Compared to other plantation owners in the area, when it came to slavery, “The Jesuits were no better or worse,” according to Cloke. Many of the slaves had been gifts from wealthy Catholic families to sustain the Church. The abolition of slavery was not an issue in the area until the early nineteenth century, when Georgetown’s Jesuits became deeply divided over the issue of slavery.“But they were not conflicted in the way you would want,” Cloke said. “They were conflicted over what to do about the threat of abolitionists.”
...Abolitionists presented an economic rather than moral problem for these Jesuits. With a growing abolitionist presence in Maryland, some of them feared a devaluation of their property, their slaves. Maryland was a state in which slavery had a tenuous hold, the economy was no longer driven by slave labor. According to reports, the general debt of the mission was close to $32,000 by the 1830s, a large sum for the time.
“It was not a market for growing crops, but for growing slaves,” said Cloke. The real money was to be made not from the work a slave could do in Maryland, but from the hugely profitable business of selling the slaves downriver....
...Brother Mobberly, who served as an overseer on one of the estates, kept an extensive diary giving a bird’s eye view of the tension the Jesuits felt surrounding the issue of slavery. His diary explores the tension between Catholics, an already persecuted group, and the Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and Methodists who were outspokenly opposed to slavery. Mobberly, like other Jesuits, came to feel threatened and saw the issue as a Catholic-Protestant conflict. Involving everything from the Bible to Thomas Jefferson, Mobberly’s diary defended slavery. He explained that Abraham owned slaves, and wrote, “Abraham had God for his particular friend; and we do not read that God ever reproached him for keeping men in servitude. Therefore, it was lawful for him to possess them.”
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. “”
Wow! I went to law school at a Jesuit university (coincidently about 5 miles from where the Dred Scott decision was handed down) and had no idea about any of this. I guess they had no reason to advertise it. :)
I suppose this was just ANOTHER set of institutional "bad apples" that we are supposed to ignore. For all the supernatural powers claimed by Apostolic clergy, high and above the clergy of other Christian faiths, I would think their overall track record would be much better than it is.