‘Three cheers for the [Ultramontanist] abolitionist Pope!’

One of nineteenth-century Rome’s greatest minds, was Pope Gregory XVI. From the 1832 encyclical Mirari Vos:

This shameful font of indifferentism gives rise to that absurd and erroneous proposition which claims that liberty of conscience must be maintained for everyone. It spreads ruin in sacred and civil affairs, though some repeat over and over again with the greatest impudence that some advantage accrues to religion from it. “But the death of the soul is worse than freedom of error,” as Augustine was wont to say. When all restraints are removed by which men are kept on the narrow path of truth, their nature, which is already inclined to evil, propels them to ruin. Then truly “the bottomless pit” is open from which John saw smoke ascending which obscured the sun, and out of which locusts flew forth to devastate the earth. Thence comes transformation of minds, corruption of youths, contempt of sacred things and holy laws -- in other words, a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other. Experience shows, even from earliest times, that cities renowned for wealth, dominion, and glory perished as a result of this single evil, namely immoderate freedom of opinion, license of free speech, and desire for novelty.

Here We must include that harmful and never sufficiently denounced freedom to publish any writings whatever and disseminate them to the people, which some dare to demand and promote with so great a clamor. We are horrified to see what monstrous doctrines and prodigious errors are disseminated far and wide in countless books, pamphlets, and other writings which, though small in weight, are very great in malice. We are in tears at the abuse which proceeds from them over the face of the earth. Some are so carried away that they contentiously assert that the flock of errors arising from them is sufficiently compensated by the publication of some book which defends religion and truth. Every law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result. Is there any sane man who would say poison ought to be distributed, sold publicly, stored, and even drunk because some antidote is available and those who use it may be snatched from death again and again?

And from the exquisite 1839 In Supremo Apostolatus:

Placed at the summit of the Apostolic power and, although lacking in merits, holding the place of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who, being made Man through utmost Charity, deigned to die for the Redemption of the World, We have judged that it belonged to Our pastoral solicitude to exert Ourselves to turn away the Faithful from the inhuman slave trade in Negroes and all other men.

[...]

[D]esiring to remove such a shame from all the Christian nations, having fully reflected over the whole question and having taken the advice of many of Our Venerable Brothers the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, and walking in the footsteps of Our Predecessors, We warn and adjure earnestly in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce to servitude, or lend aid and favour to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not men but rather animals, having been brought into servitude, in no matter what way, are, without any distinction, in contempt of the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold, and devoted sometimes to the hardest labour. Further, in the hope of gain, propositions of purchase being made to the first owners of the Blacks, dissensions and almost perpetual conflicts are aroused in these regions.

We reprove, then, by virtue of Our Apostolic Authority, all the practices abovementioned as absolutely unworthy of the Christian name. By the same Authority We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what We have set forth in this Apostolic Letter.

The traditionalist-conservative opposition to the slave trade and, indeed, to slavery itself is something which goes well beyond a handful of English Tory radicals like Samuel Johnson, Beilby Porteus, Richard Oastler and William Wilberforce. Indeed, it seems rather remarkable nowadays to find an historical personage with so thoroughly anti-liberal a political bent as Pope Gregory XVI come out with so ‘progressive’ a view on race relations and slavery, that white Christians ‘should regard [black people] as their brothers’. And yet, it makes perfect sense that a man who favours restrictions on freedom of speech for the reason that ‘[e]very law condemns deliberately doing evil simply because there is some hope that good may result’ would also condemn the slave trade and the practice of slavery, which on these shores were regarded first by its ‘liberal-minded’ defenders (notably Thomas Jefferson) as a ‘necessary evil’.  But indeed, before and during the Civil War, In Supremo Apostolatus gave notable comfort and intellectual ammunition to Catholic adherents of the abolitionist (and later Union) causes.

It is an historical irony, particularly given the fact that the Civil Rights Movement in American history is still very much considered the progressive cause par excellence, that so many of the people most in favour of freeing blacks from slavery and giving them rights tended to be classical conservatives in the High Tory or Ultramontanist modes, whilst the defenders of slavery, the slave trade and slave regimes tended to be the ‘reformists’ and ‘modernising’ dictators.  Not just Jefferson, but also Andrew Jackson.  As mentioned before, Napoléon III and Maximilian of Mexico, probably following in the footsteps of the first Napoléon’s attempt to quash the Haitian Rebellion, then the latest in a line of slave uprisings toasted presciently by Samuel Johnson.  And also, sadly, the ‘reformist’ Pope Pius IX, whose modernising compromises, political impotence and general feeble-mindedness eventually handed the Papal States over to the liberal nationalists of Italy, and was responsible for some rather embarrassing and impolitic informal overtures of recognition to the illegal, slave-based Confederacy.

The most interesting part of Pope Gregory XVI’s encyclical, however, was the history behind it.  The British government, having committed itself in the wake of Wilberforce’s campaigns to the abolition of the slave trade, had attempted to get the Pope on their side for some time before, including an overture from Lord Castlereagh to Pope Pius VII which produced an encouraging, if non-binding anti-slave-trade brief; though Gregory was keenly aware of the political difficulties which could arise from taking queues from the Protestant British Empire, he was notably sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause (probably, as Dr John Quinn surmises, due to the Pope’s previous service in Propaganda Fide and his enthusiasm for evangelising in Africa, Asia and Latin America).  In Supremo Apostolatus was notable, moreover, because Pope Gregory chose to issue his condemnation of the slave trade publicly, showing that this issue mattered a great deal to him personally.  Sadly, though, in spite of In Supremo’s notable influence on abolitionists such as Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell and Yankee radical Orestes Brownson, the self-interested political wiffling of the American bishops (particularly in the Southern states) prevented it from becoming an influential force in the development of American Catholic political thought.