Posted on 06/19/2023 7:04:28 PM PDT by marshmallow
For more than a century, the Catholic Church financed its expansion and its institutions with profits made from the purchase and sale of people they enslaved. This chapter of Church history has only recently come to the attention of the public.
"Without the enslaved, the Catholic Church in the United States as we know it today would not exist," writes author Rachel Swarns. She says the priests prayed for the salvation of the souls of the people they owned, even as they bought and sold their bodies.
In 1838, the Jesuits sold 272 enslaved people, which helped save what is now Georgetown University from bankruptcy and helped stabilize the Jesuits in Maryland. Swarns wrote about this sale in 2016 in the New York Times article "272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?"
Swarns' new book — The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church — expands on that article. It tells the story of the Church's history of enslavement in America, while illustrating the consequences by focusing on generations of one family that had several members among those 272 people sold by the Church in 1838. Two descendants of the family she writes about in the book found each other as a result of her New York Times article.
To this day, our contemporary institutions are "deeply connected" to slavery, Swarns says. She hopes that telling multi-generational stories of families associated with these institutions will help make this history more present and more personal. "This isn't this faceless, amorphous thing," Swarns says. "These are people. They have names. And we are connected to that. We are connected to that history today."
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
NPR profits from all this.
NPR is a product of the Demoncrat party, the party of slavery.
Interesting that NPR can point to Christians dealing in slavery almost 200 YEARS AGO, but they can’t find it within themselves to acknowledge that 42 Ugandans brutally murdered THIS PAST WEEKEND were killed because they were Christians.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/17/1182936177/at-least-25-killed-rebel-attack-ugandan-school
Squanto was freed by monks and allowed to return to the future United States. Without Squanto, the pilgrim colony would have starved.
Hypocritical. That’s all I’m going to say about npr for now.
That’s right. All they are is just kkkommiecrat propaganda.
“Jesuits owning slaves has been known and publicized is nothing new. I knew it in my childhood. The Catholic Church and even the Jesuits themselves would have survived with out the sale of 272 slaves. It was a pretty big church, even then.”
Exactly. Far be it for me to defend the Jesuits or Georgetown U., but it’s utterly absurd to think that the entire history Catholic Church in the U.S. rises or falls depending on what happened at Georgetown in 1838. Uh, no. That’s revisionist garbage.
By 1838, how many Catholics were already living in New York City? Maybe 30,000? How long had the Catholic Church been in Florida? 300 years? How long had the Catholic Church been in California? 70 years?
What is the answer assuming that is true? What are Catholics alive today in the United States supposed to do about something that happened nearly 200 years ago? And how exactly is the Catholic Church in the United States “as we know it today” “deeply connected” to slavery?
The Catholic church is the richest corporation on the planet. Nothing will come of this thing about profiting from slavery.
Ha, it’s a plan! Reparations, liberal Jebbies, reparations...
They want to say we have all these connections, yada yada yada, so then their conclusion is that we need to pay reparations for slavery.
Nothing.
Bad things happened to everybody's ancestors.
Learn to deal with it and move on.
Bill the Jesuits.
Their funding is separate from the main church. They were not under local bishops so no the money did not help the church, only the Jesuits.
Waiting here for Swarns’ upcoming book, “Islam profited from Slavery”.
But I’ll not hold my breath.
The Catholic Church is God’s creation and existence. His Catholic church does more charity and good works than any other entity on earth. One out of five humans are Catholic and the Church is growing.
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