Father Joel Panzer.

By the way, the author of "The Popes and Slavery" seems to be an Army chaplain.

Here is an interview with him in Iraq.

The dude's a mensch.

Here is an excerpt from Father Panzer's book.

Amazon Review - The Popes and Slavery.


Please go here and give me helpful vote.

We need to knock the anti-Catholic reviews out of first place.

				The Popes and Slavery by Joel S. Panzer Edition: Paperback Price: $7.95 Availability: In Stock		32 used & new from $4.05
The papacy stood athwart the development of modern slavery., September 2, 2012 Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: The Popes and Slavery (Paperback) Did you know: * That nearly sixty years before Columbus' discovery of the New World, in 1435, Pope Eugene IV condemned the enslavement of the natives of the Canary Islands by the Portugese? (Sicut Didum)(Whereas the Enlightened British were still enlaving Africans into the 18th Century.) * That Alexander IV's division of the New World was not an imprimatur to conquer but was premised on the consent of the natives to the overlordship of European powers? (Ineffabilis et Summi Patris.)(Whereas the secular powers of Europe and North America continued to conquer native lands well into the 19th Century.) * That Paul III affirmed the human rights of the natives of the New World in 1537?(Sublimis Deus)(Whereas there were European scientists and liberal thinkers who were still disputing the human rights of Africans, American Indians and other native peoples into the 20th Century, and in 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney would infamously hold in the Dred Scott decision that the authors of the Constitution had viewed all blacks as "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect..." (As a Catholic, Taney would have done better by following the teachings of Sublimis Deus rather than 19th Century racial science.)) * That Pope Paul III taught in 1537 that war could not be waged against a people simply because they were not Christian? (Altitudo Divini Consilii)(Whereas secular powers would use that claim to extend their power in Africa and North America for the next 400 years.) * That popes in the 17th Century re-iterated their predecessors anti-slavery teachings? (Commissum Nobis)(Whereas, at the same time, the liberal European powers of England and Holland were taking over the slave trade.) * That Pope Gregory XVI condemned slavery and the slave trade in 1839?(In Supremo)(Whereas, at the same time, Americans were contemplating extending slavery to new regions of the Western Hemisphere and had plotted returning Haiti to the slave-owners.) * That Pope Leo XIII called for the ending of slavery in Africa in 1890? (Catholicae Ecclesiae)(Whereas, in a few short years, King Leopold of Belgium would turn central Africa into the "heard of darkness" that would be resolutely ignored by liberal Europe for over a decade.) All of this may come as a surprise to those who have been taught through various forms of popular entertainment that somehow the Catholic Church bears for enabling or promoting the evils of the European conquest of the New World and the enslavement of Indians and Africans. For my part, I was surprised to find that Inter Caetera, by which Alexander VI purportedly divided up the New World between Portugal and Spain was not a license to conquer and exploit but was premised on the people of the New world freely chosing the Kings of Spain and Portugal as their sovereigns. (p. 13.) Likewise, given the constant slur that Christianity was indifferent to or supportive of slavery, it is astounding to discover that sixty years before Columbus, the pope was ordering that natives of newly discovered lands be released from slavery. The purpose of the "The Popes and Slavery" by Father Joel Panzer is to collect the primary material on the papal encyclicals and to provide some brief background material on the history, purpose and effect of the encyclicals. Father Panzer succeeds in his appointed task: this book is an excellent resource for primary source materials on the subject of papal teachings on slavery. I have often had to go to the internet to get copies of Sicut Dudum and I was not aware of a few of the other sources. The encyclicals and Instructions from the Vatican on particular circumstances involving slavery are collected in Latin and English in the appendix. The format is neatly put together and the commentary is easily accessible. My criticism of the book is that it does not go far enough, which, admittedly, was the express intention of Father Panzer. Father Panzer advises the reader that he doesn't intend to discuss "just title servitude." "Just title servitude" is a form of servitude or slavery that arises from being properly convicted of a crime or being a soldier captured in battle. Father Panzer alludes to the concept, but apart from pointing out that "just title servitude" exists into the present day - as recently as 1949, the Geneva Convention permitted "the detaining power to utilize the labor of prisoners of war" (p. 3), Father Panzer does not spend much time discussing the theory of just title servitude. Obviously, a reader or reviewer can't criticize an author for what he has not written, but in this case, the failure misses an opportunity to explain to readers immersed in the shallow narcissism of modernity just how revolutionary the papal precedents were. For example, several reviewers have sought to minimize the development of anti-slavery doctrine within Catholicism on the spurious grounds that the Church did not condemn slavery tout court until 1890 "when abolitionism had already succeeded in the Western world." Unfortunately, this is the kind of ambiguity that needs an explanation. The Church has never condemned all forms of involuntary servitude, which is what is meant by "slavery," because the Church has never condemned "punishment." Incarceration in prison is a form of "involuntary servitude," a kind of slavery. This is a non-trivial point. In fact, it was only in 2012, that Vermont finally got rid of what most people would call "slavery" wherein persons held in Vermont prisons were forced to work, even though they had never been convicted of any crime: "A man who claimed he was forced to do manual labor while detained pending trial can proceed with claims against the state of Vermont under the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude. In an opinion on Friday, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S.Circuit Court of Appeals found that a lower court wrongly denied Finbar McGarry a chance to argue that he was forced, against his will and under threat, to work in a prison laundry. McGarry was a PhD student in chemistry at the University of Vermont at the time of his arrest in December 2008. Denied bail, he was jailed at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, Vermont, pending trial on charges relating to a domestic disturbance. For six weeks, McGarry said he was forced to work three days a week for up to 14 hours at a time washing other inmates' laundry at a pay of 25 cents an hour. The work was hot, unsanitary and resulted in his getting an infection in his neck, McGarry said. If he refused to work, McGarry said prison officials threatened to send him to "the hole," where inmates were confined for 23 hours a day." (Thomson-Reuters News and Insights, August 3, 2012) All of which tends to show that slavery is still a live and complicated issue in the 21st Century - over a century after Leo XIII condemned slavery! Although one reviewer believes that Leo's condemnation was unnecessary because "when abolitionism had already succeeded in the Western world," that reviewer is clearly mistaken. Not only hadn't the anti-slavery program succeeded in the "Western World," it hadn't succeeded in Vermont! Moreover, those who criticize Father Panzer's slim and informative book because in their view the Catholic Church was a moral failure in not condemning "all forms of slavery" simply don't know their history. What Father Panzer has shown is that the Catholic Church was consistent in condemning race-based chattel slavery, something which Eugene IV could not have known in 1537 was going to be invented in the succeeding century and would be justified by liberal, secular, Enlightened philosophers like John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and many others. Anyone who doubts the role of liberalism and the Enlightenment in giving rise to a vicious modern form of slavery, which the papacy always opposed, should read Liberalism: A Counter-History. In my review of Losurdo's book, I observed: "Losurdo is also informative on the role that early liberalism played in the revival of slavery. During the revival of slavery in the early modern era, scholars recognized that Europe had eliminated slavery, at least within Europe. (p. 32, quoting Jean Bodin, "Europe was freed of slavery after about 1250.") Slavery was not a residue of the past. (p. 33.) The Catholic Church was criticized for promoting the abolition of slavery and for opposing its reintroduction in the modern world, thus encouraging sloth and dissipation of vagrants. (p. 34.) Moreover, the liberal era saw a different kind of slavery. According to John Locke, Old Testament slavery was more in the nature of servant and master, where the master did not have the unlimited power that characterized the "modern" form of slavery, and the servant was more in the nature of a hired hand. (p. 41 - 43.) Pre-modern slavery was described by Locke as "imperfect slavery," in which a person was condemned to "drudgery" and not "slavery," and could not be killed without restraint, but if injured by the master, had to be compensated or freed from drudgery. (p. 109.) Unlike this traditional slavery, more akin to having a lifetime job, modern slavery involved the excise over the slave of an absolute dominion and an absolute power, a legislative power of life and death, and an arbitrary power encompassing life itself, according to Locke. (p. 42.) This kind of slavery began with a person surrendering the right to life, by being captured in war or convicted of a capital crime, and the term of slavery was simply a kind of "stay of execution." Losurdo connects the rise of modern slavery with the power of England. The liberal powers, first Holland, and then England, supplanted Spain in the slave trade at an early point. Only a fraction of slaves were carried by non-English shipping. Unlike England, Spain made efforts at an early point to outlaw slavery in its territory at an early point. (Another theme that seems to come through Losurdo's book is just how strong the human impulse to enslave other humans seems to be.)" The critics of Father Panzer's work need to read more. If they do, they will see that the sad truth of modernity is its willingness to dehumanize foreign people, often with scientific arguments, and thereby to justify the enslavement of Africans, Indians or the poor. To its credit, the popes have stood against the modern tendency to split humanity into subspecies, where the lesser breeds may be exploited for the benefit of the master race, from the beginning and throughout the progress of modernity. Father Panzer set for himself the narrow goal of demonstrating from the writings of the popes that the papacy consistently condemned the enslavement of native people on the grounds that they were "barbarians" or were not Christians or were - as so many modern people thought until the mid-20th Century - "subhuman." The consistent position of the popes in resisting modernity and the siren call of going along with science and what the best thinkers were teaching should be a lesson for us all.