Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies ed. by David J. Endres (review)

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• Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies ed. by David J. Endres
• Maura Jane Farrelly

Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies. Edited by David J. Endres. Foreword by Archbishop Shelton J. Fabre. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 292. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8132-3675-9.)

Editor David J. Endres’s concise Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies nicely exemplifies recent developments in the scholarly analysis of American Catholicism’s history with hereditary, race-based slavery. These trends have been a long time coming, as Endres notes. In the nineteenth century, scholars ignored the reality of Catholic slaveholding, along with the existence of African American Catholics. In the first half of the twentieth century, scholars did turn their attention to the church’s teachings on slavery and to the reality that American Catholics once held human beings in bondage. These scholars, however, tended to focus on the supposedly superior nature of Catholics’ slaveholding compared with Protestants’, and they depicted slavery as an “opportunity” to expose people of African descent to Catholicism. “While the Protestant slave-holders . . . were writing and rewriting arguments to prove that the Negroes were brutes and therefore should be enslaved,” one prominent scholar quoted by Endres asserted in 1946, “the Catholics were accepting the Negroes as brethren and treating them as men” (pp. 247–48).

Not until the late 1980s—when a Black Benedictine monk, priest, and academic historian named Cyprian Davis started chronicling the history of African American Catholics—did scholars turn a truly critical eye to the topic of slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States. This attention resulted in deep dives into the sacramental records of several parishes in Louisiana, Maryland, and Kentucky. Some of these studies, such as C. Walker Gollar’s 1998 reconstruction of the Black and white Catholic community in Washington County, Kentucky, have been updated and reprinted in this volume.

Sacramental records hold a wealth of information about the lives of enslaved Catholics. They also “document prejudices that researchers, scholars, and students . . . may find uncomfortable today,” as Emilie Gagnet Leumas asserts in an essay that considers how sacramental practices reflected Louisiana’s legal and social racism (p. 211). Records of baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and burials tell us whom the acknowledged fathers of children were; which slaves were literate and/or skilled; when and if slaves were manumitted; and what families were broken up and sold by the people who owned them. In so doing, such records not only give us a window into the relationships that enslaved people built between and among themselves, but also tell us about the degree to which white Catholics, lay and clerical alike, used their faith to sustain, understand, and even justify the racial hierarchy that was the foundation of America’s brutal slave economy.

The willingness of scholars—many of whom are themselves Catholic—to embrace the discomfort Leumas notes is what marks these essays as radically different from the work of earlier scholars of American Catholicism and [End Page 597] reflects current research trends (embodied most publicly in the Georgetown Slavery Archive). Confronting the passive and active support that American bishops gave to hereditary, race-based slavery, the extent to which white Catholics benefited from slavery, and the racism that sustained it allows us to better understand how “the Church [has] come to a new understanding of the implications of the reign of God as Jesus proclaimed it,” according to contributor James Fitz, S.M. (p. 58). Although the story of Catholicism’s relationship with slavery “is not one of the glorious moments in the history of” the Catholic Church, Fitz writes, honest examinations of “the experience of our forebears in dealing with this issue [slavery] might prove enlightening and insightful in the present-day struggle for justice” (p. 61).

Maura Jane Farrelly Brandeis University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...