Catholicism and Slavery: Setting the Record Straight

It’s easy to forget that the institution of slavery has constituted a social norm in human history. From the grand perspective of time, its supporters and defenders have far outnumbered its critics and condemners.

The Catholic Church is often chastised for tolerating, even promoting, slavery as Catholic nations expanded their empires into Africa and the New World. But a fair reading of the evidence shows that the Church was more often on the side of the angels—and the enslaved.

While one can find intimations of unease with slavery in some Greek and Roman thinkers, there is little question that it was Christianity that introduced the deepest doubts about both the legitimacy of slavery as a practice and the widespread cultural habit of viewing entire categories of people as natural slaves.

This runs against the common narrative that it is only with the various Enlightenments that slavery was subsequently challenged. With some notable exceptions, Enlightenment thinkers were either silent on the topic or decidedly ambiguous. In fact, the institution that most often was the target of many Enlightenment thinkers—the Catholic Church—turns out to have been consistent and early in its condemnation of slavery.

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