Slavery and the Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching Concerning the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery

John Francis Maxwell's Slavery and the Catholic Church is a scholarly history, published by Barry Rose, tracing the development of official Catholic teaching on the moral legitimacy of slavery across many centuries, from early acceptance through eventual condemnation. Maxwell, a Catholic priest and canon lawyer by training, wrote the book specifically to document that this teaching had genuinely changed over time rather than remained constant, using papal statements and canonical texts as his primary evidence. Its authority rests on that direct engagement with the Church's own official documentary record across the full period it covers. Its limit is that it is now decades old, so a claim about the Church's most recent statements or scholarly reassessments of this history since 1975 needs a more current source alongside this foundational documentary history.