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To: Alex Murphy; kosta50
Pointing out some possible abuses by some Jesuits who wee not following the teachings of the Church does NOT mean the Church sanctioned it.

As always there are those who who disregard what the Church teaches

Here is an excerpt from New Advent
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14036a.htm

Slavery and Christianity

“”The Trinitarians, founded in 1198 by St. John of Matha and St. Felix of Valois, established hospitals for slaves at Algiers and Tunis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and from its foundation until the year 1787 it redeemed 900,000 slaves. The Order of Our Lady of Ransom (Mercedarians), founded in the thirteenth century by St. Peter Nolasco, and established more especially in France and Spain, redeemed 490,736 slaves between the years 1218 and 1632. To the three regular vows its founder had added a fourth, “To become a hostage in the hands of the infidels, if that is necessary for the deliverance of Christ’s faithful.” Many Mercedarians kept this vow even to martyrdom. Another order undertook not only to redeem captives, but also to give them spiritual and material assistance. St. Vincent of Paul had been a slave at Algiers in 1605, and had witnessed the sufferings and perils of Christian slaves. At the request of Louis XIV, he sent them, in 1642, priests of the congregation which he had founded. Many of these priests, indeed, were invested with consular functions at Tunis and at Algiers. From 1642 to 1660 they redeemed about 1200 slaves at an expense of about 1,200,000 livres. But their greatest achievements were in teaching the Catechism and converting thousands, and in preparing many of the captives to suffer the most cruel martyrdom rather than deny the Faith. As a Protestant historian has recently said, none of the expeditions sent against the Barbary States by the Powers of Europe, or even America, equalled “the moral effect produced by the ministry of consolation, and abnegation, going even to the sacrifice of liberty and life, which was exercised by the humble sons of St. John of Matha, St. Peter Nolasco, and St. Vincent of Paul” (Bonet-Maury, “France, christianisme et civilisation”, 1907, p. 142).

A second revival of slavery took place after the discovery of the New World by the Spaniards in 1492. To give the history of it would be to exceed the limits of this article. It will be sufficient to recall the efforts of Las Casas in behalf of the aborigines of America and the protestations of popes against the enslavement of those aborigines and the traffic in negro slaves. England, France, Portugal, and Spain, all participated in this nefarious traffic. England only made amends for its transgressions when, in 1815, it took the initiative in the suppression of the slave trade. In 1871 a writer had the temerity to assert that the Papacy had not its mind to condemn slavery” (Ernest Havet, “Le christianisme et ses origines”, I, p. xxi). He forgot that, in 1462, Pius II declared slavery to be “a great crime” (magnum scelus); that, in 1537, Paul III forbade the enslavement of the Indians; that Urban VIII forbade it in 1639, and Benedict XIV in 1741; that Pius VII demanded of the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, the suppression of the slave trade and Gregory XVI condemned it in 1839; that, in the Bull of Canonization of the Jesuit Peter Claver, one of the most illustrious adversaries of slavery, Pius IX branded the “supreme villainy” (summum nefas) of the slave traders. Everyone knows of the beautiful letter which Leo XIII, in 1888, addressed to the Brazilian bishops, exhorting them to banish from their country the remnants of slavery — a letter to which the bishops responded with their most energetic efforts, and some generous slave-owners by freeing their slaves in a body, as in the first ages of the Church.

In our own times the slave trade still continued to devastate Africa, no longer for the profit of Christian states, from which all slavery had disappeared, but for the Mussulman countries. But as European penetrations progresses in Africa, the missionaries, who are always its precursors — Fathers of the Holy Ghost, Oblates, White Fathers, Franciscans, Jesuits, Priests of the Mission of Lyons — labour in the Sudan, Guinea, on the Gabun, in the region of the Great Lakes, redeeming slaves and establishing “liberty villages.” At the head of this movement appear two men: Cardinal Lavigerie, who in 1888 founded the Société Antiesclavagiste and in 1889 promoted the Brussels conference; Leo XIII, who encouraged Lavigerie in all his projects, and, in 1890, by an Encyclical once more condemning the slave-traders and “the accursed pest of servitude”, ordered an annual collection to be made in all Catholic churches for the benefit of the anti-slavery work. Some modern writers, mostly of the Socialist School — Karl Marx, Engel, Ciccotti, and, in a measure, Seligman — attribute the now almost complete disappearance of slavery to the evolution of interests and to economic causes only. The foregoing exposition of the subject is an answer to their materialistic conception of history, as showing that, if not the only, at least the principal, cause of that disappearance is Christianity acting through the authority of its teaching and the influence of its charity. “”

2,801 posted on 02/24/2008 8:54:39 AM PST by stfassisi ("Above all gifts that Christ gives his beloved is that of overcoming self"St Francis Assisi)
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To: stfassisi
Pointing out some possible abuses by some Jesuits who we[r]e not following the teachings of the Church does NOT mean the Church sanctioned it.

Part of the religions which hold that the Pope is the Antichrist and all that is that the Pope is so much in control that nothing happens without his knowing and approving it. Bogeymen make far better targets for abuse and emotionalism than do real people.

I was just reading a history of Lay Dominicans and found this:

Munio de Zamora, then, gave the Rule to the Third Order in 1285. But this action antagonized the incumbent Pope, Nicholas IV. Pope Nicholas was a former Minister General of the Franciscan Order. He had an idea of what to do with the Penitent movement: attach all the penitent groups to the Franciscan Order. Thus, he was quite unhappy with de Zamora's action in affiliating a substantial sector of the penitent movement with the Dominicans. This, along with several other grudges which he seems to have had against Zamora, caused him in 1290 to demand that the Dominican General Chapter remove this Master General from office. The General Chapter met, and refused to remove him. In the next year, 1291 -- Pope Nicholas deposed him personally. But by now the Third Order was firmly established, and survived.
As I like to say, I don't believe in organized religion. I'm a Catholic.
2,806 posted on 02/24/2008 9:13:16 AM PST by Mad Dawg
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To: stfassisi

bookmark.


4,951 posted on 04/17/2008 9:23:30 PM PDT by TASMANIANRED (TAZ:Untamed, Unpredictable, Uninhibited.)
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