Vittime della libertà. La schiavitù nelle pagine della «Civiltà cattolica»

This article analyzes the discussion on slavery and emancipation that took place in the journal «La Civiltà Cattolica», published by the Jesuits from 1850 onwards, to help map a debate that involved both shores of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century and has yet to be systematically addressed in relation to the Italian peninsula. Anyone looking to the pages of this periodical for energetic condemnations of slavery will be disappointed. The Jesuit journal always deployed this issue in a functional manner, to fight various battles: against the philosophes and revolutionaries of ‘89, accused of not having truly supported emancipation; against the French liberal political tradition; against the U.S. republic; and against Protestantism, the ancient enemy, by this time blamed not for spreading the disease of heresy but rather for fueling anticlerical currents keen on secularizing society. Rather than condemning slavery and calling for abolition, the journal exposed the mistreatment characterizing this system – namely the harshness of slaveowners – even while continually stressing the dangers of emancipation. It was only in the face of the final abolitionist laws of the late nineteenth century and publication of the encyclical In plurimis (1888) by Leo XIII that «La Civiltà Cattolica» shifted its approach: it began taking an anti-slavery stand and reconstructing the past in a way that, in keeping with papacy’s cultural policy of the time, cast the Church as one of the institutions that had played a pioneering role in pushing for emancipation.