page_title: Pope Gregory XVI
section_title: Condemnation of the slave trade
hierarchical_section_title: Pope Gregory XVI / Pontificate / Condemnation of the slave trade
context_page_description: Pope Gregory XVI was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 2 February 1831 to his death in 1846. He had adopted the name Mauro upon entering the religious order of the Camaldolese.
  Strongly conservative and traditionalist, he opposed democratic and modernising reforms in the Papal States and throughout Europe, seeing them as fronts for revolutionary leftism. Against these trends, Gregory XVI sought to strengthen the religious and political authority of the papacy. In the encyclical Mirari vos, he pronounced it "false and absurd, or rather mad, that we must secure and guarantee to each one liberty of conscience." He encouraged missionary activity abroad and condemned the slave trade. However, his harsh repression, financial extravagance and neglectfulness left him deeply unpopular domestically.
  He is the most recent pope to take the pontifical name "Gregory", and the most recent non-bishop to become pope. He was, until the accession of Pope Francis in 2013, the most recent pope to have been a priest of a religious order.
context_section_description: In 1839, Gregory XVI issued an apostolic letter against the Atlantic slave trade, In supremo apostolatus, in which he wrote:
  [W]e have judged that it belonged to Our pastoral solicitude to exert Ourselves to turn away the Faithful from the inhuman slave trade in Negroes and all other men. ... [D]esiring to remove such a shame from all the Christian nations, having fully reflected over the whole question and having taken the advice of many of Our Venerable Brothers the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, and walking in the footsteps of Our Predecessors, We warn and adjure earnestly in the Lord faithful Christians of every condition that no one in the future dare to vex anyone, despoil him of his possessions, reduce to servitude, or lend aid and favour to those who give themselves up to these practices, or exercise that inhuman traffic by which the Blacks, as if they were not men but rather animals, having been brought into servitude, in no matter what way, are, without any distinction, in contempt of the rights of justice and humanity, bought, sold, and devoted sometimes to the hardest labour. ...
  We reprove, then, by virtue of Our Apostolic Authority, all the practices abovementioned as absolutely unworthy of the Christian name. By the same Authority We prohibit and strictly forbid any Ecclesiastic or lay person from presuming to defend as permissible this traffic in Blacks under no matter what pretext or excuse, or from publishing or teaching in any manner whatsoever, in public or privately, opinions contrary to what We have set forth in this Apostolic Letter.
caption: Monument to Gregory XVI in Saint Peter's Basilica
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