The Pope's speech to the German Parliament

[fpb]

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_listening_heart
As ever, the man is worth listening to. But the responses in the comments thread just show how bloody useless it is to deliver intellectually distinguished and morally valuable speeches in a world where most people know no history but are stuffed full of out-of-context factoids and believe themselves entitled to judge.

Comments

One

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You are wrong about slavery: by the year 1000 it had been effectively abolished in Christian countries (by the transformation of slavery into serfdom, with limited and definite rights and duties), and the only state that dealt in slaves proper was Venice, because it was the only one that had wide-open borders with non-Christian countries. In 1437, I think, the Portuguese asked for and received from the Pope, as ultimate authority in law, a permission to trade in African slaves (a trade that already existed in West Africa - the Portuguese only wanted a piece of the action) in order to finance a crusade against Morocco. At the time, nobody imagined such a place as America existed, and the disastrous consequences of what seemed like a very minor leave could not possibly be foreseen. (The crusade actually did take place in about 1510, and was an unqualified disaster.) But when the Iberian powers discovered America, the minor issue of a few slaving boats between African harbours slowly grew into a major trade which skewed the social composition of the coming European colonies in America in ways that had been utterly unknown in Europe since the end of the Roman Empire. Even so, the real catastrophe was the Protestant Reformation, which removed several involved parties from the Pope's jurisdiction and weakened his hold on the rest. The Dutch threw themselves on Portuguese trade routes like vultures, and the British started settling colonies with slaves bought first from the Dutch, then from their own ships. Furthermore, the immediate softening and legal correction imposed by the Church on slavery in CAtholic colonies through the advocacy of such men as Bartolome' de las Casas and St.Peter Claver was wholly absent in the Protestant powers; indeed, slavery did not actually begin in the English colonies with imported Africans, but with tens of thousands of enslaved Irish Catholics - the Africans only came later. (In the first half of the seventeenth century, as I pointed out elsewhere, England suffered from a serious shortage of valuta and might not have been able to pay Dutch prices for them anyway. But she could and did drag tens of thousands of wretched Irishmen and women to be treated worse than the Portuguese and Spanish treated their Africans.) Even so, the poison of slavery, having been reintroduced into the body of European colonies (there never was slavery in the mother countries) was eventually spat out again, in one case at a very high cost in lives and treasure. Western civilization could not live with it. China, India, and the Muslim world, on the other hand, lived happily with it for millennia.

Re: One

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

So Christianity ended slavery after 1000 years...except when it didn't...and serfdom was hardly a great leap forward for human rights, even if it was relatively better than slavery: you still had an unequal rendering of basic rights in society. I also find the notion that the Pope granted some leeway to be inexcusable for something supposedly as basic as the right to be free of bondage.

I can't speak to India, not being as familiar with its history, although the Islamic Mughals were responsible for much of its mainstreaming. Likewise in China, slavery came in and out of favor, often under the auspices of the authoritarian philosophy of Legalism (which opposed Confucianism and Mohism; in fact Confucian tales abound of scholars trying to convince cruel kings to be benevolent), and even then it was mainly a punishment for criminals or war captives. Slavery was limited in east, however: for example, Yu Hyongwon was a Confucian scholar who argued for abolition, as did Mohism in China and later the Emperor Wang Mang. Buddhism specifically prohibited engaging in any slave trade.

Re: One

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Try not to equivocate. Christianity abolished slavery among Christians, because all Christians, including the slaves, had rights which the Church recognized and which neither nobles nor kings could deny, since their very same rights also depended on Church recognition. In theory, non-Christians could be enslaved. In practice, as soon as a large body of slaves began to build up - in the New World - its presence proved troublesome, and ultimately intolerable, for the very same reason: slaves became Christians, and Christian public opinion - Catholic first, Protestant much later - started asking "is he not a man and a brother?" It was the primacy of the Christian doctrine of the equality of all believers that killed slavery again and again.

Buddhism prohibited engaging in any slave trade. Prohibited who? And some intellectuals in China did not much like it. With what result? The war between the states wasn't fought in China.

Re: One

[ihuitl.livejournal.com]

Buddhists believed that no one should engage in the slave trade - their proscriptions were, and are universal. They also rejected the Indian caste system. Slavery came and went out of favor throughout China's long history, depending on the rulers involved.

That abolition during the middle ages extended only to non-Christians upon their conversion is better than nothing, and better than previous conditions, but is clearly not the same as later conceptions of rights, that exist for people regardless of their religious belief. Same for serfdom which was not abolished fully until the 19th century in some places, mainly due to economic and population pressures.