John T. Noonan Jr.

“The offenses to human dignity that the Church did not condemn included the buying, selling, hypothecating, inheriting, and owning of human beings; the use of slave labor without any measure of just compensation; the denial to slaves of education, including instruction in reading and in writing, and the denial to slaves of the right to educate their children; the denial to slaves of any right to a religious vocation or to the sacrament of holy orders; the denial to slaves of the full range
of conjugal companionship and protection; the denial of any right to personal development; and the complete exclusion of the slave from the political community. According to the teaching of John Paul II, all these denials and exclusions would be serious sins today. They were not denominated so by any
magisterial document before the recent development of doctrine...The Church had always been against slavery. So thought that improbable stereotype,
the average Catholic.”
― John T. Noonan Jr., Church That Can and Cannot Change