How Pope Nicholas V Used the Church to Start the Disgraceful Slave Trade
By: Allison Gaines
Tags: Black Lives Mater, Religion, History, Race, Freedom

How Pope Nicholas V Used the Church to Start the Disgraceful Slave Trade

Religious dogma created the dehumanization of African indigenous people

In 1452, Pope Nicholas V charged Alfonso of Portugal with the Christian duty to enslave any non-Christian. The Pope’s act would be the first recorded international edict to literally grant a Christian nation the right to promote, enforce, and heavily profit from slave trading. Decades later, Pope Alexander VI beckoned Christian monarchs to conquer native populations in the name of the Catholic Church, upholding his predecessor’s tradition to enslave non-Christians in whatever lands they called home (Muhammad, 2019).

While discussions about slavery often center on European nations’ wrongdoings, historians often obscure the role of the Catholic Church. The truth is like the sound of an alarm after a long night of drinking; it may sound unpleasant, but it is essential to move on from the drunken stupor.

The Catholic Church forced their views onto African and Indigenous people. There was no peaceful conversion and mending of ideological differences. Conversion by missionaries was historically violent, dehumanizing, and destabilizing for African nations. White people justified African enslavement because they did not deem non-Christians worthy of respect.

Colonization is the preamble to every injustice Black and Indigenous people experience today through white supremacy. Pope Nicholas V charged Portugal with the duty to enslave non-Christian people, crossing the rubicon.

The enslavement of non-Christians

Though the Bible does not mention race or skin color in this narrative, according to these sixteenth and seventeenth century theologians, Africans inherited Ham and Canaan’s curse of slavery. By the nineteenth century, pro-slavery advocates in the United States continued to use this misleading biblical justification, as well as Aristotle’s theory of natural order and New World racial prejudices, to defend their support of slavery (LDHI, 2020).

If something is right, someone should convince you of that fact, not force you. However, the Catholic Church viewed all other religious practices as barbaric. There was never a debate — the papacy ordered a mandate instead of trying to convert through kindness, respect, and virtue. So, when many people feel surprised that many modern Christians, Catholics, and Evangelicals are showing disdain for Black people and the LGBT community, I cannot help but feel this is a result of white-washed history. Historians documented their race-based oppression thoroughly.

When a country indulges in revisionist history, it is easy to turn a war criminal into a Saint and a family farmer into a savage. White men used the Bible as a sword against all non-Christian people. This ideology came directly from one of the great philosophers — Aristotle.

Aristotle argued that the master and slave relationship was natural and that some are marked out for subjection, others for rule (LDHI, 2020).

Thus, assertion that slavery was humane became part of early European thought. The Church embodied this ideology and turned it into policy. Catholics spread their faith through acts of war, not discourse. When Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, and other European nations enslaved Africans, they did so with the blessing of the Church. Pro-slavery relied on the selection of key verses from the bible.