Here are the Catholic bishops who enslaved Black people in America.

The history of the Catholic Church in the United States is fraught with contradictions. Established on colonial hopes, its early years included persecutions, false starts, major deliberations, and the ever-present reality of the nation’s original sin.

Yes, slavery was a feature, not a bug, of the early European project in the lands that would in 1776 become what we now call “America.” Colonial Catholicism was certainly no exception, even hundreds of years prior during pre-American contact by the Spanish with various stateside regions in the 16th century.

Less explored has been the involvement of the highest echelons of the Church hierarchy in the trafficking of human flesh from Africa to the New World. Indeed, many Catholic bishops were participants in the trade and exploitation of Black bodies, though historians are in many ways still picking up the pieces.

The first European contact with what would become the United States was in the Virgin Islands and in Puerto Rico. Enslaved Africans were brought in chains to the latter during the early 1500s—despite the fact that the island’s Indigenous population had been conquered in part by an Afro-Spanish conquistador, Juan Garrido. Slavery would continue on in Puerto Rico for nearly four centuries, with a number of prelates taking part.

The Spanish bishop Alonso Manso, who headed the Diocese of Puerto Rico from 1511 to 1539, was among them, as were his successors in Bishops Juan Damián López de Haro, OSST and Manuel Jiménez Pérez, OSB. Other Catholic prelates were also slaveholders in Puerto Rico, but records are not always clear on the specifics.

Stateside, the Catholic colony of Maryland was a safe haven for Catholics during much (though not all) of its early history. This made it the perfect germination point for the nascent stateside Church, including its first bishops—and its first enslaved Catholics.

Bishop John Carroll, SJ was the first Catholic prelate there, appointed Bishop of Baltimore in 1789. He founded Georgetown University, supported the use of enslaved labor in building the school, and personally owned at least two enslaved African Americans, one of whom he later sold. His immediate successors as archbishop, Leonard Neale, SJ and Ambrose Maréchal, PSS, were also traffickers, as was Samuel Eccleston, PSS.

In 1808, the same year Baltimore was raised to archdiocesan status, the pope separated it—the nation’s sole Catholic diocese—into five sees, creating the new Dioceses of Boston, Bardstown, New York, and Philadelphia.

The Diocese of Bardstown, which covered all of what was then the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains, was also home to slaveholding prelates: Bishops Benedict Flaget, a Sulpician who later became Bishop of Louisville in 1841, and Martin John Spalding, who became Archbishop of Baltimore during the Civil War. Both were vocal critics of abolitionism and worked to justify slaveholding even on a moral and theological level.

The Diocese of Cincinnati was carved out from Bardstown in 1821, with the Dominican prelate Edward Fenwick as its first head. Near the historic St. Rose Priory in Springfield, Kentucky, he had previously run the College of St. Thomas Aquinas, where future Confederate president Jefferson Davis was one of the first students. Fenwick himself inherited enslaved persons from his father, later growing the number to at least 19. His successor, Bishop John Baptist Purcell, likely owned African Americans while serving as president of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland.

Unsurprisingly, antebellum Catholic bishops in the Deep South generally supported slavery, though usually as a domestic reality rather than an international inevitability. Among them was Bishop John England of Charleston, who claimed to hate slavery but facilitated its endurance. His successors, Ignatius Reynolds and Patrick Lynch, continued the practice and enslaved people directly. (The latter was even named—in vain—by President Davis as the Confederate States' delegate to the Holy See in 1864.)

In the Spanish Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, Bishop Louis DuBourg likewise engaged in the slave trade even while unsuccessfully attempting to take his episcopal seat in New Orleans. Rejected by his flock, he instead anchored his cathedral in St. Louis, then a part of his ecclesiastical territory. Later recalled to France, he was succeeded in Missouri by the Vincentian priest Joseph Rosati, another slaveholder, who became Bishop of St. Louis in 1827. The enslaver Peter Kenrick became archbishop in 1847. 

(The Vatican originally intended that Rosati be succeeded by John Timon, who is also believed to have been a trafficker. He rejected the appointment, however, and later became the first Bishop of Buffalo.)

In 1825, the Viciariate of Alabama and the Floridas was created under Bishop Michael Portier, a slaveowner who ministered between Mobile and St. Augustine, Florida. He became the first Bishop of Mobile in 1829 and remained in his position for thirty years, advocating for the secessionist cause.

Another spinoff of Louisiana and the Two Floridas, the Diocese of New Orleans, was created in 1830. An abortive succession plan resulted in the accession of Antoine Blanc, a slavery defender who is thought to have owned African Americans himself. It is certain that his successor, the stalwart Confederate sympathizer and Vincentian Archbishop Jean-Marie Odin, did.

Also consider Mathias Loras, a French-born prelate who served as the first Bishop of Dubuque beginning in 1837. Known as a fervent and resourceful missionary, he was revealed in recent years to have owned at least one enslaved individual during his time as a parish priest and diocesan official in Alabama.

Regrettably, this overview is but a sample of the Catholic hierarchy’s participation in African-American human trafficking in the three-and-a-half centuries between European contact in the Caribbean and American emancipation in the late 1800s.

This list aims to feature most of the bishops known to have personally enslaved people at some point in their lives. Not included are others who are indicated in U.S. Census records to have been slaveowners. More still directly oversaw schools, cathedrals, and chanceries that made use of unpaid labor from enslaved African Americans. 

Numerous Catholic institutions across the country continue to bear the names of Catholic bishops who directly participated in slavery, including universities, high schools, student halls, historical landmarks, and even a diocesan seminary.

Some dioceses, religious communities, and schools have removed such honors in view of justice and acknowledgment of harm. Others have not. Some bishops have intervened to block historians from uncovering the full history of slaveholding in their diocesan archives.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has never formally made amends for the participation of its former members in the institution of slavery. In 2024, just days before the holiday of Juneteenth, the USCCB voted in favor of a public apology—for the Church’s historical treatment of Native Americans.

As for the original sin, contradictions remain even in the historical record. Some of the same bishops who enslaved men, women, and children later became anti-slavery advocates. Others were always ambivalent, not quite Confederates but also wary of attaching themselves to the “radical” idea of immediate abolition. (Convenience kills.)

One wonders what fruits could have been borne in the U.S. Catholic Church had fewer—or none—of its chief shepherds engaged in what we now understand to be a heinous and unequivocal crime. Dignity denied, families destroyed, and even faith stamped out by what can only be described as institutional cowardice. Tragically, it’s a story we have come to encounter time and time again.

Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.

Want to donate to BCM? You have options.

b.) click to give (fee-free) on Zeffy

b.) click to give on Facebook