Catholicism and racial justice

Excerpted from Matthew Anger's article in The Seattle Catholic (see
link below for more)

"The Problem of Slavery
Slavery, which had been successfully suppressed with the growth of
Christian Europe, saw an unfortunate reprise during the Renaissance.
This was due to two factors. First were the wars against the Turks, in
which both sides enslaved captives for use on the galleys in naval
combat. Turkish slaves did, however, have recourse to baptism, in
which case they had to be freed. The second factor was the Age of
Exploration, beginning in the late 15th century. What made this slave
institution different from the ancient model is that the enslaved were
now exclusively of a different race, rounded up and placed in
captivity solely for servile labor (unlike Turks who were simply
prisoners of war). During the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the
New World, Indian and Negro enslavement was widespread, though it was
constantly opposed by the Church, with varying degrees of success.

Clearly there were shortcomings amongst individual Catholics. But to
hold the Faith responsible for such disappointments is like blaming
Moses for the failure of the Hebrews to obey the Ten Commandments. If
Catholics have tried and occasionally failed, more can be said for
them than for those who never tried at all. As noted above, no culture
prior to Christianity recognized slavery as a sin. As early as 1462,
Pope Pius II called slavery a "great crime" and pontiffs continued to
inveigh against the institution through the reign of Leo XIII in the
late 19th century. It was under him that the last instance of slavery
in a Catholic country (Brazil) was peacefully eliminated in the 1880s.
***It is interesting to contrast this with the bloody and destructive
end of slavery in the South during the American Civil War, which cost
nearly a million casualties. ***Even where slavery existed in the
Spanish colonies, it was always more of an economic institution rather
than a racial one, since marriage between different races was common
and did not carry the stigma it did in Protestant lands. Also, in the
1700s, American blacks frequently escaped from their masters in
Georgia and the Carolinas to find refuge as free men in Spanish
Florida. Some of these served as uniformed soldiers in the frontier
posts."

http://www.seattlecatholic.com/article_20031201.html

As we can see, Baha Allah is rather the Johnny Come lately on issues
of racialism and slavery; the Catholic Church was far ahead of the
game in eliminating this evil from human society. Of course slavery
was hard to eradicate, especially in the face of its industrialization
by Calvinist Protestants (Baptists, Presbyterians in the South of the
US). To atribute the end of slavery to baha Allah's "manifestation" is
simply to ignore the historical truth, that slavery in  Christendom
was already at its end, only in Mahometan countries and in the animist
societies of Africa does one still find slavery as an enduring
institution. I suppose one could argue that if slavery was eliminated
in the Americas by the "spiritual effulgence" of Baha Allah's
manifestation, like so many Bahaists claim, why then did this
manifestation have no supernatural effect in the pagan countries of
Africa and in Mahometan countries like the Arabias and Afghanistan?

Clearly the claim made by Bahaists is akin to a rooster claiming that
the sun rose because of its crowing.