ABSTRACT
The Jesuits of Maryland developed a theology which attempted to promote an ordered, restrained form of slaveholding in connection with the white Catholic slaveholder’s struggle for civil and religious liberty. A key figure in reconstructing their anti-abolitionism is Brother Joseph Mobberly, S.J. Mobberly’s skepticism about the Enlightenment can be seen in what he chose to quote from Thomas Jefferson in his writings. In the late eighteenth century, the suppression of the Jesuit order by the Church and the effects of the American Revolution in Maryland fostered still greater disorder on the Jesuits’ plantations. Divine revelation and God’s will were taken as mandating slavery; the imperfectibility of man argued that some needed the guidance to be provided by masters; there was no divinely revealed mandate against slavery. The impact of Jesuit resistance to the Enlightenment upon their antiabolitionism has been underestimated.
