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reasonsforhope · 8 months

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Non-paywall version here.

"When Arley Gill, head of Grenada’s National Reparations Committee, envisioned his work seeking repair for centuries of enslavement on the Caribbean island, one thing was certain: It was going to be a long slog.

But just two years since its founding, the task force is fielding calls from individuals around the world looking to make amends for ancestors who benefited from enslavement in Grenada.

“If you had told us this would be happening, we wouldn’t have believed you,” Mr. Gill says, crediting a burgeoning movement of descendants of enslavers getting wise to their family’s history and taking action.

In Grenada’s case, the momentum began with a public apology made by former BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan and her family in February at a ceremony on the island. They apologized for their forebears’ enslavement of people in Grenada and their enrichment from it, pledging an initial contribution of £100,000 ($130,000) toward education on the island.

“She opened the doors for people to feel comfortable” coming forward, says Mr. Gill.

In April [2023], Ms. Trevelyan and journalist Alex Renton co-founded an organization called Heirs of Slavery. Its eight British members have ancestors who benefited financially from slavery in various ways...

Heirs of Slavery says wealth and privilege trickle down through generations, and that there are possibly millions of Britons whose lives were touched by money generated from enslavement.

The group aims to amplify the voices of those already calling for reparations, like Caribbean governments. And it supports organizations working to tackle the modern-day consequences of slavery, both in the United Kingdom and abroad, from racism to health care inequities. But it’s also setting an example for others, drafting a road map of reparative justice for enslavement – at the individual level...

“Shining a light is always a good idea,” says Mr. Renton, who published a book in 2021 about his family’s ties to slavery, donating the proceeds to a handful of nongovernmental organizations in the Caribbean and England. “You don’t have to feel guilt about it; you can’t change the past,” he says, paraphrasing Sir Geoff Palmer, a Scottish Jamaican scholar. “But we should feel ashamed that up to this point we’ve done nothing about the consequences” of slavery.

Start anywhere

Most Africans trafficked to the Americas and Caribbean during the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended up in the West Indies. The wealth generated there through unpaid, brutal, forced labor funded much of Europe’s Industrial Revolution and bolstered churches, banks, and educational institutions. When slavery was abolished in British territories in 1833, the government took out a loan to compensate enslavers for their lost “property.” The government only finished paying off that debt in 2015.

The family of David Lascelles, the 8th Earl of Harewood, for example, received more than £26,000 from the British government after abolition in compensation for nearly 1,300 lives, while “the enslaved people were given nothing,” Mr. Lascelles says. He joined Heirs of Slavery upon its founding, eager to collaborate with peers doing work he’s been focused on for decades.

“People like us have, historically, kept quiet about what our ancestors did. We believe the time has come to face up to what happened, to acknowledge the ongoing repercussions of this human tragedy, and support the existing movements to discuss repair and reconciliation,” reads the group’s webpage.

For Ms. Trevelyan, that meant a very public apology – and resigning from journalism to dedicate herself to activism...

For Mr. Lascelles, a second cousin of King Charles, making repairs included in 2014 handing over digitized copies of slavery-related documents discovered in the basement of the Downton Abbey-esque Harewood House to the National Archives in Barbados, where much of his family’s wealth originated during enslavement.

“What can we do that is actually useful and wanted – not to solve our own conscience?” he says he asks himself...

“Listen and learn”

...The group is planning a conference this fall that will bring together families that benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade along with representatives from Caribbean governments and Black Europeans advocating for reparations. In the meantime, members are meeting with local advocacy groups to better understand what they want – and how Heirs of Slavery might assist.

At a recent meeting, “there was one man who said he wanted to hear what we had to say, but said he saw us as a distraction. And I understand that,” says Mr. Renton. “Maximum humility is necessary on our part. We are here to listen and learn, not try to take the lead and be the boss.”

Mr. Renton’s family has made donations to youth development and educational organizations, but he doesn’t see it as compensation. “I see this as work of repair. If I sold everything I own, I couldn’t begin to compensate for the lives my ancestors destroyed,” he says."

-via The Christian Science Monitor, August 1, 2023

Note: I know the source name probably inspires skepticism for a lot of people (fairly), but they're actually considered a very reliable and credible publication in both accuracy and lack of bias.

#slavery #reparations #antiblackness #racism #colonialism #united kingdom #uk #granada #caribbean #social justice #ancestry #black history #black lives matter #reparative justice #enslavement #abolition #systemic racism #good news #hope

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haggishlyhagging · 5 months

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The first feminist to disinter the witches’ story and to claim this title for herself was the American Matilda Joslyn Gage, who fought for women's right to vote and also for the rights of Native Americans and the abolition of slavery—she was given a prison sentence for helping slaves to escape. In Woman, Church and State (1893), she offered a feminist reading of the witch-hunts: “When for ‘witches’ we read ‘women’, we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity.” Gage inspired the character of Glinda, the good witch in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was written by her son-in-law, L. Frank Baum. When he adapted the novel for cinema in 1939, Victor Fleming created the first "good witch" in popular culture.

-Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women are Still on Trial

#mona chollet #Matilda Joslyn gage #witch hunts #wizard of oz #glinda #witchcraft in pop culture

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gatheringbones · 1 year

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best books of 2022 rec list:

fiction:

chouette by claire oshetsky

forty thousand in gehenna by cj cherryh

fierce femmes and notorious liars by kai cheng thom

sula by toni morrison

everyone in this room will someday be dead by emily r. austin

jane eyre by charlotte bronte

villette by charlotte bronte

non-fiction:

gay spirit by mark thompson

we too: stories on sex work and survival by natalie west

transgender history by susan stryker

blood marriage wine & glitter by s bear bergman

love and rage: the path to liberation through anger by lama rod owens

gay soul by mark thompson

between certain death and a possible future: queer writing on growing up in the AIDS crisis by mattilda bernstein sycamore

the man they wanted me to be: toxic masculinity and a crisis of our own making by jared yates sexton

nobody passes: rejecting the rules of gender and conformity by mattilda bernstein sycamore

cruising: an intimate history of a radical pastime by alex espinoza

gay body by mark thompson

what my bones know: a memoir of healing from complex trauma by stephanie foo

the child catchers: rescue, trafficking, and the new gospel of adoption by kathryn joyce

the opium wars: the addiction of one empire and the corruption of another by w. travis hanes III

a queer history of the united states by michael bronski

the trouble with white women by kyla schuller

what we don't talk about when we talk about fat by aubrey gordon

the feminist porn book by tristan taormino

administrations of lunacy: a story of racism and psychiatry at the midgeville asylum by mab segrest

the women's house of detention by hugh ryan

angela davis: an autobiography by angela davis

ten steps to nanette by hannah gadsby

neuroqueer heresies by nick walker

the remedy: queer and trans voices on health and healthcare by zena sharman

brilliant imperfection by eli clare

the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity by david graeber and david wengrow

tomorrow sex will be good again by katherine angel

all our trials: prisons, policing, and the feminist fight to end violence by emily l. thuma

if this is a man by primo levi

bi any other name: bisexual people speak out by lorraine hutchins

white rage: the unspoken truth of our racial divide by carol anderson

public sex: the culture of radical sex by pat califa

I'm glad my mom died by jenette mccurdy

care of: letters, connections and cures by ivan coyote

the gentrification of the mind: witness to a lost imagination by sarah schulman

skid road: on the frontier of health and homelessness in an american city, by josephine ensign

the origins of totalitarianism by hannah arendt

nice racism: how progressive white people perpetuate racial harm by robin diangelo

corrections in ink by keri blakinger

sexed up: how society sexualizes us and how we can fight back by julia serano

smash the church, smash the state! the early years of gay liberation by tommi avicolli mecca

no more police: a case for abolition by mariame kaba

until we reckon: violence, mass incarceration, and a road to repair by danielle sered

the care we dream of: liberatory & transformative justice approaches to LGBTQ+ health by zena sharman

reclaiming two-spirits: sexuality, spiritual renewal and sovereignty in native america by gregory d. smithers

the sentences that create us: crafting a writer's life in prison by Caits Messner

#book recs tag #83 in total the same as last year

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blessedarethebinarybreakers · 5 months

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Advent Devotionals, 2023

I wanted to share some devotionals for this coming Advent (it starts December 3!) that are queer affirming & center marginalized perspectives. If you know of others, please add on!

What Are You Waiting For? An LGBTQIA+ Affirming Advent Devotional

Format: A short written devotional or poem for every day of Advent, shared as one PDF document linked above

Creators: The Collective of Queer Christian Leaders, including Rev. Nicole Garcia of the National LGBTQ Task Force and members of the Transmission Ministry Network

Another Starry Black Night: A Womanist Advent Devotional

Format: Short written devotionals, one for each Sunday & Wednesday of Advent, as well as Christmas day

Creators: Black women, most of whom are ordained Presbyterian ministers, some of whom are queer

Posted on Unbound: An Interactive Journal of Christian Social Justice

Abolition Advent Calendar: "Freedom for All Bodies"

Format: daily written devotionals that you can sign up to receive as emails. Each week expands the theme of abolition & racial justice to include 1) reproductive justice; 2) trans/nonbinary justice; 3) disability justice; and 4) body positivity

Shared by Join the Movement, a UCC organization

"Todos! Todos! Todos! Advent Reflections and Meditations on the Scriptures

Format: Zoom calls with a reflection followed by discussion groups every Wednesday of Advent, 8pm-9pm EST

Creators: DignityUSA, a Catholic LGBT-advocacy organization

An Advent Guide with Reflections on Palestine/Israel

Format: a devotional for each Sunday of Advent, shared as one PDF linked above

Creators: "Each week during Advent read firsthand accounts from recently returned Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs) of their experiences during their deployment with the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel (WCC-EAPPI). Along with their stories and photos are bible readings, further resources and prayers to offer."

#queer christians #advent #advent 2023 #devotionals #prayer tag #resources

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nicklloydnow · 1 month

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““Dorothy reminds me in so many ways of Toni Morrison,” West said. “You know Toni Morrison is Catholic. Many people do not realize that she is one of the great Catholic writers. Like Flannery O’Connor, she has an incarnational conception of human existence. We Protestants are too individualistic. I think we need to learn from Catholics who are always centered on community.”

(…)

She viewed belief in God as “an intellectual experience that intensifies our perceptions and distances us from an egocentric and predatory life, from ignorance and from the limits of personal satisfactions”—and affirmed her Catholic identity. “I had a moment of crisis on the occasion of Vatican II,” she said. “At the time I had the impression that it was a superficial change, and I suffered greatly from the abolition of Latin, which I saw as the unifying and universal language of the Church.”

Morrison saw a problematic absence of authentic religion in modern art: “It’s not serious—it’s supermarket religion, a spiritual Disneyland of false fear and pleasure.” She lamented that religion is often parodied or simplified, as in “those pretentious bad films in which angels appear as dei ex machina, or of figurative artists who use religious iconography with the sole purpose of creating a scandal.” She admired the work of James Joyce, especially his earlier works, and had a particular affinity for Flannery O’Connor, “a great artist who hasn’t received the attention she deserves.”

What emerges from Morrison’s public discussions of faith is paradoxical Catholicism. Her conception of God is malleable, progressive, and esoteric. She retained a distinct nostalgia for Catholic ritual, and feels the “greatest respect” for those who practice the faith, even if she herself wavered. In a 2015 interview with NPR, Morrison said there was not a “structured” sense of religion in her life at the moment, but “I might be easily seduced to go back to church because I like the controversy as well as the beauty of this particular Pope Francis. He’s very interesting to me.”

Morrison’s Catholic faith—individual and communal, traditional and idiosyncratic—offers a theological structure for her worldview. Her Catholicism illuminates her fiction; in particular, her views of bodies, and the narrative power of stories. An artist, Morrison affirmed, “bears witness.” Her father’s ghost stories, her mother’s spiritual musicality, and her own youthful sense of attraction to Christianity’s “scriptures and its vagueness” led her to conclude it is “a theatrical religion. It says something particularly interesting to black people, and I think it’s part of why they were so available to it. It was the love things that were psychically very important. Nobody could have endured that life in constant rage.” Morrison said it is a sense of “transcending love” that makes “the New Testament . . . so pertinent to black literature—the lamb, the victim, the vulnerable one who does die but nevertheless lives.”

(…)

Morrison is describing a Catholic style of storytelling here, reflected in the various emotional notes of Mass. The religion calls for extremes: solemnity, joy, silence, and exhortation. Such a literary approach is audacious, confident, and necessary, considering Morrison’s broader goals. She rejected the term experimental, clarifying “I am simply trying to recreate something out of an old art form in my books—the something that defines what makes a book ‘black.’”

(…)

Morrison was both storyteller and archivist. Her commitment to history and tradition itself feels Catholic in orientation. She sought to “merge vernacular with the lyric, with the standard, and with the biblical, because it was part of the linguistic heritage of my family, moving up and down the scale, across it, in between it.” When a serious subject came up in family conversation, “it was highly sermonic, highly formalized, biblical in a sense, and easily so. They could move easily into the language of the King James Bible and then back to standard English, and then segue into language that we would call street.”

Language was play and performance; the pivots and turns were “an enhancement for me, not a restriction,” and showed her that “there was an enormous power” in such shifts. Morrison’s attention toward language is inherently religious; by talking about the change from Latin to English Mass as a regrettable shift, she invokes the sense that faith is both content and language; both story and medium.

From her first novel on forward, Morrison appeared intent on forcing us to look at embodied black pain with the full power of language. As a Catholic writer, she wanted us to see the body on the cross; to see its blood, its cuts, its sweat. That corporal sense defines her novel Beloved (1988), perhaps Morrison’s most ambitious, stirring work. “Black people never annihilate evil,” Morrison has said. “They don’t run it out of their neighborhoods, chop it up, or burn it up. They don’t have witch hangings. They accept it. It’s almost like a fourth dimension in their lives.”

(…)

Morrison has said that all of her writing is “about love or its absence.” There must always be one or the other—her characters do not live without ebullience or suffering. “Black women,” Morrison explained, “have held, have been given, you know, the cross. They don’t walk near it. They’re often on it. And they’ve borne that, I think, extremely well.” No character in Morrison’s canon lives the cross as much as Sethe, who even “got a tree on my back” from whipping. Scarred inside and out, she is the living embodiment of bearing witness.

(…)

Morrison’s Catholicism was one of the Passion: of scarred bodies, public execution, and private penance. When Morrison thought of “the infiniteness of time, I get lost in a mixture of dismay and excitement. I sense the order and harmony that suggest an intelligence, and I discover, with a slight shiver, that my own language becomes evangelical.” The more Morrison contemplates the grandness and complexity of life, the more her writing reverts to the Catholic storytelling methods that enthralled her as a child and cultivated her faith. This creates a powerful juxtaposition: a skilled novelist compelled to both abstraction and physicality in her stories. Catholicism, for Morrison, offers a language to connect these differences.

For Morrison, the traits of black language include the “rhythm of a familiar, hand-me-down dignity [that] is pulled along by an accretion of detail displayed in a meandering unremarkableness.” Syntax that is “highly aural” and “parabolic.” The language of Latin Mass—its grandeur, silences, communal participation, coupled with the congregation’s performative resurrection of an ancient tongue—offers a foundation for Morrison’s meticulous appreciation of language.

Her representations of faith—believers, doubters, preachers, heretics, and miracles—are powerful because of her evocative language, and also because she presents them without irony. She took religion seriously. She tended to be self-effacing when describing her own belief, and it feels like an action of humility. In a 2014 interview, she affirmed “I am a Catholic” while explaining her willingness to write with a certain, frank moral clarity in her fiction. Morrison was not being contradictory; she was speaking with nuance. She might have been lapsed in practice, but she was culturally—and therefore socially, morally—Catholic.

The same aesthetics that originally attracted Morrison to Catholicism are revealed in her fiction, despite her wavering of institutional adherence. Her radical approach to the body also makes her the greatest American Catholic writer about race. That one of the finest, most heralded American writers is Catholic—and yet not spoken about as such—demonstrates why the status of lapsed Catholic writers is so essential to understanding American fiction.

A faith charged with sensory detail, performance, and story, Catholicism seeps into these writers’ lives—making it impossible to gauge their moral senses without appreciating how they refract their Catholic pasts. The fiction of lapsed Catholic writers suggests a longing for spiritual meaning and a continued fascination with the language and feeling of faith, absent God or not: a profound struggle that illuminates their stories, and that speaks to their readers.”

#morrison #toni morrison #catholic #catholicism #religion #literature #art #nobel prize

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cartermagazine · 2 months

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Weeksville, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is home to many monumental neighborhoods, but few come close to the history and culturally rich Weeksville. Originating in the mid-1800s sat a small African American village named Weeksville, formed during the post-abolition era. At that time, Weeksville and the surrounding Brooklyn area had one of the country’s densest rates of enslaved people. Brooklyn continued to develop, resulting in Weeksville’s absorption of the Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights neighborhoods. Despite the merger, echoes of Weeksville’s past still exist.

Weeksville earned its name from a freed African American dock worker named James Weeks, who purchased a plot of land in the community following abolition in the state.

As word spread that African Americans like Weeks were making a living in New York, more would head to the area for the same opportunity as long-standing families continued to sell off their land in the Brooklyn area. In the 1850s, the population boomed to over 500 residents, nearly half of the residents were originally born in the South. All with different stories and backgrounds, the occupations of these settlers included educators, health care professionals, and entrepreneurs. As time went on, the Weeks village would go on to operate a “colored” school, cemetery, senior home, and multiple churches. Not to mention, the village was amongst the highest rates for ownership of property and business among an African American settlement.

Weeksville quickly became a safe haven for African Americans throughout New York.

The community has changed over the years, but the history of Weeksville remains one of the most influential neighborhoods in New York State, particularly for African Americans.

CARTER™️ Magazine

#weeksville brooklyn #carter magazine #historyandhiphop365 #carter #wherehistoryandhiphopmeet #history #cartermagazine #today in history #staywoke #blackhistory #blackhistorymonth

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ausetkmt · 7 months

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It was the morning of May 24, 1888, and a large, ethnically diverse crowd waited in the Sala Ducale of the Apostolic Palace in Rome for the pope to arrive. Led by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, the French missionary archbishop of Algiers, the group had traveled to Rome on a double pilgrimage from North Africa and from the Diocese of Lyon, France. The pilgrims had earlier entered St. Peter’s Square with camels and a special gift for the pope: a pair of gazelles wearing silver collars inscribed with Latin verse.

Shortly after noon, the smiling Pope Leo XIII and his entourage entered the Sala Ducale to sustained applause from the pilgrims. It was a special year for Leo: the golden jubilee of his ordination to the priesthood. Preparations had been underway throughout nearly the entirety of 1887 for the yearlong celebration in which the pope would receive thousands of gifts from all over the world and greet an abundance of well-wishers.

Among the pilgrims who traveled to Rome during Leo’s jubilee, however, this group was unique, and its uniqueness was indicated by the 12 men strategically placed at the front of the crowd. These 12 African men had been enslaved before their freedom was purchased by Lavigerie and his missionaries. They were at the head of the group because today’s audience was an unofficial celebration of the release of Pope Leo’s encyclical on slavery.

On Feb. 10, the Brazilian statesman and abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco had met with Leo in a private audience and asked the pope to write the encyclical. Brazil was on the cusp of abolishing slavery, which would make it the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so. Due to the Brazilian princess regent Isabel’s devout Catholicism, Nabuco thought a letter from the pope condemning slavery might embolden her to support abolition more aggressively. Leo was happy to oblige, and the news about this antislavery encyclical began to spread.

Upon hearing of it, Cardinal Lavigerie wrote to the pope and asked him to include something about the continuing presence of slavery in Africa. The anti-abolition prime minister of Brazil, however, was not happy with the news from Rome, and he successfully pressed the Holy See to delay the issuance of the encyclical.

Despite the prime minister’s back-channel machinations, Brazil’s parliament passed the abolition bill, and it was signed into law by Isabel on May 13. When the encyclical, titled “In Plurimis,” was released to the public on May 24, it was dated May 5, as if Pope Leo wanted it on the record that he had supported Brazilian abolition before it became the law of the land. Nevertheless, this late release intersected perfectly with Cardinal Lavigerie’s pilgrimage. The day before the audience, the 12 formerly enslaved men had been given the chance to read the document. Though other encyclicals of Leo would come to overshadow this one, it surely was one of his most theologically significant. For with “In Plurimis” and his follow-up encyclical, “Catholicae Ecclesiae,” Leo XIII did something astounding: He changed the church’s teaching on slavery. The Catholic Church, for the first time in its history, had finally gotten on board with abolitionism.

Divergent Explanations

That revolutionary day when Leo XIII became the first pope to condemn slavery is not well known by many Catholics and is rarely mentioned in scholarship related to the church’s history. This is not terribly surprising. The church’s historical engagement with slaveholding is very complex, and it is also widely misunderstood. Even in the past several years, well-intentioned Catholic writers have published accounts of the church and slavery that are full of inaccuracies.

Often, those inaccurate accounts are written to defend the church in some way. In 2005, for example, Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote a book review in First Things claiming that the popes had denounced the trade in African slaves from its very beginnings and yet had never condemned slavery as such, retaining a continuity of teaching that always allowed for some “attenuated forms of servitude.” Other apologists have taken a more absolute position: The church has always been against slavery itself. Both these lines of argumentation seem to agree on two central assertions: The popes always condemned the trade in African slaves, and the church’s teaching did not change.

Defending the church, either in its reputation or its doctrinal continuity, can be praiseworthy. But when it comes to the history of the Catholic Church and slaveholding, this posture of defense has been deeply damaging. It has unnecessarily led to confusion around the church’s history with slaveholding, and that confusion has helped to prevent the church from reckoning with a troubling history whose consequences are still present in our world.

The history of the church was nothing close to a steady, if interrupted, march to eliminate slavery.

And yet it was once widely known, and still is among historians of slavery today, that the Catholic Church once embraced slavery in theory and in practice, repeatedly authorized the trade in enslaved Africans, and allowed its priests, religious and laity to keep people as enslaved chattel. The Jesuits, for example, by the historian Andrew Dial’s count, owned over 20,000 enslaved people circa 1760. The Jesuits and other slaveholding bishops, priests and religious were not disciplined for their slaveholding because they were not breaking church teaching. Slaveholding was allowed by the Catholic Church.

One of the reasons the church’s past approval of slaveholding is so little known among the general Catholic population today is that the very popes who reversed the church’s course on slavery and the slave trade also promoted that same inaccurate narrative that defended the church’s reputation and continuity—even, intentionally or not, at the cost of the truth.

Condemning the Atlantic Slave Trade

The shifts began quietly. In 1814, Pope Pius VII, at the request of Great Britain prior to the upcoming Congress of Vienna, privately sent letters to the kings of France and Spain asking them to condemn the slave trade. At this time in history, condemning the trade did not equate to condemning slavery itself. “The slave trade” meant the transatlantic shipping of enslaved persons from the African continent to the New World. Hence, the slaveholding U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, prior to signing an anti-slave-trade bill into law in 1807, saw no contradiction in referring to the trade as “those violations of human rights” against “the unoffending inhabitants of Africa” all while continuing to keep Black descendants of the trade’s immediate victims enslaved. Britain itself outlawed the trade in 1807, but slaveholding remained legal afterward in parts of its empire. In the same vein, Pius’s private letters referred only to the trade, not to slavery itself.The Door of No Return is a memorial in Ouidah, a former slave trade post in Benin, a country in West Africa. (Alamy)

The papacy’s condemnation of the trade became a public one in 1839 with Gregory XVI’s bull “In Supremo Apostolatus.” Though the bull came, once again, at the request of Great Britain, Gregory deserves praise for being the first pope to publicly condemn the Atlantic slave trade after nearly four centuries of its operation. The bull was a strong one in many ways, blaming the advent of the trade on Christians who were “basely blinded by the lust of sordid greed.” And yet, as with Pius VII, Gregory did not speak directly on the issue of whether slaveholders in the Americas should free their enslaved people, something he easily could have included.

So when some abolitionists in the United States greeted Gregory’s bull as a fully antislavery document, Catholic bishops like John England of Charleston, S.C., and Francis Patrick Kenrick of Philadelphia argued that the only thing the bull did was precisely what the United States had already done: ban participation in the international slave trade. Gregory corrected no one’s interpretation, and so Catholic slaveholding was able to continue in the United States and elsewhere, arguably without disobedience to church teaching.

The Catholic Church approved, multiple times and at some of its highest levels of authority, of one of the gravest crimes against humanity in modern history.

Why Gregory was the first pope to publicly condemn the trade is an agonizing and perhaps unanswerable question. The arguments that Gregory used to support his condemnation had been articulated by countless theologians and activists over the previous few centuries, including by the representatives of Black Catholic confraternities who protested the trade before the Holy See in the 1680s. Any pope since at least the 1540s, when the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas changed his opinion on the trade after researching its injustices, could have issued nearly the same bull as Gregory did. Gregory was just the first to choose to do it.

Rewriting History

Unfortunately, Gregory also provided a narrative in his bull that did not present a truthful portrait of the church’s engagement with the trade. Pius VII had made an ambiguous and dubious claim that the church had helped to abolish much of the world’s slavery and that the popes had always “rejected the practice of subjecting men to barbarous slavery,” but Gregory expanded upon this claim in detail. He wrote that in ancient times, “those wretched persons, who, at that time, in such great number went down into the most rigorous slavery, principally by occasion of wars, felt their condition very much alleviated among the Christians.” He claimed that slavery was gradually eliminated from many Christian nations because of “the darkness of pagan superstition being more fully dissipated, and the morals also of the ruder nations being softened by means of faith working by charity.”

In Gregory’s telling, this steady Christian march toward eliminating slavery from the earth was then interrupted by greedy Christians who reduced Black and Indigenous peoples to slavery or who bought already enslaved persons and trafficked them.

Gregory claimed that the papacy had been opposed to these new situations of enslavement: “Indeed, many of our predecessors, the Roman Pontiffs of glorious memory, by no means neglected to severely criticize this.” As evidence for this statement, he cited the bulls prohibiting the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas written by Paul III, Urban VIII and Benedict XIV, as well as the then recent condemnations of the trade by Pius VII. He also included a curious reference: a 1462 letter of Pius II that, Gregory wrote, “severely rebuked those Christians who dragged neophytes into slavery.”

This narrative was deeply misleading. The history of the church was nothing close to a steady, if interrupted, march to eliminate slavery. Rather, the early church embraced slaveholding both before and after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and the medieval church expanded the ways by which someone could become enslaved beyond those allowed by pagan Rome—allowing, for example, that women in illicit relationships with clerics could be punished with enslavement. Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas theologically defended the practice of keeping humans enslaved, and St. Gregory the Great gave enslaved people to his friends as gifts.

Moreover, while it was true that the popes condemned the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the trade in African slaves was permitted and encouraged by a series of popes from Nicholas V, who died in 1455, forward. Gregory XVI mentioned none of this, instead seeming to suggest that Pius II’s letter meant the popes’ hands had always been clean with regard to the trade. But Pius II’s condemnation had nothing to do with the general Portuguese trade in enslaved Africans; it instead concerned a particular instance of Catholic converts being kidnapped. Nicholas V’s bulls had specified that only non-Christians could be seized and enslaved. Pius II’s letter was in accordance with Nicholas’ permissions, not against them.

While it was true that the popes condemned the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the trade in African slaves was permitted and encouraged by a series of popes.

The inaccuracy of this narrative did not go unnoticed. The Portuguese consul in Brazil scoffed at the bull, writing that “its doctrine has been most rarely sent forth from the Palace of the Vatican, for it is well known that Nicholas V…and Calistus III…approved of the commerce in slaves” and that Sixtus IV and Leo X also approved of the trade even after the letter of Pius II. He noted that Scripture did not condemn slavery and that the popes had previously condemned only the enslavement of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Erroneous as Gregory’s narrative may have been, he was not pulling it out of thin air. Some British and American abolitionist historians had been promoting such a narrative for decades in an attempt to argue that Christianity had historically been an antislavery religion. Just five years prior to Gregory’s bull, for example, the American historian George Bancroft falsely claimed that the slave trade “was never sanctioned by the see of Rome.” It is possible, then, perhaps even likely, that Gregory XVI honestly believed this narrative to be accurate. Nevertheless, it was wrong, and its publication in a papal bull meant that it would spread more widely.

An Abolitionist Church

When Leo XIII condemned not merely the slave trade but slavery itself on that exciting day in 1888, it may have not been too shocking to most people who heard the news. Slavery was now legally abolished in the Christian world; why would the church not be opposed to it? And yet both Nabuco and Lavigerie understood that Leo was making history. The condemnations of slaveholding that Leo issued in 1888 and 1890 did not represent merely a change in policy, which itself would have been momentous enough. The change was a theological one. What the Holy Office only a couple decades prior had proclaimed was “not at all contrary to natural and divine law” was now declared by Leo to be contrary to both.

Leo even used the arguments of abolitionists to make his case. There was a certain set of theological propositions that abolitionist theologians had been promoting for centuries, from as early as St. Gregory of Nyssa to the 19th-century abolitionists Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass and the French Catholic journalist Augustin Cochin. These propositions had been criticized or ignored by most Catholic theologians who wrote in favor of slavery, but Leo’s documents were filled with them. His successors would repeat and even deepen those abolitionist ideas in their own antislavery documents over and over again.

And yet, bold and praiseworthy as Leo’s abolitionist encyclicals were, he further concealed the truth about church history. Ignoring centuries of papal, conciliar and canonical approval of slavery, Leo strengthened Gregory’s narrative of a long antislavery march through history and inaccurately listed additional popes who had supposedly condemned the trade in African slaves and even slavery itself—including one of the popes who had renewed Nicholas V’s permissions.

What the Holy Office only a couple decades prior had proclaimed was ‘not at all contrary to natural and divine law’ was now declared by Leo to be contrary to both.

As with Gregory, Leo may sincerely have believed these falsehoods to be true. But far from being officially corrected, this erroneous papal narrative has survived online and in print. Even St. John Paul II, who apologized for the participation of Christians in the slave trade, repeated the false claim that the trade had been condemned by Pius II.

The Need for Reckoning and Reconciliation

The Catholic Church’s change in teaching regarding slavery was striking. While that change raises important theological questions about ecclesiology and doctrinal development, we must reject the temptation to jump straight to those questions without also doing the hard and painful work of reckoning with this history. It is morally imperative that we admit and deal with a series of difficult truths: that the Catholic Church approved, multiple times and at some of its highest levels of authority, of one of the gravest and longest-lasting crimes against humanity in modern history—and did not withdraw that approval for nearly 400 years.

During the full history of the Atlantic slave trade, roughly 12.5 million African men, women and children were forced onto ships to be sent across the ocean to a life of forced labor. Almost two million did not survive that journey. The survivors and millions of their descendants, all human beings made in God’s image, were the chattel property of other humans who had the power to whip them, force them to work unpaid their entire lives and keep their children enslaved as well.A bas-relief sculpture on the wall of the Our Mother of Africa chapel at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., depicts the African American experience from slavery to emancipation and the civil rights movement. (CNS photo/Patrick Ryan for the National Black Catholic Congress via Catholic Standard)

As Catholics, we must consider the human beings affected by the church’s actions. How many people died chained to the disease-ridden hulls of ships because the popes before Gregory XVI repeatedly failed to take a bold stand? How many enslaved people were sexually assaulted because they were placed in a legal position allowed by the popes before Leo XIII that left them vulnerable to such abuse? How many enslaved people fell away from the Catholic faith because priests told them that the oppression they were experiencing was occurring with the approval of Holy Mother Church?

A process of reconciliation is needed. Our church needs to admit these past injustices.

As part of that reconciliation process, we need to do our best to repair the harm caused by the injustices our church perpetuated. Anti-slave-trade Catholic theologians of the 16th century were already writing about the need to make restitution to enslaved people. One 17th-century Capuchin even wrote about the eventual need for the descendants of slaveholders to make restitution to the descendants of the enslaved. Some religious communities have taken steps toward reconciliation, including the Jesuits of the United States, but at some point the Vatican will have to do the same. Perhaps there could be an international commission, or maybe a synod. When we consider the millions of lives the trade harmed and still harms to this day, it is difficult to imagine even the convoking of an ecumenical council as being too extreme a remedy.

Pope Leo XIII righted one significant wrong when he changed the Catholic Church’s teaching on slavery in 1888, and the popes since then should be lauded for their continual denunciation of slavery, slavery-like economic practices and contemporary human trafficking. But as with every unconfessed and unaddressed sin, harm remains. It takes courage to pick up that examination of conscience and pray with it. It takes courage to enter the confessional, say what needs to be said and commit to doing what needs to be done. And yet the justice and love of God demand such steps.

#Slavery and the Catholic Church: It’s time to correct the historical record #catholic church #curse of cannan #church lies #white lies #Black Lives Matter #Reparations

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heathersdesk · 1 year

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#lds #mormon #mormonism #the church of jesus christ of latter day saints #tumblrstake #queerstake #racism #abolition #antiracism #church #black history month

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hymnsofheresy · 1 year

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Truly He taught us to love one another His law is love and His gospel is peace Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother And in his name all oppression shall cease Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we With all our hearts we praise His holy name Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we His power and glory ever more proclaim!

“Since that first rendition at a small Christmas mass in 1847, "O Holy Night" has been sung millions of times in churches in every corner of the world. And since the moment a handful of people first heard it played over the radio, the carol has gone on to become one of the entertainment industry's most recorded and played spiritual songs. This incredible work--requested by a forgotten parish priest, written by a poet who would later split from the church, given soaring music by a Jewish composer, and brought to Americans to serve as much as a tool to spotlight the sinful nature of slavery as tell the story of the birth of a Savior--has become one of the most beautiful, inspired pieces of music ever created.” (x)

Learn about the abolitionist history of O Holy Night:

“Things start in 1843 or 1847—there’s some discrepancy about the year—in Roquemaure, a small town in the Rhône valley region. Placide Cappeau, who had followed his father into the wine business, was also known for the poetry he composed. Though a critic of the Catholic church, Cappeau was asked by the local priest to write a few stanzas in celebration of the town cathedral’s newly refurbished organ. He is said to have written the song’s words while in transit to Paris on business, with the biblical Gospel of Luke as inspiration. On the advice of the same clergyman who had commissioned him, Cappeau took his completed work—then titled “Minuit, Chrétiens,” or “Midnight, Christians”—to Adolphe Adams, a composer of some renown. Adams, who was of French-Jewish descent, arranged the music, and the song was newly christened as "Cantique de Noel.” The carol would make its world debut, with opera singer Emily Laurey belting lyrics, during Christmas eve midnight mass at the Roquemaure church...

Though "Cantique de Noel” would quickly become a French Christmas favorite, it was later denounced by the French Catholic church—a reported consequence of Cappeau being an avowed atheist and socialist, along with the discovery that Adams was Jewish, not Christian. One bishop reportedly dismissed the song as having a "lack of musical taste and total absence of the spirit of religion.” There was also some resistance to Cappeau’s overtly anti-slavery lyrics in the third verse, which were perhaps made more glaring by his emergent political outspokenness. In any case, the ban reveals where the French Catholic church stood on matters of abolition...

In any case, "Cantique de Noel” would make its way across the Atlantic to John Sullivan Dwight, a white American abolitionist, Unitarian minister, musician and classical music aficionado who published a magazine called Dwight's Journal of Music...

Dwight gave his translated verse the title “O Holy Night” when he published it in his music periodical in 1855. It apparently became a hit in the U.S., gaining popularity among the abolitionist crowd during the Civil War. Even as the song was being banned in its home country, it was becoming a staple of Christmas, and a song of protest, thousands of miles away, in the U.S. It’s long since become part of the broader American Christmas songbook.”

(x)

#hymns #carols #o holy night

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communistkenobi · 7 months

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something i’ve never liked is how, when people talk about dealing with the problems indigenous people face, there’s always this assumption that we shouldn’t “punish” non-indigenous people by involving them in the solution. just because their ancestors did something wrong that doesn’t mean they have blood on their hands and that their ancestors’ intentions aren’t their intentions.

i’m not somebody who thinks we should take responsibility for running society instead of the government, but, the situation just just rubs me the wrong way. like if your ancestors wronged people and the people they wronged have to deal with the consequences of of said wrongs everyday, do you not owe it to society to be part of the solution?

i don’t know what to do about this situation, but i just feel like society teaches non-indigenous people they are not responsible for pursuing justice here and i was wondering what your thoughts on the matter. tysm in advance if you reply 🤍

Even if you accept that current settlers are not in any way responsible for or benefit from past colonial violence (which I don’t, but we will sit with this hypothetical for a moment), then the same reasoning must be extended to indigenous peoples. If my wealth and privilege in a settler colonial state is not morally linked to the history of said state, then the oppression of indigenous peoples are doubly not their own faults - which is all the more reason to resolve current inequalities! But this line of reasoning is not logically extended to indigenous people because in the Canadian imaginary (and other settler colonial contexts, but I’m most familiar with Canada so I will speak on this context) indigenous people are considered to be subjects stuck in history, always “behind” us in time. Of course, indigenous people are treated as indigenous in every conceivable way, but they are treated as if they are in the wrong time period. The only acceptable version of this for settlers is for there to be no more indigenous people - only then will there be no debts to repay.

But obviously this is not the case, and can never be the case. I think concepts of individual punishment or retribution are a flawed way of understanding decolonial efforts. A more productive understanding is what Fanon says - for decolonisation to happen, the last must come first. This can be in the form of wealth and land redistribution, legal autonomy, official apologies, the abolition of various colonial institutions, and so forth. This can include stripping institutions of their wealth which consequently means powerful people will lose status and power (the church, for example, which was one of the primary architects of residential schools), but this is not based on individual punishment. Obviously this isn’t immediately realisable in the current state of affairs, and so supporting current indigenous struggles (such as blocking oil pipelines, the MMIWG project, etc) is of prime importance.

And also like just on a general note, settlers do still directly benefit from settler colonialism. Like whenever you hear about a new pipeline being built on indigenous land, the argument is always about how many jobs it will create (for settlers). Churches profit fucking massively from indigenous genocide and every settler Christian directly benefits from this. The RCMP is an arm of the Canadian state that is constantly used to conduct massive amounts of violence and suppression of indigenous people. etc.

And this is also a deeper disease of white supremacy: this open denial of history allows white people today to believe their accomplishments, their privileges, their wealth, are entirely of their own doing, ignoring the mountain of colonial architecture that affords them these privileges in the first place. This also has the dual effect of individually blaming indigenous people for their own oppression. At the heart of this sentiment is an existential white insecurity - white supremacy promises what it says on the tin, and while many white people buy into it wholeheartedly, deep down there is an anxiety about the true nature of white supremacy, because white supremacy only works if it is constantly, violently reinforced at every turn. White supremacy, contra to the claim of white supremacists, is not naturally occurring, it has to be fought for at every moment, it has to constantly add bodies to the pile to justify itself. So when (especially white) settlers claim they are not responsible for the sins of the past, this is motivated reasoning, because if the past does not exist then their privilege as a white person is a result of some biological process outside of history, emerging naturally and organically.

So like you, I don’t buy this argument, I think it’s deeply racist, and I don’t think it’s arguing the thing people think it is - of course Joe Average on the street is not individually responsible for his government’s genocide, because settler colonialism is an institutional project, but calls for decolonisation are not calls for white genocide or whatever other nonsense. It is like all serious left wing projects an aim towards the abolition of class, the abolition of the settler as a historical subject that exerts power over the indigenous subject. and while decolonisation is a violent process (and I use violence in an expansive, inclusive sense, not just interpersonal physical violence - many indigenous struggles you see today are violent in some sense or another because they are confronting the state), it is only that way because settler colonialism itself is an eternally violent machine and must be sloughed off violently

#asks #genocide tw

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3rdeyeblaque · 5 months

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On November 26th we venerate Elevated Ancestor & Hoodoo Saint Mama Sojourner Truth on the 140th anniversary of her passing 🕊

An abolitionist, Womens’ Rights activist, & itinerant evangelist, Mama Sojourner Truth truly lived up to her name as one of the fiercest, relentless, & unstoppable pro-abolitionist voices of the 19th Century.

Given the name, Isabella, at birth, Mama Truth was born around 1797 to Dutch-speaking enslaved parents on Colonel Ardinburgh Hurley's plantation in Ulster County, NY. The actual date of her birth remains unknown. At the age of 9 she was sold away from her parents. She was passed through the hands of several slavers across NY State before ending up with the Dumonts. As was the case for most enslaved folks in the rural North, Isabella was forcibly isolated from other slaves and suffered physical & sexual abuse at the hands of the Dumonts.

Alone in the nearby woods, she found peace. Here, she'd speak to Spirit/God. Inspired by her many conversations with Spirit, one day in 1826, she walked away from Dumont Farm to freedom. Although the journey tempted her to return to the Dumonts, she stayed the course after she was struck by a vision of a man she identified as Jesus, during which she felt "baptized in the Holy Spirit," and thus gained the strength & confidence to push on. Like countless Ancestors before her, Isabella called on Spirit & supernatural forces for the power to survive her conditions.

Eventually, she married & birthed 5 children. On July 4, 1827, the NY State Legislature emancipated the enslaved, including Isabella & her children. Yet the Dumont family who "owned" her, refused to comply. Before dawn the next morning, with her youngest baby cradled in her arms, she sought refuge 5 miles away with an abolitionist family. During her time there, she converted to Pentecostal and joined their local Methodist church.

She later then moved again, this time with one of her eldest sons, Peter, in NYC wherein by day she worked as a live-in domestic. Here she found & joined a religious cult called, The Kingdom. It's leader, Matthias, beat Isabella and forced her to take on the heaviest workload. Soon thereafter she became a Pentecostal preacher. Her faith and preaching along with her life story as an emancipated slave drew the attentions of abolitionists & women's rights crusaders. Her speeches were not political by nature. They were based on her unique interpretation - as a woman and a former slave -of the Christian Bible.

On June 1st 1863, Sojourner Truth was born. Isabella took on this new name for herself as she headed East to, “exhort the people to embrace Jesus, and refrain from sin". She lived in a utopian community called, The Northampton Association for Education & Industry, which was devoted to transcending class, race, & gender. She preached at camp meetings for a few years before the community was dissolved. Even though the community lasted less than five years, many highly influential & reform-minded individuals visited the Northampton community; including prolific abolitionist leaders such as Frederick Douglass & William Lloyd Garrison.

Through these connections, she began to speak at public events on behalf of slave abolition and women’s rights. Eventually, this compelled her infamous 1851,“Ar’nt I A Woman” speech at a Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, OH. This was a significant moment in the sociopolitical climate of the country at the time because, for the first time for most, "slave" became equated to women & "woman" became equated to Black. She became increasingly involved on the issue of Women's suffrage, but eventually separated her voice from leaders such as Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton one they asserted that they would not support the Black vote if Women were not also granted the same right.

In 1857, Mama Truth purchased a house with the help of friends in a small Spiritualist community called, Harmonia, near Battle Creek, MI. Here she lived thriving the years of supporting hwrself thrift paid speaking events, selling photographs of herself, publishing her book titled, "Narrative of Sojourner Truth" which was written by an amanuensis, as she was illiterate.

Once the Civil War began, Mama Truth pushed for the inclusion of Blacks in the Union Army, which was not intitially the case. She then poured her energy into gathering food & clothing supplies for the underserved volunteer regiments of Black Union soldiers. This is when the plight freed slaves captured her attention, as many of whom were living in refugee camps in Washington D.C.. Mama Truth embarked on a round-trip journey from her home near Battle Creek,MI to D.C. to meet with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss the conditions of the freedmen refugees in D.C. & across the North.

After the Civil War, she championed the idea of a colony for freed slaves out West where they could galvanize their desires to become self-reliant. Mama Truth garnered numerous signatures for her petition urging the U.S. Government to provide land for this endeavor. Although she presented this petition to then President Ulysses S. Grant, her mission never materialized. Nevertheless, in the Fall of 1879, a large migration of Southern freedmen ventured westward to start begin life anew. Mama Truth saw this as God's Divine Plan for our people. Despite her old age, Mama Truth traveled to Kansas to help them. Four years later, Mama Sojourner Truth passed away at her home near Battle Creek, MI. She was believed to be 86.

"How came Jesus into the world? Through God who created him and woman who bore him. Man, where is your part? But the women are coming up blessed by God and few of the men are coming up with them. But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk an' a buzzard." - Sojourner Truth @ the 1851 Ohio Women's Convention.

We pour libations & give 💐 today as we celebrate Mama Truth her selfless service and pioneering vision for the freedom & self-determination of our people. May her life be a reminder of: the power of stillness & deep meditation, to lead with Spirit, & the grit of perseverance that's alive in our blood.

Offering suggestions: woodland soil, water, Pentecostal prayers/ scripture, read/share her speeches & written words.

‼️Note: offering suggestions are just that & strictly for veneration purposes only. Never attempt to conjure up any spirit or entity without proper divination/Mediumship counsel.‼️

#hoodoo #hoodoos #atrs #atr #the hoodoo calendar #ancestor veneration #Sojourner Truth #black spirituality #Black Spiritualists

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