While John Brown sat in the Jefferson County Jail awaiting his execution in 1859 after his failed attempt to spark an uprising at Harpers Ferry, a local Catholic priest visited him. The priest tried to persuade Brown of slavery’s legitimacy. After all, he told Brown, in St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, “we are informed that [St. Paul] sent back the fugitive slave Onesimus from Rome to his master.”
Brown was not persuaded. But the priest’s view was typical. Reform-minded Catholics abolished slavery in the early nineteenth century in countries such as France (1794, until Napoleon reinstated slavery in French colonies in 1802), Haiti (1804), and Mexico (1829). More ultramontane nineteenth-century Catholics, though, committed to Roman authority and, suspicious of the individualism and anti-Catholicism they detected beneath some abolitionist rhetoric, defined slavery as one among many hierarchical relationships. New York’s archbishop John Hughes saw no real difference between “the relations and obligations of those who own slaves, and those who are masters of hired servants, or the parents of children.” In the United States, France, Cuba, the Philippines and much of Latin America, those Catholics rarely became abolitionists. Pope Gregory XVI declared the slave trade immoral in 1839, but slavery itself remained theoretically permissible. The Holy Office matter-of-factly noted that slavery did not contravene “natural or divine law” as late as 1866.
Leo XIII, Leo XIV’s namesake, condemned slavery in the encyclical In plurimis (1888) just after predominantly Catholic Brazil became the last major nation to abolish the institution. He did so with a theological sleight of hand, declaring that the Church had always been opposed to slavery in principle, but had been wisely working toward its abolition over eighteen centuries. He contrasted this shrewd and patient amelioration with a putative tolerance of slavery within Islam.
This checkered history makes the two paragraphs on the Church and slavery in Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, all the more remarkable. The pope refers to the Catholic toleration of slavery as a “wound in Christian memory” and expresses “deep sorrow” for Catholic “complicity and blindness.”
Why did the pope make this apology? Until the archives open, we cannot be sure. One explanation is that Robert Prevost is newly aware of his family’s history in Catholic Louisiana, with relatives on his mother’s side identified in the U.S. census as Black or mixed race. Two other explanations are more probable. The first is the desire to integrate the history of slavery with the history of Catholic social thought. The linking term is “human dignity.” The two paragraphs on slavery appear at the end of a compelling analysis of human dignity in the era of artificial intelligence. In 1888, Leo XIII was the first pope to use the term “human dignity” and he did so when criticizing the institution of slavery.
Use of the term “human dignity” within Catholic circles accelerated in the 1930s, as popes and Catholic intellectuals attempted to combat a fascism willing to reduce men and women to their racial status and a communism willing to reduce them to their social class. Human dignity in this framing became inviolable. At exactly the same time, and for the same reasons, the Church’s long tolerance of slavery came under scrutiny. Black Catholics in North America and Africa raised the question to white colleagues repeatedly. When the French philosopher Jacques Maritain made one of his first visits to North America in the late 1930s, his hosts prepped him to respond to this question from Black Catholics: “What response should one make to the allegation that the Catholic Church justified slavery?”
After World War II, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the concept of human dignity became even more important. This helps explain why the bishops at the Second Vatican Council declared slavery an “infamy” in Gaudium et spes (1965). They made that declaration without any references. Neither did John Paul II provide any explanation when he declared slavery intrinsically evil in Veritatis splendor (1993). Leo XIV’s capsule history of human dignity, which recognizes slavery’s importance in the modern era, is a more candid reckoning.
This reckoning leads to a more speculative explanation of the inclusion of the two paragraphs. Leo XIV refers to Catholic social doctrine in Magnifica humanitas—not Catholic social teaching—which seems a heightened recognition of its importance alongside other doctrinal truths. A generation ago, the distinguished legal scholar and jurist John Noonan noted the relevance of the evolution of Church teaching on slavery for discussions of doctrinal development. Leo XIV uses exactly the same phrasing in his reference to the “development of [the Church’s] doctrine” on slavery.
Development can be a fighting word for philosophers and theologians, since it implies that things now declared settled might one day no longer be so. A Church that once tolerated slavery forbids it. Or as Leo XIV explains:
Although there was not always consistency in practice—given that slavery was long tolerated before being unequivocally condemned—there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized.
Does Leo XIV think other doctrines or practices require a more explicit recognition or further evolution? I have no idea. Placing an analysis of Church teaching on slavery in a document about artificial intelligence, though, does suggest something about how Leo XIV understands human dignity. It exists within history, as do all of us and as does a pilgrim Church.
