Fr Alexander-Lucie Smith writes:
The Anglican Bishop of Salisbury has written a
letter in the Daily Telegraph about gay marriage, which can be read here
if you feel you really want to. Embedded in the letter the Bishop has this to
say:
“For example, before Wilberforce, Christians
saw slavery as Biblical and part of the God-given ordering of Creation.”
Interesting, eh? Wilberforce, one assumes he
means William Wilberforce, was born in 1759 and died in 1833. So, for seventeen
centuries all was darkness until Wilberforce came along and put us all right on
the matter.
This will come as major news to Pope Pius II who
condemned slavery as a great crime and who died in 1464. The same is true of
Popes Paul III, Urban VIII, and Benedict XIV, all of whom long predated the
English reformer, not to mention the founders and members of the Mercedarian
and Trinitarian Orders, which were dedicated to the redemption of slaves. In
fact the history of Christian anti-slavery is a long one, as this useful article
makes clear.
Perhaps we should not expect the Bishop of
Salisbury to know much about any of the people above; after all, they were all
Roman Catholics and foreigners, and thus, one assumes, beneath his notice. But
when someone makes such an ignorant remark, whoever he may be, it is worth
protesting, simply because if such ignorant remarks go unchallenged, then they
may well pass into the mainstream and poison the minds of future generations.
Slavery is a great evil, but it is simplistic,
misleading and dangerous to see it as something that flourished because of the
Bible or because Christians approved it.
"This will come as major news to Pope Pius II who condemned slavery as a great crime and who died in 1464. The same is true of Popes Paul III, Urban VIII, and Benedict XIV"
ReplyDeleteSo people just ignored the Popes, even in countries that didn't experience the Reformation? The bulk of the trans-Atlantic slave trade took place after 1464.
Being widely ignored does not mean, either that the speaker was wrong, or that he never spoke.
ReplyDeletePeople ignored the then Pope over the Iraq War, and they have ignored every Pope at least since 1891 over capitalism (of which, of course, the slave trade was a pioneering example).
But in both cases, the point has been made, and it has been right.