Did the Pope Bless Slavery?

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There I was sitting in my Louisiana History class and on the power point I saw the words : Pope Blessed Slavery. This was part of my teacher's lecture at my local college. Being a Catholic I could see that this was based on nothing. I did not know the technical details, but I knew that Our Lord would not give the keys to the kingdom of heaven and authority on earth just so one of the later popes could blow it on slavery. I knew that the gates of hell would never prevail against Holy Mother Church.

My class was assigned a topic of our choice for a term paper so I naturally chose slavery knowing that as a result I probably would not make the greatest grade, but I could at least live with expressing the truth about the matter.

As a result I was basically told as well as written on my paper in the traditional red ink (not verbatim): ' Jee that is a lot of new information I've never seen before and I still don't fully believe you, ...but I will take that out of my lecture." (Bold was written)

It was really difficult even establishing the topic because when she questioned me about it I could tell she probably wanted some kind of strong response from me like "I can't believe you actually think I should belong to a belief that ever supported slavery!" Thankfully our Lord's grace was with me and I was able to handle the truth with ease.

'Person-hood' that is truly the underlying topic: Did the Roman Catholic Church ever neglect the person-hood of human beings? We see the Church defending life on terms of the abortion of children in the womb and euthanasia and we see the Church love and respect the lives of the poor, but I was considerably glad to establish here in my paper: 'Slavery in Louisiana and Roman Catholic Teaching' that the Church in her long standing tradition of defending and valuing the person-hood of every human being did so even there in history when it was so obviously neglected within the years of 1700 to 1865 in the United States of America.