John
Francis Maxwell, Slavery and the
Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching concerning the Moral
Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery
Above is a link to a book
published 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 in portable
document format (.pdf) made from scans of photocopied pages.*
Interested readers are, of course, happy to have this long-out-of-print study in any decent
form, for until the project of a documentary history has been
financed, undertaken, completed, and published, this is the best window
we have into a significant area of what is called "Catholic Social
Teaching." I do plan, however, to extract plain text from this
document in the near future and format it attractively. The
result will be, unlike the current version, searchable.
It also provides ample
material for testing the proposition 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 happens to be one of several unintended but happy
consequences of my blog,
anarcho-catholic.
Anthony Flood
September 24, 2011
* Due to my technological
limitations, I had recently posted a dozen links to the book in
consecutive .pdf segments, but Daniel Coleman rendered the whole thing
for me in a single document. Thanks, Daniel.