Damned Catholics

[Fake Messiah]

Here are some of the Catholic bishops who enslaved Black people in America

Less explored has been the involvement of the highest echelons of the Church hierarchy in the trafficking of human flesh from Africa to the New World. Indeed, many Catholic bishops were participants in the trade and exploitation of Black bodies, though historians are in many ways still picking up the pieces.

The first European contact with what would become the United States was in the Virgin Islands and in Puerto Rico. Enslaved Africans were brought in chains to the latter during the early 1500s. Slavery would continue on in Puerto Rico for nearly four centuries, with a number of prelates taking part.

The Spanish bishop Alonso Manso, who headed the Diocese of Puerto Rico from 1511 to 1539, was among them, as were his successors in Bishops Juan Damián López de Haro, OSST and Manuel Jiménez Pérez, OSB. Other Catholic prelates were also slaveholders in Puerto Rico, but records are not always clear on the specifics.

Bishop John Carroll, SJ was the first Catholic prelate there, appointed Bishop of Baltimore in 1789. He founded Georgetown University, supported the use of enslaved labor in building the school, and personally owned at least two enslaved African Americans, one of whom he later sold. His immediate successors as archbishop, Leonard Neale, SJ and Ambrose Maréchal, PSS, were also traffickers, as was Samuel Eccleston, PSS.

The Diocese of Bardstown, which covered all of what was then the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains, was also home to slaveholding prelates: Bishops Benedict Flaget, a Sulpician who later became Bishop of Louisville in 1841, and Martin John Spalding, who became Archbishop of Baltimore during the Civil War. Both were vocal critics of abolitionism and worked to justify slaveholding even on a moral and theological level.

The Diocese of Cincinnati was carved out from Bardstown in 1821, with the Dominican prelate Edward Fenwick as its first head. Near the historic St. Rose Priory in Springfield, Kentucky, he had previously run the College of St. Thomas Aquinas, where future Confederate president Jefferson Davis was one of the first students. Fenwick himself inherited enslaved persons from his father, later growing the number to at least 19. His successor, Bishop John Baptist Purcell, likely owned African Americans while serving as president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland.

Unsurprisingly, antebellum Catholic bishops in the Deep South generally supported slavery, though usually as a domestic reality rather than an international inevitability. Among them was Bishop John England of Charleston, who claimed to hate slavery but facilitated its endurance. His successors, Ignatius Reynolds and Patrick Lynch, continued the practice and enslaved people directly.

In the Spanish Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, Bishop Louis DuBourg likewise engaged in the slave trade even while unsuccessfully attempting to take his episcopal seat in New Orleans. Rejected by his flock, he instead anchored his cathedral in St. Louis, then a part of his ecclesiastical territory. Later recalled to France, he was succeeded in Missouri by the Vincentian priest Joseph Rosati, another slaveholder, who became Bishop of St. Louis in 1827. The enslaver Peter Kenrick became archbishop in 1847.

(The Vatican originally intended that Rosati be succeeded by John Timon, who is also believed to have been a trafficker. He rejected the appointment, however, and later became the first Bishop of Buffalo.)

Numerous Catholic institutions across the country continue to bear the names of Catholic bishops who directly participated in slavery, including universities, high schools, student halls, historical landmarks, and even a diocesan seminary. Some bishops have intervened to block historians from uncovering the full history of slaveholding in their diocesan archives.

https://www.blackcatholicmessenger.org/s...n-america/