Slavery is the next thing to hell.
— Harriet Tubman
My teachers, the Jesuits, have vowed to raise $100 million to benefit descendants of the slaves they once owned, according to The New York Times.
The pledge represents the largest effort by the Catholic Church to atone for buying, selling and enslaving Blacks, church historians told The Times.
Jesuits in America relied on slave labor for more than three centuries to sustain themselves, and sold slaves to finance the operation of schools, including Georgetown University, the nation’s first Catholic college.
“This is an opportunity for Jesuits to begin a very serious process of truth and reconciliation,” said the Rev. Timothy Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.
“Our shameful history of Jesuit slaveholding in the United States has been taken off the dusty shelf, and it can never be put back.”
The Jesuits have already contributed $15 million toward the $100 million pledge, and have hired professionals fundraisers to bring in the $85 million balance during the next five years.
In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, the Jesuits believed slaves, though humans, were valuable assets. Buying and selling them was considered moral.
But some Jesuits objected.
Fr. Antonio Viera, for example, argued that anyone who enslaved others "enslaved his own soul," and that anyone who sold slaves "sold his own soul.
"The price for which they are sold is sin," Viera said.
