From the desk of the pastor for Feb. 8, 2026

The Lord be with you! Last week we started discussing the Church and the New World, especially her missionary efforts. Any conversation about the European powers and the Americas, however, requires comment on the slave trade. Eventually, the Church would clearly condemn slavery but that condemnation did not come quickly.

In fairness to the Church’s earlier accommodation, slavery has and likely always will exist. Certainly, the abolition of legalized slavery was a tremendous gain for the peoples who were oppressed by that nefarious institution. Outlawing a practice is not the same as eliminating it - look at drug use and the cartels for a useful example. Current estimates have 1.1 million modern slaves in the United States. The vast majority of such people are trafficked by the aforementioned drug cartels so that the number above is as much a guess as an estimate. Nevertheless, given the surveillance power of the modern state, it is a sobering thought that so many could be so trapped.

The Church has always condemned the slavery of Christians, and that problem disappeared as the Western Roman Empire did. In the Middle Ages slavery was seen as possibly just by many theologians, including St. Thomas Aquinas, so long as certain conditions were met - such as it being the punishment for capital crime or the result of a defensive war. This theological framework of what might be called “limited slavery” began to be extended during the colonization of the Americas.

Whereas Pope Eugene IV’s bull Sicut Dudum condemned the enslavement of baptized Christians in the Canary Islands, Pope Nicholas V authorized slavery against hostile Islamic powers in Africa. As the slave trade expanded from Africa and Asia to the Americas, Europeans made money. A lot of money. Moreover, the conditions of slavery worsened considerably in the Americas but especially in the Caribbean and in Spain’s Central and South American mines. Whereas the slaves held in the Old World could expect to live out their entire natural lives, some slaves in the New World would be likely to live three years on a sugar plantation or a silver mine.

Even before the Church clearly condemned slavery in 1888 with Pope Leo XIII’s In Plurimis, many saints worked to ameliorate or eliminate this evil. St. Peter Claver worked for over 40 years amongst the slaves of Columbia baptizing an estimated 300,000! The conditions of the slave trade were so bad that many slaves thought they were being shipped across the Atlantic to be eaten. The staggering loss of life and hardness of heart of the slave traders was truly a sign of the demonic.

In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, the Church would find a new way to articulate her moral teachings. Usually called the “Social Teachings,” the Church would confront the many excesses and dysfunctions of the industrialized world. As the world changes, we must keep vigil against the new disguises of the Enemy. May the Lord give us the wisdom to discern and the courage to speak.

In His Sacred Heart,
Fr. John