The Double Bond of Catholic Abolition: Christianity, Chattel Slavery, and Racial Capitalism

The reign of the first Pope to originate in the former colonies of the modern Euro-Christian empires calls us into awareness of the layers of interconnection between the Roman Catholic Church and the long “wake” (Sharpe 2016) of 1492. As anthropologists, I argue, our studies of Catholic practices must be informed by a detailed awareness of this history. I offer a broad historical view of how the Roman Catholic Church participated and, at times, led the way in initiating the trans-Atlantic system of Black chattel slavery and colonial expropriation in Euro-Christian Empires. As a scholar of Catholicism in France, I then turn to a more detailed examination of the role of French Catholic actors in efforts aimed at slowing abolition and maintaining systems of racialized hierarchy in French colonial territories between 1830 and 1860. Arguments made by some Church actors at the time—as well as the practices of Catholic missionaries and priests—aimed to constrain enslaved people before and following abolition to ensure the continued exploitation of their labor under conditions that would come to be known as racial capitalism. Such efforts were never totalizing and were always variously refused, but the French Catholic Church’s repeated alignment with forces committed to maintaining systems of oppression must shape our analysis of its operations in the present.