Just yesterday we heard Saint Paul’s letter to his friend and fellow worker, Philemon, in which he send back Philemon’s slave, Onesimus, catechized, baptized, now to be treated as a brother and not a slave.
Saint Paul saw in Onesimus what his friend Philemon could not…he saw a brother to be loved and not an object to be bought and sold and used.
By happy chance, today is the feast of the great Jesuit Saint Peter Claver, who spent his life in service to the enslaved African peoples in the port of Cartagena, Columbia, where 10,000 slaves arrived each year by boat from Africa.
Father Claver, we are told, would board the slave ships and would descend directly into the hold, where filth, disease and death were the only companions of the terrified human cargo. As he fed, clothed and nursed the prisoners, he was wont to take off his own cloak and place it over the shoulders of a naked, shivering child. So revered was Father Claver that word began to spread that whoever wore his cloak would enjoy a long, happy and illness-free life.
He famously baptized more than 300,000 slaves, and when he went to visit them after they had been auctioned off to the highest bidder, he would decline the hospitality of their masters and insist on eating and sleeping with the slaves.
All because he recognized in each person, not a slave, but a brother, not a creature, but a human person.
The Church, like every institution, struggled with slavery through the years. Just as enslaved African people built the white house in 1792, as recently as 1838 the Jesuits at Georgetown University sold 272 slaves to pay the College’s debts. All this despite the condemnation of slavery by Popes since the fifteenth century, culminating in Gregory the XVI’s papal bull In supremo apostolatus, published one year later, in which the Holy Father condemned “all believers in Christ, of whatsoever condition [who] unjustly molest Indians, Blacks, or other men of this sort;...or to reduce them to slavery…” All this taking place almost thirty years before the United States of America would outlaw slavery.
It’s a long and ugly history, this buying and selling of human beings, but even today we must ask ourselves how often we use people and love things. And when we do, perhaps we should think back on Saint Paul and Onesimus in prison and Father Claver in the bowels of all those ships.
