Kategoria: News from Rome

Through my voice, it is this same prayer that the African slaves address to you, today! Christians of Europe, come across the sea which separates us and come to our help! St. Paul lost no time in replying to the Macedonian’s prayer. In Macedonia, he rescued those held prisoners under the yoke of evil. Come across to the country of the black population. Come there, some with your kindness, others by the strength of your arms and rescue these peoples, seated in the shadow of death, and those even more miserable from slavery. Amen.

Our missionaries echo this wish, and they declare in addition that, alone, armed force can stop the slave traders. “Alas!”, they write to us, “when will there be an European power prepared to destroy this accursed slave trade and all the subsequent evils.

Enough of suffering! Enough of blood! Enough of this infamy! Enough of these insults to civilisation, to all the principles which the Christian world lives by and which it can no longer allow to be trampled under foot! Such is the cry which rises up from every heart. This is what is asked for by God’s Vicar, once again, through my voice.

You will be able to read and you will see for yourselves that nothing is respected by these demons, neither the age, sex, or weakness of their victims; how they strike the women dead at their feet when they resist; how our missionaries are obliged to suffer the anguish of a thousand deaths, not for themselves (they have already made the sacrifice of their lives), but because, witnesses to the miseries of the black population, it is impossible to help them, not wishing to expose them to some new massacre by an unequal resistance; and not being able to pay a ransom for all the slaves.