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• 1 media/Thumb 153.png 2024-12-03T13:22:55-05:00 "Speech Given by His Eminence Cardinal Lavigerie for the Opening of the Antislavery Congress" 28 Cardinal Lavigerie opens the anti-slavery conference with a passionate speech plain 2024-12-06T20:04:42-05:00 Translation: A Domine factum est istud! This is the work of God.
  
  Two years ago, I was on this same pulpit, at the request of the Curate of Jesus Christ, to launch a peaceful crusade against African slavery.
  
  I recalled then that the Church previously, twice in history, had to triumph over a similar plague.
  
  The first time, the fight lasted centuries. it found, as I said to you, the pagan world as the prey of the passions of a small number of cruel masters who kept the human race like beasts under a yoke. But, although alone and without any other power than that of justice and truth, the Church did not refrain from casting the cry of deliverance to these oppresses multitudes. She taught them that the name "slave" must disappear from the language of man, because, as Saint Augustine later explained, that name is a name of punishment and, if the human race is delivered over to so many cruelties and infamies, it is because it has abandoned the path of justice; but Jesus Christ, in expiating our crimes and obtaining for us the forgiveness of heaven, made us free from the slavery of man by delivering us from the slavery to sin.
  
  It is the faithful echo of the word of the Apostle of the nations, that the great bishop of Africa this transmits to us: "You are free, Christ has delivered you."
  
  But, if truth be proclaimed, since the first days of Christianity, passions were slow to give up their sacrilegious prey. Only slowly did justice, abnegation and charity triumph. Twelve centuries after Jesus Christ the Church still persevered by the voice of her Pontiffs, of her Saints, of her greatest men, the cupidities expired that still maintained servitude.
  
  This fight against paganism finished, another, more odious in a sense, because it was happening between Christians, began after the conquest of the New World. It lasted three centuries and only just concluded in our day, with the abolition of slavery in Brazil.
  
  But, just as we received the assurances of this last victory, in the memorable Encyclical of Leo XIII to the bishops of that nation, a third crusade began.
  
  This time it was against African slavery.
  
  It was on this same pulpit that I gave the public declaration, in the name of and by the order of the Curate of Jesus Christ.
  
  I am here again in his name, not after ten centuries as with the pagan slavery, nor after three centuries as with American slavery, but after hardly two years, to delight with you that the civilized world has generously embraced so noble and holy a cause, set up laws and thereby assured its triumph. And I cannot find, to express the sentiments of my heart, in the view of such a result, any better words than those of the Psalms, which I said at the start of this speech: this is the work of God: A Domine factum est istud! 
  
  This is what I want to establish on the occasion of the opening of your Congress against slavery, showing you what I have done so far for this great work up to today, and what still needs to be done.
  
  The church of Saint-Suplice already reminded me, as I said to you in the past, of the most memorable circumstances of my sacerdotal life. It was on the cobblestone of this sanctuary, more than forty years ago, that I sacrificed my youth to God and to so many souls, and on this altar that, for the first time, I offered the sacrifice with the pontiff who had just laid hands on me; and now Saint-Sulpice will remind me that, with the title time I have left, of a new and no less dear memory. It was under its vaults that, for the first time, I preached the crusade destined to beseech the Black people of our Africa with Christian pity. I thank God for the effectiveness that he has given to the voice of an old man, and of the grace he has given me to plead that cause, at the end of my career, in the places where his cradle was found.
  
  ***
  
  What I said here for the first time about African slavery was a revelation for many.
  
  At its base, however, the books of explorers had reported a portion of the evils of our continent, the academies had studied them. The public papers had calculated the number of executioners and victims. Travellers who returned from those Muslim countries repeated that they had seen the number of Black slaves multiplying as the number of white slaves decreased in the Turkish Empire, in Egypt, in Morocco, in Tripolitania. But it seemed that either that these facts did not exist in reality or that the civilized world was indifferent to them.
  
  It was in this situation that, a few weeks before I spoke to you here for the first time, a voice made itself heard. It was, in truth, the voice of an old man who had arrived at an extreme old age, but who was the voice of the Curate of Jesus Christ. At the moment when he communicated his Encyclical to the bishops of Brazil to congratulate them for the abolition of slavery and to commend them for the works of fathers and pastors who had helped alleviate a the disorders of a social revolution, the Pope learned, from a distant voice, about the horrors that were bloodying, with the Muslim slave traders, the whole interior of Africa. His soul was stirred, and, taking up the letter that he had been addressing to the bishops in the Americas, he denounced it with a rare vigour of style and thought, to the missionaries, the bishops, the princes, the peoples, to the whole world, the innumerable crimes that strike the universe with shock and terror. With an energy that was never surpassed by his predecessors, he declared African slavery as contrary to natural law no less than to that of religion, he pleaded, he ordered all, with the triple authority of his high ministry, his age and his social authority, to suppress such a plague.
  
  But a letter was not enough. We have seen it in the history of the world, even in the history of religion. We know what the Prophets did, who wrote so much in the name of God; their teachings did not go beyond the limits of Israel. God had to make himself a man and speak himself in order to change hearts. The Holy Father thus wanted, in addition to his Encyclical, a living voice, a heart of flesh, as is said in Scripture, and he looked for them where he could have hoped to find them, I mean among those whom the spectacle of so many tears, the echo of the cries of so many children ripped away from their mothers, the lamentations of so many Rachels, tore for such a long time to the base of their soul. And, to better demonstrate that he was obeying nothing but a supernatural inspiration, that magnanimous old man chose, for such a ministry, another old man whose voice and strength were already half broken down with weariness.
  
  That is how I came to it.
  
  I started among you to honour my country by the sign of my preaching, to thus respond, as we so often want to acknowledge, to the most ancient aspirations of France toward liberty and justice.
  
  From Paris, I went to London. Its Anti-Slavery Society arranged the touching spectacle of two cardinals of the Holy Roman Church speaking in the middle of an assembly mainly made up of Protestants who hung onto their words. It was they who, after hearing us speak, solicited the government of their country to obtain from all of the governments of Europe, as I had proclaimed the necessity, to associate together to suppress and destroy African slavery. For proof, one only needs to reread the text of the resolutions that the meeting of Princess Hall adopted under the Lord Granville's chairmanship.
  
  At Brussels, where the Catholic faith reigns, success was no less sure. It was the same everywhere that my voice was heard, in Holland, Rome, Milan. The Catholics of Spain and Portugal, those of Germany were no less willing to hear the voice of the Curate of Jesus Christ.
  
  It was he, indeed, who spoke through my voice, who directed my actions, who encouraged my acts with his letters, with his papal briefs, with the marks of his sovereign generosity.
  
  For more than two years, he did not forget this great work for a single day, and he wrote to me again recently in a public brief with gratitude for what the powers had accomplished at the Brussels Conference, encouraging us to continue our actions regarding public opinion, making a call out to the humanities for the composition of the best work that would hasten the abolition of African slavery.
  
  Do we not have, at this very moment, a new sign of his paternal blessings, in the presence among us of his eminent representative in France?
  
  But, this constant solicitude of the Holy Father, what practical goal did it hope to accomplish and entrust me with pursuing? A goal that is surely worthy of the wisdom of his great political mind. In the last audience that he granted me to confirm my mission, he said to me: "Opinion, now more than ever, is queen of the world, it is on her alone that you should act. You will not vanquish except by opinion."
  
  The Episcopate, especially in France, did not delay in making heard the voice of the Curate of Jesus Christ. I received and published the warm letters of support for the crusade ordered by the Holy Father, from all of the Cardinals, from all of the Archbishops in France, from nearly all of their venerable suffragans. Some were very eloquent, all with charity and apostolic indignation, declared that they would associate with the initiative, with the exhortations of Leo XIII.
  
  Everywhere, it was to public opinion that I directed my labours. You can read all my speeches. I do not have time to cite them here, but I will print this speech just like I have printed previous ones, and join my own words with them. You can see what I said in England:

  It is indisputably up to the governments of Europe that the obligation to save Africa is first imposed. And why would they not want to? Is there any more noble, greater, more generous work? On what question can they more honourably consult and agree together that on this question of stopping such frightful evils?

  And I added:

  But if interested voices do not speak to governments with enough force, as busy as they are with other concerns, they must be forced to hear, in Montesquieu's words, the cry of mercy and pity. "And for that, it is necessary that all should cry out with so much force that they are forced to obey it."

  At the same time that I was repeating the call made by the Holy Father to the peoples and governments to the most powerful people in princely councils, I was also addressing everyone, even women, to ask them to act on the masses.

  "Christian women, of Europe," I said,

  it is up to you to make horrors of slavery known everywhere and to stir up the indignation of the civilized world toward it. Do not leave your father, your husbands, your brothers in peace, employ the authority that they have in their speech, in their position in the State, to stop the flow of the blood of their sisters. If God has given you talent for writing, use it to sustain the cause, you will not find a holier one. Do not forget that it was a woman's book, a novel (Uncle Tom), which, translated into all the countries in the world, sealed the deliverance of the slaves of America.

  But those to whom I am making the strongest appeal, without distinction either of nationality or religion or politics, it is to the members of the press.
  
  (More to follow)

  
  
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