John
Francis Maxwell, Slavery and the
Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching concerning the Moral
Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery
Embedded in the text above is a link to a book
pub-lished in 1975 by Barry Rose Publishers, Chichester (UK) in association with the Anti-Slavery
Society for the Protection of Human Rights with a foreword by
Lord Wilberforce. It is a .pdf made from scans of photocopied pages.*
Interested readers are, of course,
glad to have this long-out-of-print study in any decent
form, for until the project of a documentary history has been
fi-nanced, undertaken, completed, and published, this is the best window
we have into a significant area of what is called
“Catholic Social
Teaching.”
It also provides ample
material for testing the pro-position that official Catholic
teaching never changes or, if it does, the change amounts to merely a
“development” or explication, but never a reversal, of earlier
teaching. Such testing is one of the unintended but happy
consequences of my (now-deleted) blog, anarcho-catholic (2011-2012),
whose posts now form the chapters of my
Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic
(2019).
Anthony Flood
September 24, 2011
Updated August 8, 2019
* Due to my technological
limitations, I had posted a dozen links to the book in
consecutive .pdf segments, but Daniel Coleman rendered the whole book for me in a single document. Thanks, Daniel.