Gonzaga Witness

Issue date: 2/1/08 Section: Faith

In many ways the current dissent from Humanae Vitae parallels dissent from the Church's teachings on slavery in the 19th century. In the time leading up to and during the Civil War, Catholic bishops of the South did their best to reinterpret or ignore the Church's clear condemnation of racial slavery, which date from Pope Eugene IV's 1435 papal bull Sicut Dudum, which explicitly forbade slavery and excommunicated any Catholic who did not immediately free his slaves. The teaching was reinforced by Pope Paul III's 1537 bull Sublimus Deus, which condemned the idea that blacks were sub-human, and also condemned the claim, held by some Catholics, that slavery was a positive good because slaves could be forced to accept Catholicism. Finally, Gregory XVI's 1839 bull In Supremo reiterated the previous condemnations. In a purposeful misreading of the document and a blatant disregard of centuries of clear papal teachings, southern bishops rushed to assure politicians and citizens that In Supremo only condemned the slave trade, not domestic slavery. These bishops were so successful that the myth still persists that the Church did not condemn slavery until Pope Leo XIII's 1890 encyclical Catholicae Ecclesiae, long after the Civil War.

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