly, allowing moral clarity to emerge through conflict.

• Catholics maintained institutional unity but muted prophetic witness.

In both traditions, enslaved Christians became the truest theologians — living proof that the gospel could outlast the very institutions that profited from their bondage.