If this is about slavery, then there is a marked distinction btwn evangelical-types who did not want to uphold that tradition went it could be abolished, versus institutionalized religion, Protestant or Catholic.
Fair summation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_slavery#Christian_abolitionism
And here on slavery in the Bible: http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Slavery
And this is very good treatment on slavery in the ANE: http://www.christian-thinktank.com/qnoslave.html
It MUST be understood, esp. in the light of our image of the antebellum south, that that slavery was not a monolithic institution, and the Bible does sanction, if not mandate, its regulated ameliorated form, in managing an intractable institution of the ancient world. And which was better under the Hebrews than the type of slavery that the modern welfare state ends up being.
There was no slavery in the church when it began as an organic community, (Acts 2-6) and some estimate that about half of the church was made up of slaves in the slaves states of Rome and Greece, and which institutional practice was regulated to be morally tolerable in that context, till the outworking of the Christian ethos of love, albeit interrupted, and the political situation would enable it to be wholly cast off as cultural appendage.
Rome at best sounded an uncertain sound, though joined by many Prots in sanctioning it, but below is the response of one RCA to a exalt-Rome-at-all-costs polemic:
Shane, your mistake is just what I noted. One Pope out of 265 Popes condemns slavery as intrinsically evil in the ordinary magisterium and you call it Church Teaching without ever using your own brain to see if he might have overstepped in his late years... and you are prepared to throw God Himself and His estimation of slavery overboard. The Prots are not 100% wrong when they fault us for Pope worship. You just did it.
Your thoughts on torture and saving Pope Leo X’s reputation from an obvious cruel belief is absolutely the same syndrome.
I think you are important to the Church but you will spoil it if you think flattering Her when She really needs the opposite from you is the thing to do. Paul confronted Peter in Galatians and Peter grew....the Church now has no one with Paul’s truthfulness.
The list of bulls against slavery occurred over a time span that included 44 Popes but only about 7 of them denounced slavery of sorts....one was against slavery in the Canaries but only of baptized natives....the next one by Paul III was against the enslavement of the Caribbean natives but not against that of blacks....another was against the trade, but not against the domestic slavery of blacks born to slave mothers and held by religious orders into the 19th century, with [the] Bishop [of] England who knew the Pope [was][ writing for domestic slavery after the bull and not being gainsaid by the Pope. The most complete one was finally at the end of the 19th century by a Pope...Leo XIII this time... who claimed that the Church was the great liberator from slavery, and he gave a papal list which left out the six Popes from 1452 til 1511 who literally turbocharged the slavery by Spain and Portugal that involved millions. And you can easily research the first words of that chain by going to Romanus Pontifex on line by Pope Nicholas V and go to the middle of the 4th paragraph.
In the OT flattery was a sin. Why does no one say that anymore? Because Church speak is floating in it. — http://www.jimmyakin.org/2009/02/soups-reredux.html
So you’re willing to whitewash the fact that in the overwhelmingly Protestant south - well after Wilberforce and the rest of the civilized world had turned away from slavery, that slavery persisted?
Really? You would have me believe that it was the fault of the Catholics? You’d better take a look at your history again.