The Church now teaches that slavery is intrinsically evil. Her record before that is genuinely mixed: popes condemned enslavement repeatedly and from early on, and a pope also authorised it. The development is real, and so is the failure.
The Church blessed the slave trade. Papal bulls authorised the enslavement of Africans, Catholic religious orders owned slaves, and no pope condemned slavery as such until the nineteenth century — by which time abolition had been won by others. To claim continuity here is to rewrite history.
Put as strongly as those who press it put it. An objection worth answering is worth stating properly first.
Genuine development — the same truth, unfolded
The later teaching does not contradict the earlier but unfolds it — the same principle, applied with better knowledge or in changed conditions. This is the hardest verdict to earn, and the test is Newman's: does it preserve what came before, or overturn it?
The Church's answer here is not in dispute among faithful theologians. The argument this page answers comes from outside it.
The record
What was actually said, when, and by whom — with the documents linked wherever a public text exists.
- 1435
Eugene IV condemns the enslavement of the newly converted inhabitants of the Canary Islands and orders those enslaved restored to liberty, under pain of excommunication.
Sicut Dudum, 13 January 1435 - 1452
Nicholas V authorises Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate Saracens and pagans and consign them to perpetual servitude — a grant later read as licensing the Atlantic trade.
Dum Diversas, 18 June 1452 · read it - 1537
Paul III declares the indigenous peoples of the Americas rational men with rights to liberty and property, and forbids their enslavement — teaching that they are not to be deprived of freedom even though they are outside the faith.
Sublimis Deus, 2 June 1537 · read it - 1839
Gregory XVI condemns the slave trade outright, calling it unworthy of the Christian name, and forbids any cleric or layman to defend it.
In Supremo Apostolatus, 3 December 1839 · read it - 1965
Vatican II lists slavery among the practices that poison civilization and dishonour the Creator, alongside genocide, torture and trafficking.
Gaudium et Spes 27, 7 December 1965 · read it - 1993
John Paul II names slavery among the acts that are intrinsically evil — wrong always, everywhere, and regardless of circumstance or intention.
Veritatis Splendor 80, 6 August 1993 · read it - 2023
The Holy See formally repudiates the 'doctrine of discovery' and states that the bulls of the colonial era never were expressions of the Catholic faith.
Joint statement of the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Integral Human Development, 30 March 2023
The apologetic that says the Church always and consistently opposed slavery is not true, and a reader who checks will find that out. Nicholas V did authorise enslavement in 1452. Catholic institutions, dioceses and religious orders — including Jesuits in the United States — owned and sold human beings. Theologians distinguished 'just title' slavery, from captivity in war or as penal servitude, from the man-stealing they condemned, and that distinction was used for centuries to accommodate an evil. The condemnations were real and early and repeated; so was the failure to make them bite. Both belong in the record.
What developed, and what did not
The principle that was never absent is the one Paul III states in 1537 and grounds in nothing but reason and creation: these are men, they possess liberty and property by nature, and being outside the faith does not forfeit it. That is the seed. What took four centuries was for the Church to say the consequence out loud without qualification — that no title whatever can justify owning a person.
That is a real development in Newman's sense: the later teaching does not contradict Paul III, it completes him. What it does contradict is the scholastic accommodation, the 'just title' distinction that let churchmen condemn the trade while tolerating the institution. When John Paul II lists slavery as intrinsically evil, that accommodation is closed for good.
Why saying this plainly is the Catholic position
It is tempting to defend the Church by minimising, and the temptation should be refused — partly because the record will not bear it, and partly because the Church herself has stopped doing it. John Paul II asked pardon in the Jubilee of 2000 for the sins of the Church's children, naming among them those committed against the dignity of peoples. In 2023 the Holy See formally repudiated the doctrine of discovery.
There is also a properly theological reason. The claim Catholics make is not that Catholics have behaved well; the record of the Church is full of men who failed her teaching, including popes. The claim is narrower: that when the Church has taught definitively, she has not taught error. Slavery tests that claim and it survives it — because at no point did the Church define that slavery was good. She tolerated, accommodated, and was slow. That is a grave indictment of Christians. It is not a reversal of doctrine.
And the counter-witness is real too: Peter Claver, who spent forty years in Cartagena meeting the slave ships and baptized, by his own reckoning, three hundred thousand people the traders regarded as cargo; and Josephine Bakhita, kidnapped in Darfur, sold five times, freed by an Italian court, who died a Canossian sister and was canonized in 2000.
What binds a Catholic today
- ⛓That slavery is intrinsically evil — wrong always and everywhere, whatever the circumstances or intentions.
- ⛓That every human being possesses liberty and dignity by nature and not by grant of any authority.
- ⛓That the Church's tolerance of the institution for centuries was a failure of her children, and is acknowledged as such by the Holy See.
Follow it further
Every citation on this page was checked against the document it names, and linked where a public text exists. Where Catholics of good faith genuinely disagree, the page says so rather than pretending the question is settled.