Catholic Order of Jesuit Priests, who Unjustly Enriched Themselves Off Slave Labor and Sales for Over a Century, Claim its Struggling to Raise Money after Promising to Atone for African Genocide

From [HERE] A prominent order of Catholic priests vowed last year to raise $100 million to atone for its participation in the American slave trade. At the time, church leaders and historians said it would be the largest effort by the Roman Catholic Church to make amends for the buying, selling and enslavement of Black people in the United States.

But 16 months later, cash is only trickling in.

The Jesuit priest leading the fund-raising efforts said he had hoped that his order would have secured several multimillion-dollar donations by now, in addition to an initial $15 million investment made by the order. Instead, only about $180,000 in small donations has flowed into the trust the Jesuits created in partnership with a group of descendants whose ancestors were enslaved by the Catholic priests.

Alarmed by the slow pace of fund-raising, the leader of the group of descendants that has partnered with the Jesuits wrote to Rome earlier this month, urging the order’s worldwide leader to ensure that the American priests make good on their promise.

The American Jesuits, who relied on slave labor and slave sales for more than a century, had discussed plans last year to sell all of their remaining former plantation lands in Maryland, the priests said. They discussed transferring the proceeds, along with a portion of the proceeds of an earlier $57 million plantation sale, to the trust. Money from the trust will flow into a foundation that will finance programs that benefit descendants, including scholarships and money for emergency needs, and promote racial reconciliation projects.

But the remaining land has yet to be sold and the proceeds from prior land sales have yet to be transferred to the trust, Jesuit officials and descendants say.

“It is becoming obvious to all who look beyond words that Jesuits are not delivering in deed,” Joseph M. Stewart, president and chair of the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation, wrote in his letter to the Rev. Arturo Sosa, the Jesuit superior general. “The bottom line is that without your engagement, this partnership seems destined to fail.”

In his letter, Mr. Stewart warned that “hard-liners” within the order maintained the position that they “never enslaved anyone and thus do not ‘owe’ anyone anything.”

In an interview, Mr. Stewart said he believed that the Jesuit leadership remained committed to the partnership, describing ongoing meetings and conversations. The point, he said, was that the descendant community needed the priests to do more than talk. [MORE]