did the catholic church have any involvement in the slave trade or the holocaust?

Answer 1

+ Slavery +

The Catholic Church was one of the first groups to condemn slavery.

The Bible does not condemn slavery. Colossians 3:22 even states, "Slaves, obey your human masters in everything."

This was much debated before and during the US Civil War.

The condemnation of slavery is one of those nonbiblical doctrines that Catholics have developed through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit over the centuries.

+ In 1462, Pius II declared slavery to be "a great crime" (magnum scelus)

+ In 1537, Paul III forbade the enslavement of the Indians

+ Urban VIII forbade it in 1639

+ Benedict XIV forbade it in 1741

+ Pius VII demanded of the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, the suppression of the slave trade

+ Gregory XVI condemned it in 1839

+ In the Bull of Canonization of the Jesuit Peter Claver, one of the most illustrious adversaries of slavery, Pius IX branded the "supreme villainy" (summum nefas) of the slave traders.

+ Leo XIII, in 1888, addressed a letter to the Brazilian bishops, exhorting them to banish from their country the remnants of slavery -- a letter to which the bishops responded with their most energetic efforts, and some generous slave-owners by freeing their slaves in a body, as in the first ages of the Church.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14036a.htm

+ The Holocaust +

It is only right to place the Jews first on the list of the Nazis' victims.

However millions of Catholics and other Christians were also killed. No one knows exactly how many. I've seen claims of up to 42,000,000 but I could not find documentation for this number.

One example, over 6 million Poles perished during WWII. That was 22% of the population of the country. Three million were Jews. Most of the rest were Catholics.

Also remember most the the allied military dead were Christians.

http://www.holycross.edu/departments/history/vlapomar/hiatt/catholic.htm

+ With love in Christ.

Answer 2

Popes have spoken out against slavery for over 500 years, so while some Catholics probably were involved in the slave trade, it wasn't condoned by the church.

Pius XII, the pope at the time of the Holocaust, is often criticized as doing too little too late to stop it. That's pretty true -- publicly, he didn't denounce it very much. He did issue some fairly bland comments about the human cost of the war and things like that.

However, towards the end of the war, he worked to get other countries to accept refugees fleeing Nazi oppression. And it was recently unveiled that he was secretly active in helping the Catholic Church hide Rome's Jews inside monasteries and convents, and tried to assist in a failed plot to overthrow Hitler at some point during the war.

Answer 3

By the term "Catholic Church" one will assume the Vatican and local hierarchy of each city and country. Regarding the slave trade, research who transported the slaves. If they were Spanish then likely they were Catholic. Catholics were involved in every social problem in history as were any other religious group simply by their numbers. But it does not mean those acting were abiding by the rulings from the Vatican. Regarding Nazi Germany, research the Reich Concordant where by an agreement was reached between the Nazi Party and the Catholic Church for the silence of the clergy in the country. In return for silence from the pulpit, the Vatican profited monetarily. Not everyone obeyed and many spoke out from the pulpit and paid for their disobedience at the hands of the Nazi's.

Answer 4

for sure the Catholic Church had a hand interior the slave commerce. The Catholic church is conscious that the "slaves" were Moorish - it particularly is a those who ruled over Spain which consisted of African and Arabian Berbers. The Africans claimed to be the unique Jewish religiously and bodily. The Moors were expelled from of Spain in 1492. The slave commerce start up round this date. The Christians conquered Spain in 1492. they're those who moved the Moors to west Africa. the position the slave commerce continued. even although that wasn't the purely route for those Moorish. They were offered into Europe and distinct parts of the midsection east. They understand for a shown actuality that Black individuals would if truth be told have Jewish history of their ancestral blood line.

Answer 5

The church attitude toward slavery varied throughout history, for instance, in the
Late 17th century: The institution of slavery was a integral part of many societies worldwide. The Roman Catholic church only placed two restrictions on the purchase and owning of slaves:
They had to be non-Christian.
They had to be captured during "just" warfare. i.e. in wars involving Christian armies fighting for an honorable cause.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_slav1.htm

Concerning the Holocaust, a search returned:
http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?go_button.x=11&go_button.y=12&s=catholic+church+holocaust&ff=1

Answer 6

The Slave Trade, the largest, most socially and economically transformative institution in European history up ‘til then, left no major European power structure untouched and every major power BROKER (including The Church) benefited from and either directly or indirectly backed, funded, or supported The Trade. The Slave Trade was carried out by, it benefitted, effected, and impacted directly AND indirectly, ALL the major European powers, every one of the European monarchs, the Catholic Church, and the nascent guild system of growing autonomy in the mercantile business dealings of European city-states.
Also, The Trade entailed the conscious, sober, self-interested, deliberative input and assistance of dozens of early corporations and of scores of state apparatuses, interest cliques, missionaries (such as the Jesuits), and armies. It entailed profits for and the enlargement of Papal Palace wealth as well as the enlargement of the Vatican "Cohors Pedestris Helvetiorum a Sacra Custodia Pontificis" (the so-called Vatican Swiss Guard and Vatican Army). See the book, "Christianity, The Papacy, and Mission in Africa" by Richard Gray, particularly chapter 4, "The Papacy and Africa in the Seventeenth Century" and that chapter's sub section, "African Embassies and the Creation of Propaganda Fide." This book, among many, simply confirms the utter worldliness of The Church, not necessarily recording actual receipts of purchase of African souls with Popes' signatures on them, but the reality, quite in contradiction of the Catholic fantasy of Propaganda Fide, that The Vatican and the Vatican Bank were monetary powers in the world and full participants in the corruption of the world during the epoch of The Corporate Trade.
Yes, for those who don't want to admit it, of COURSE the Catholic Church was involved, foot, knee, chest, and cap in the Corporate, Trans-Atlantic Triangle Slave Trade's profits and shared in its transformative wealth; wealth that, let's be clear, rescued Western and Central Europe from the devastating aftermath (impoverishment and population decimation) of two major Bubonic Plague die offs, of several invasions by the Mongols, and of the catastrophic collapse of the monarchy and the resulting chaos and social turmoil that ensued.
Not all, but certainly the more corrupt of the individual popes were definitely as personally involved in funding the project of slavery and in receiving, banking, laundering, and investing the fabulous wealth that poured into every social, political, and economic institution of Europe between 1500 and 1800! Papal and Vativan power brokers profited mightily from the corrupt, bloody, primitive accumulation that all of Europe enjoyed from the sale and transport of millions of African souls into an involuntary servitude; this is an obvious truth simply because the Church hierarchy, both its novitiate and its temporal cohorts, it's Holy See, it's political officiate, and its Curia in association with Portugal--the first major early capitalist slave trading nation--all formed an indisputably firm network of greed and profit shared between states, The Church, and the monarchy of Western Europe.
History is clear; despite Catholic apologists who tout the Vatican self-absolving propaganda as a get-out-of-history free card (that The Catholic Church and Her papal lineage bravely and piously denounced slavery and officially rejected it as a crime). Yes, well, involuntary servitude produced lavish wealth just the same that every European state (including the independent state known as The Vatican) benefited from. Popes habitually dealt with individual monarchs who openly brokered slavery profits, profits from warmongering, from prostitution, from child slavery, from indentured servitude in the New World (known as 'White slavery'), from international extortion, and of course, the greater investment into 'laundered' mercantilist markets, of Triangle Slave Trade profits.
From Father John Francis Maxwell's 1975 book, “The Catholic Church and Slavery”, we get the actual Vatican history of slavery being openly authorized by popes and by Vatican councils, as well as the simultaneous Catholic declarations of prohibition; Maxwell writes that those outside The Church unfamiliar with the subtext of Vatican discourses, as well as those who call themselves Catholics who naively ingest Vatican propaganda, are unfortunately ‘unfamiliar with the intricacies of Church teaching and law'. These discourses, Maxwell charges, and these intricacies, are contradictory, 'often involving the same Pope,' and reflecting common and longstanding concepts of permissible “just slavery”, and “unjust slavery.” Catholic hierarchies often condoned enslavement of 'savages' such as the natives of The Caribbean, Africans, and of 'heathens' such as Jews and Asians. See Bic Biorseth's, "Roman Catholic Church Teaching on Slavery." (at: catholicamericanthinker.com)
Not that the Catholic Church is any MORE guilty of being implicated in The Trade than any of or all of the other European power brokers. This is just to offer the argument that they are not defacto fide somehow exempt from historical involvement.
Remember finally that European monarchs habitually paid fealty to Papal power regimes, and sometimes found themselves under attack by Papal armies, extensions of the Cohors Pedestris Helvetiorum a Sacra Custodia Pontificis--the Vatican Swiss Guard that routinely swelled into army sized invasionary forces to fight wars for its popes. Portions of that fealty were based, for two hundred years, in the astounding wealth (as much as and some say more than 1 billion pounds Sterling) generated by both European and Aboriginal (the Taino, the Arawak, and the Caribe natives who suffered genocide in the Caribbean Basin), and African and even East Indian slaves and wage slaves and indentures.
The thousands of workers and soldiers of slave trading corporations and of merchant charter companies as well as priests, evangelists, lay priests, church hierarchy, business officials and bankers of the Catholic Church, as well as the lesser 'businessmen' who did covert business with the Vatican Bank-- the suppliers, explorers, slave catchers, freebooters, mercenaries, merchants, entrepreneurs, and middlemen. All worked to bring about, maintain, and expand The Trade's profits in Europe.

Professor Rayfield A. Waller
Department of Africana Studies
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI