LONDON — Two centuries after profiting from the venture, the Church of England has apologized for its role in the global slave trade, which included running a Caribbean island sugar plantation and branding the blacks who worked it.
The church’s general synod voted 238–0 Feb. 8 to acknowledge its involvement in human trafficking and to apologize to the descendants of its victims 199 years after Britain’s Slave Trade Act of 1807 outlawed the practice.
“We were at the heart of it,” Simon Bessant of Blackburn, England, told the synod during debate on the motion. “We were directly responsible for what happened. … We can say we owned slaves, we branded slaves.
“That is why I believe we must actually recognize our history and offer an apology.”
Bessant cited one case in which the church’s missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Foreign Parts, owned and operated the Codrington Plantation in Barbados and used a red-hot iron to brand its slaves with the word “society” on their chests.
The motion that the synod passed, with the backing of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, specifically acknowledged the “dehumanizing and shameful” consequences of the slave trade.
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