This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross.

There is a very dark part of the Catholic Church's history

that has only recently come to the attention of the public.

For more than a century, the Church financed its expansion and its institutions

with the profits from the enslaved people the Church bought and sold.

Without the enslaved, the Catholic Church in the United States, as we know it today,

would not exist, writes my guest Rachel Swarns.

She says the priests prayed for the salvation of the souls of the people they owned,

even as they bought and sold their bodies.

In 1838, the Jesuits sold 272 enslaved people,

which helped save what is now Georgetown University from bankruptcy,

and helped stabilize the Jesuits in Maryland.

In 2016, Swarns wrote an article published on the front page of The New York Times,

headlined 272 slaves were sold to save Georgetown.

What does it owe their descendants?

Rachel Swarns' new book expands on that article and tells the story of the Church's history

of enslavement in America while illustrating the consequences by focusing on generations of one

family that had several members among those 272 people sold by the Church in 1838.

Two descendants of the family she writes about in the book

found each other as a result of her New York Times article.

She was a reporter at the Times for 22 years and is now a contributing writer on race and race

relations. She directs the New York University initiative Hidden Legacies, Slavery Race and the

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