DAVID J. ENDRES, Ed., Slavery and the Catholic Church in  the United States. Washington DC. The Catholic University of America Press, 2023. Pp 292. $29.95 pb. ISBN 978-0813236759. Reviewed by Marie CONN, Chestnut Hill College (ret.), Philadelphia, PA 19118.

This book is divided into three sections: enslaved persons and slaveholders; debating abolition and Emancipation; and historians and historiography. Endres’ goal is to “lead us to an awakening, or an ongoing awakening, about the Church’s painful history regarding racism”. (vii) His hope is that this awakening can open our hearts to “dismantle the evil and sin of racism as it continues to exist in our Church and society”. (viii) Given the length of the book, I have chosen to look rather closely at the first section, while dipping lightly into the other two. 

Kelly L. Schmidt, “A National Legacy of Enslavement: Jesuits and Enslaved Persons.” This section delves into enslaved people and the Catholics who held them. Kelly L. Schmidt explores the Jesuits’ ownership of enslaved people. She opens with the story of six enslaved persons who were taken from the Jesuits’ White Marsh plantation in Maryland to Wheeling, West Virginia, to establish a new foundation. 

 Schmidt explores the “Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation (SHMR) Project,” which began as a joint venture of the Jesuits USA Central and Southern Province and Saint Louis University in 2016. She looks at the “lesser-known lives of people whose enslavement sustained the Jesuits beyond Maryland and Pennsylvania”. The project also connects with living descendants, not just to repair relationships, but also to address racial inequalities. SHMR discovered that the treatment of people enslaved by the Jesuits hardly differed from other enslaved persons. The Jesuits, however, could not control enslaved persons’ lives completely. These people created networks “to survive, surmount, and resist their enslavement”. (6) 

  Jesuits relied on the work of enslaved people, not just in Maryland and Pennsylvania, but in the Caribbean, Canada, and New Orleans. Schmidt spends the bulk of his essay on the history of the enslaved people exploited by the Jesuits in the central and southern United States. She ends the essay on the continuing work of SHMR. The project not only supports descendants, it seeks to repair historical harms, and to educate Jesuits and others about their historical role in slaveholding and its links to today’s systemic issues. “Through the Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, the Jesuits and their parishes, works, programs, services, and educational institutions, can begin to determine what they are obligated to do for the descendant communities that they now serve”. (32) 

James Fitz, S.M., “U.S. Catholic Religious and Slavery: Seeking Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation.”  In his essay, Firz examines “the nineteenth-century struggle for justice and human transformation, the story of slavery, and how American religious were involved in and responded to this critical issue in American social history”. (34) This is important to understand as we address current calls for social transformation. 

 Fitz notes that, although much remains to be done in the study of the archives of religious orders, there is now enough information “to provide an overview of the response of the American religious to slavery”. (35) 

 Echoing Elie Wiesel, Fitz reminds us that remembering is important. “Humanity must remember and change so that the sins and tragedies of the past are not repeated.” (34) Tracing the history of the American Catholic Church from the end of the 18th and the early 19th century, Fitz points out that Catholics were not allied with the abolitionist movement. Catholic leaders took no stand on the issue. They considered the preservation of the Union more important than the abolition of slavery. Catholics held a racist attitude toward slaved: they were szeen as human persons, but they were not equal.            

 Turning to the religious involvement with enslaved people, Fitz notes that both men and women religious owned slaves. “Of the first eight permanent communities of women religious within the original boundaries of the United States, six had enslaved person, the Oblate Sisters of Providence and the Sisters of Our Lady of mercy were the two congregations that did not own enslaved persons.” (41) 

John F. Quinn, “American Reaction to Gregory XVI’s Condemnation of the Slave Trade.” In December of 1839, Pope Gregory XVI issued Supremo Apostolatus, an papal letter condemning the slave trade. He was encouraged to do so by the British government, in the hope that the letter would persuade Spain and Portugal to enforce the laws against slave trafficking. That didn’t happen, but, as Quinn demonstrates in this essay, the letter became a hot topic among Catholics in the United States. Throughout this period, abolitionists made very little headway. Pope Gregory was not about to intervene and most American Catholics did not support abolition. Catholic newspapers were unsympathetic, depicting abolitionists as anti-Catholic bigots. 

David J. Endres, “An Antislavery Archbishop: John B. Purcell and the Slavery Controversey among Border State Catholics.”   John B. Purcell of Cincinnati, “was the first U. S. Catholic bishop to show public support for the emancipation of enslaved persons”. (126) He faced great opposition from other bishops, clergy and laymen, and religious and secular publications.  When Purcell was named president of Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1829, he become a de facto enslaver of six men and ten women, something that caused him unease. 

Conclusion. There is much more to learn from the essays not included here. This is a valuable contribution to the growing body of work studying the relationship between the American Catholic religious congregations and the history of enslaved persons.