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ORIGINAL: DomYngBlk

If the Church is evil then the act of breaking down the Communist walls of the Soviet Union by JP2 was an evil act?

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ORIGINAL: DomYngBlk
That the countless lives and treasure given to help the poor in Latin America is evil?

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ORIGINAL: DomYngBlk

So you are blaming the Church for the ills of Africa?

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ORIGINAL: DomYngBlk

And, yes, read the history.

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ORIGINAL: DomYngBlk

By the way , having some fucking brit talk to me about freedoms and rights is hilarious. First, your owned by the fucking queen. Second you, still today, have a standing army controlling and terrorizing the island of Ireland.

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ORIGINAL: DomYngBlk
By the way , having some fucking brit talk to me about freedoms and rights is hilarious. First, your owned by the fucking queen. Second you, still today, have a standing army controlling and terrorizing the island of Ireland. When you start taking responsibility for your fucking ills...come talk to me.

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ORIGINAL: RapierFugue
By the way, the irony of a young black man defending the Catholic church is too, too delicious. You do realise they claimed (and continued to claim, for years after the rest of the world woke up) that the slave trade was morally "right", because black African peoples were "lesser" human beings, and therefore weren't subject to any rights, privileges or protections?

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ORIGINAL: Anaxagoras

Rapier the 1965 Vatican II council explicitely rejected slavery as "infamy" and Popes before that also spoke out. Before the modern era the Church was part of a world which embraced slavery, both Christians and Muslims did. If anything their message on slavery was mixed through those times, occasionally sanctioning it and at other times censuring it.

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ORIGINAL: DomYngBlk

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ORIGINAL: RapierFugue
By the way, the irony of a young black man defending the Catholic church is too, too delicious. You do realise they claimed (and continued to claim, for years after the rest of the world woke up) that the slave trade was morally "right", because black African peoples were "lesser" human beings, and therefore weren't subject to any rights, privileges or protections?

By the way , having some fucking brit talk to me about freedoms and rights is hilarious. First, your owned by the fucking queen. Second you, still today, have a standing army controlling and terrorizing the island of Ireland. When you start taking responsibility for your fucking ills...come talk to me.

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ORIGINAL: RapierFugue

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ORIGINAL: Anaxagoras
Rapier the 1965 Vatican II council explicitely rejected slavery as "infamy" and Popes before that also spoke out. Before the modern era the Church was part of a world which embraced slavery, both Christians and Muslims did. If anything their message on slavery was mixed through those times, occasionally sanctioning it and at other times censuring it.

They condoned it at the time, and for many, many years afterwards, and indeed gave a "moral" basis for its practice.

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In the bull Sublimus Dei (1537), Pope Paul III forbade "unjust" kinds of enslavement relating to the indigenous peoples of the Americas (called Indians of the West and the South) and all other people. Paul characterized enslavers as allies of the devil and declared attempts to justify such slavery "null and void."

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The Jesuit reductions, highly organized rural settlements where Jesuit missionaries presided over Indian communities, were begun in 1609, and lasted until the suppression of the order in Spain in 1767. The Jesuits armed the Indians, who fought pitched battles with Portuguese Bandeirantes or slave-hunters. The Holy Office of the Inquisition was asked about the morality of enslaving innocent blacks (Response of the Congregation of the Holy Office, 230, March 20, 1686). The practice was rejected, as was trading such slaves. Slaveholders, the Holy Office declared, were obliged to emancipate and even compensate blacks unjustly enslaved.

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In 1839, Pope Gregory XVI issued a Bull, entitled In Supremo Apostolatus in which he condemned slavery, with particular reference to New World colonial slavery and the slave trade, calling it "inhumanum illud commercium."

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In 1888 Leo III issued a letter to the Bishops of Brazil and another in 1890, Catholicae Ecclesiae (On Slavery In The Missions). In both these letters the Pope singled out for praise twelve previous Popes who had made determined efforts to abolish slavery.

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In a letter to the bishops of Brazil (May 5, 1888), Pope Leo XIII recalled the Church's unceasing efforts in the course of centuries to get rid of colonial slavery and the slave trade and expressed his satisfaction that Brazil had at last abolished it. Pope Leo XIII wrote, "In the presence of so much suffering, the condition of slavery, in which a considerable part of the great human family has been sunk in squalor and affliction now for many centuries, is deeply to be deplored; for the system is one which is wholly opposed to that which was originally ordained by God and by nature"[117]

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In 1917, the new Code of Canon Law promulgated by Pope Benedict XV condemned the "selling a human being into slavery or for any other evil purpose".

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The Vatican II document "Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World" stated: "Whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torture...whatever insults human dignity, subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery ... the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed ... they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator."[118]

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Speaking in 1992 at the infamous “House of Slaves” on the Island of Gorée in Senegal, John Paul II declared: “It is fitting to confess in all truth and humility this sin of man against man, this sin of man against God.”

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Daniel O'Connell, the Roman Catholic leader of the Irish in Ireland, supported the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and in America. Garrison recruited him to the cause of American abolitionism. O'Connell, the black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, and the temperance priest Theobold Mayhew organized a petition with 60,000 signatures urging the Irish of the United States to support abolition.

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ORIGINAL: Anaxagoras

There was a strong anti-slavery trend in the Church too:

The anti slavery movement was also led by many defout Catholics.

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ORIGINAL: RapierFugue

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ORIGINAL: Anaxagoras
There was a strong anti-slavery trend in the Church too:

The anti slavery movement was also led by many defout Catholics.

But the Catholic Church, which is what is under discussion, had an official, sanctioned, pro-slavery position and, furthermore, defended its position vigorously, sometimes (indeed often) by denigrating the victims of slavery.

In all honesty though, you could give them a "bye" on this topic and there'd still be enough left to hang the lot of them a hundred times over :)

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ORIGINAL: Anaxagoras

Rapier the Vatican is the very core of the Catholic Church, the Pope's word by many is seen as not subject for discussion. While a few popes accepted slavery, the majority did not and quite a number actually spoke out about it harshly. This was at a time when slavery was largely accepted socially in the Western world. Thus you can't generalise as you did.

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ORIGINAL: Anaxagoras

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ORIGINAL: RapierFugue
By the way, the irony of a young black man defending the Catholic church is too, too delicious. You do realise they claimed (and continued to claim, for years after the rest of the world woke up) that the slave trade was morally "right", because black African peoples were "lesser" human beings, and therefore weren't subject to any rights, privileges or protections?

Rapier the 1965 Vatican II council explicitely rejected slavery as "infamy" and Popes before that also spoke out. Before the modern era the Church was part of a world which embraced slavery, both Christians and Muslims did. If anything their message on slavery was mixed through those times, occasionally sanctioning it and at other times censuring it.

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ORIGINAL: RapierFugue

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ORIGINAL: Anaxagoras
Rapier the Vatican is the very core of the Catholic Church, the Pope's word by many is seen as not subject for discussion. While a few popes accepted slavery, the majority did not and quite a number actually spoke out about it harshly. This was at a time when slavery was largely accepted socially in the Western world. Thus you can't generalise as you did.

I'll repeat it just one more time, since you seem to be having issues at comprehension; the Catholic Church's position on slavery at the time, and for many years afterwards, was that it condoned such actions and, furthermore, did so by denigrating those who were victims of slavery.

You feel free to get into a "number of angels on the head of a pin" defence by all means, but the facts I've stated are precisely that - facts.