Slavery

As I walked by, the morning sun shot through the trees and called my attention to these blossoms on a neighbor's pumpkin(?) patch.
The 2nd reading for this Sunday is from St. Paul's Letter to Philemon, a very brief, very personal, and very persuasive letter in which Paul asks a Christian to free a slave.  That's the most common interpretation of the letter.  The slave escaped from Philemon, found his way to St. Paul, and became a Christian.  Paul sends him back but asks Philemon to receive him no longer as a slave but as "a beloved brother."  It is clear in this brief letter that Paul went along with his culture's acceptance of slavery.
I knew that our moral theology had come late to condemning slavery, so I started to read about it.
In four other letters St. Paul tells slaves to be subject to their masters (Eph 6:5-8; Col 3:22-25; 1 Tim 6:1; Tit 2:9-10).  In his First Letter St. Peter says, "Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh (2:18).
Church teaching through the centuries continued to support slavery, making a distinction between "unjust slavery" and "just slavery."  Even popes, bishops, and priests kept slaves.  The first archbishop of Baltimore had two black servants, one of whom was a slave.  In colonial times the Jesuits had slaves on their Maryland plantations.  It is not until the very end of the 19th century that church teaching caught up with the evolving culture and condemned slavery.
It is astonishing that a practice that we now know is very wrong could have been accepted and approved by Catholic moral teaching for nineteen centuries.  It is a blessing that it didn't take us long to catch up.  By the middle of the 20th century Catholics with their priests and religious were working for civil rights for people whose ancestors were slaves.