Catholic Social Teaching (Part Three)

Dignity and respect for individuals is the foundation of the social teaching and the institution of slavery tears at that foundation.

For thousands of years slavery was as much a part of human civilization as the family, and rarely commented on, except by the Catholic Church.

Though the Apostles largely spoke of it neutrally, it was also stressed that all were equal before God—free people and slaves—and it was this dividing line, between freedom and coercion that so clearly divided the pagan world from the Catholic, noted by Rodger Charles S. J. (1998):

“Our awareness of the importance of personal freedom makes it difficult to understand the phenomena of slavery in times past. Firstly, we forget that in ancient simpler societies freedom was not the obvious or desirable goal. Security was more important—membership of a clan or tribe, which offered a recognized place according to some customary law in return for observing the conventions. Secondly, all cultures accepted that those taken in war, or who were guilty of certain crimes, should be enslaved. They provided the pool of labour to do the hard or unpleasant work that free men were reluctant to do, or simply provided cheap labour. No-one could imagine any other way to order human affairs.” Christian Social Witness and Teaching: The Catholic Tradition from Genesis to Centesimus Annus, Volume 1, From Biblical Times to the Late Nineteenth Century. (P. 25)

Today, the war against Islamic Extremism is a war between coercion and freedom, for what most clearly marks that part of the world informed by the practice of Islamic Extremism is the continuing reality of slavery.

This is discussed in the recent article by Robert Spencer in First Things

Slavery, Christianity, and Islam
By Robert Spencer
Monday, February 4, 2008, 7:45 AM

It has become a feature of today’s atheist chic to shy bricks at Christianity for its record on slavery. This is part of a larger assault on Western history and society, which, by accident or design, plays into the hands of those who are today mounting on a global scale a sweeping and explicit cultural challenge to Judeo-Christian as well as post-Christian values. The fundamentally most misunderstood and overlooked aspect of today’s defense against the global jihad is this challenge that Jihadists make to Western values, which are in large part Judeo-Christian. Combine this with a historical critique that relentlessly portrays the West as the aggressors against the rest of the world, and as uniquely responsible for its evils, and Westerners’ will to defend something as rotten as Western civilization begins to ebb away.

This is the concern of my book Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t—which I wrote in order to counter these tendencies and answer the Islamic cultural critique. For in fact, taken at face value, the Bible condones slavery. The Apostle Paul says flatly: “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ” (Eph. 6:5). He wasn’t saying anything remotely controversial (and of course has been criticized for apparently accepting the cultural status quo instead of challenging it). No culture on earth, Christian or otherwise, ever questioned the morality of slavery until relatively recent times.

But in the popular mind the onus for slavery is squarely on the West. When Britain commemorated the two hundredth anniversary of its abolition of the slave trade in March 2007, Prime Minister Tony Blair called it “an opportunity for the United Kingdom to express our deep sorrow and regret for our nation’s role in the slave trade and for the unbearable suffering, individually and collectively, it caused.” Britain’s role in the slave trade? Some Americans might be surprised to learn that the British, or anyone besides American southerners, ever owned slaves, since after coming through American schools as they stand today many people no doubt have the impression that slavery was invented in Charleston and Mobile. “The American education system,” observes Mark Steyn, “teaches it as such—as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition.”

However, as Steyn details, it was a cross-cultural fact of life for centuries: “In reality, it was more like the common cold—a fact of life. The institution predates the word’s etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Eric Metaxas puts it, ‘Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.’”

Likewise unacknowledged has been the role that Christian principles played in the abolition of slavery in the West, which was an enterprise unprecedented in the annals of human history. The roots of abolitionism can be traced to the Church’s practice of baptizing slaves and treating them as human beings equal in dignity to all others. St. Isidore of Seville (560–636) declared that “God has made no difference between the soul of the slave and that of the freedman.” His statement was rooted in what St. Paul told the slaveowner Philemon about his runaway slave Onesimus: “Perhaps this was why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but as more than a slave, as a beloved brother” (Phil. 15–16).