This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

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The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter:

No. 149, June 16, 2019

Magisterial Teaching, Slavery & Women Priests

The Church uses the narrative of the unchangeable nature of magisterial teaching to deny women the priesthood, but magisterial teaching has been changed often, notably concerning slavery, which these excellent articles (Part I & Part II so far) by Katy Grimes at Women in Theology note.

It’s embarrassing that someone has to remind our Church of her own history.

Part I

“I tell my students that the Catholic church used to think about slavery the same way most of us think about incarceration today: it’s good as long as long as the person deserves it.

“Put another way, earlier magisterial judgments about slavery were not an all or nothing affair. Just as we today believe it is wrong to imprison an innocent person, so magisterial authorities thought it was wrong to enslave an individual without just cause.

“But, just as our collective outrage at unjust incarceration does not automatically indicate support for prison abolition, so magisterial condemnations of certain instances of enslavement did not evidence opposition to slavery itself.

“For most of the church’s history, the magisterium asked not whether slavery itself was wrong, but when and under what circumstances it was right.

“Augustine, for example, thought that slavery was a just punishment for original sin. Original sin brought slavery into the world because it brought disobedience in too. Enslaved people earned their fate due to their disobedience.

“But while we would blame slavery on the sinfulness of slave masters, Augustine blamed it to the sins of enslaved people themselves.

“For Augustine, slavery was theological in another sense. He argued that, although Jewish people had descended from the free woman Sarah “in the flesh,” they were still slaves due to their spiritual attachment to the Old Testament.

“And, even though they lacked a servile attachment to the Old Testament, Augustine’s pagan Arab contemporaries were slaves too (136-137). As the descendants of Abraham’s enslaved concubine Hagar, they had inherited their servile status through not the spirit, but the flesh.

“Christians of course were free in both senses.

“What about Aquinas? Modern interpreters often point to his belief that slavery was unnatural as evidence that Aquinas somehow opposed slavery.

“But this misinterprets his work. As used in reference to slavery, the term “unnatural” did not operate as a category of moral condemnation. He deemed slavery unnatural only in the sense that it was not a part of God’s original plan for creation.”

Retrieved June 9, 2019 from https://womenintheology.org/2019/06/09/catholic-teaching-changes-slavery-part-i/

Part II

“Magisterial authorities would continue to endorse real world practices of slavery throughout the medieval era.

“In this vein, magisterial authorities recognized four legitimate reasons-then called “titles”-for which one person could enslave another:

“1.As punishment for a capital crime.

“2.As a result of capture on the battlefield while fighting an unjust war.

“3.As repayment for debt.

“4.Through purchase from a slave trader who acquired the slave legitimately.

“5.In the case of the centuries’ long battle between Christian and Muslim kingdoms for control of the Iberian peninsula: for being a foreign Muslim.

“These titles may seem random and arbitrary to us, but each followed the logic of slavery.

“Enemy soldiers and capital convicts alike both deserved death but were mercifully allowed to live. Since they lived because of their masters, they therefore lived for them. Put another way, a master owned a slave’s life because a slave owed him her life.

“What about the Muslims? More than simply generic religious bigotry positioned them as especially enslaveable. Purportedly descended from apostate Christians, they were engaged in theological rebellion simply by existing. They were theologically what enemy soldiers and capital convicts were sociopolitically.

“Informed by this traditional Catholic teaching about slavery, in the fifteenth century, Pope Alexander VI gave all of Africa to Portugal and America to Spain with the explicit command to enslave all those who didn’t bow down to Iberian authority.”

Retrieved June 9, 2019 from https://womenintheology.org/2019/06/09/catholic-teaching-changes-slavery-part-ii/