WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The wrong that came about when Jesuit priests from Georgetown University sold 272 women, children and men into slavery for financial gain in 1838 cannot be corrected, but there are ways to proceed after such revelations, said a panel of scholars Oct. 12 as they discussed "Georgetown, Slavery and Catholic Social Thought."

"We cannot right the wrong that has been done, but we can do justice today," said James Benton, the slavery, memory and reconciliation fellow at Georgetown University, who is helping the leadership of the university respond to recommendations made earlier this year about what should be done today for what the university president called "Georgetown's participation in that disgrace."

Jesuit Father Matthew Carnes, director of Georgetown's Center for Latin American Studies and member of a group that helped draft the recommendations, said it's important to first recognize the complicity of Jesuits who participated in the now infamous slave sale, but the process of how to go forward has never been about making amends.

"I don't think there's ever a way that we can make amends, to have reparations for our slaveholding past," he said.

Georgetown University president John J. DeGioia in September said: "There were two evils that took place: The sale of slaves and the breakup of families."

Some of those families included adults and children the Jesuits had baptized. As a black Catholic, it's a hard reality to understand how they could have sold human beings made in the image of God, said Diana L. Hayes, professor emerita of systematic theology at Georgetown University.

"One of the things that I kept puzzling over was 'if we are all created in the image and likeness of God, why were some images seen as lesser than others?'"

The harsh reality, said Hayes, is that some human beings were not seen as people.

"African people were not seen as human beings so therefore you were not denying the sacredness of the human person, of an African person, because they were not persons," Hayes said. "They were animals. They were chattel. They were bits of paper on which you wrote names that you made up and decided what to do with them. That major foundation of Catholic social justice teaching was literally torn apart."

But the history of Catholic social teaching only began in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum" on the rights and duties of capital and labor, Hayes said.

"Prior to that you did not have that same sort of understanding. It wasn't vocalized in the same way," she said. "It's only been since 1891 that you see this chain of traditions and statements that deal with this idea of social teaching and the responsibility that Christian people have for (others)."

But how does the church bring a person of color into that understanding of justice and dignity? Through the years, there have been a lot of inroads made, she said, but added that "in some ways, we're still grappling with that question today."

When you think about the slave sale today, the concerns shouldn't be solely for that group of people who were sold in 1838 but for the millions who were brought from Africa as slaves to the U.S., the injustices to their descendants and toward other people of color today, she said.

Benton said some argue that slavery may still exist in the country in some forms, when you think about farmworkers or even labor from some prison populations.

Marcia Chatelain, author and associate professor in the department of history at Georgetown, who also helped draft some of the recommendations, said part of the work taking place is about a process that may help other institutions, including the Catholic Church, learn how to contend with the choices made in the past and the way their legacy continues today.

It continues in inequality in society, in the way that some choose to perpetrate violence against black communities, such as the 2015 killing of black Christians at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and events that have sparked the Black Lives Matter movement, she said.

John Carr, who moderated the panel, asked professor Chatelain, who is a black Catholic, about the personal side of the topic.

"When you are a part of a family of faith, when you do have institutional loyalty ... how does it challenge you to be so clearly confronted by institutional evil done by religious people?" he asked.

She answered: "As a U.S. historian, nothing surprises me. No institution of this age and prestige and location in this age can have clean hands when we think about the institution of slavery and its pervasiveness," she said. "And to be honest with you, I'm more troubled by my personal experiences of racism within the church than the historical legacy of the foundation of American Catholicism."

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