Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

The origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States includes a dependency on slave labor and sales to sustain itself and build its institutions. In 1838, a group of the United States’ most prominent Catholic priests, the Society of Jesuits, sold 272 enslaved people to save Georgetown University, their largest mission project and the first Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States. The sale included the separation of children from parents, a common feature of the slave trade. In the groundbreaking new book The 272 (2023), Rachel L. Swarns follows one family through nearly two centuries of indentured servitude and enslavement to uncover a harrowing history. In a recent article about the 1838 sale, she shares how witnesses “described the terrors of enslavement: children torn from their parents, brothers from their sisters, and desperate people forced to board slave ships that sailed to Louisiana. It was one of the largest documented slave sales of the time, and it shattered entire families.”

For this topic, the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues asks: Children who were enslaved were often separated from their families. How did Catholic communities respond to this separation at the time? How is the Catholic Church responding to this history of separation now? Going forward, how should Catholic communities respond to this history of separation?