The elaborate hagiographical and liturgical account of Saint Anselm presents him as a noble intellectual, a spiritual reformer, and a bulwark of Church independence and orthodoxy. However, hagiography typically functions as religious propaganda, not an actual historical biography. It serves the institutional needs of the Church, canonizing not only individuals but ideologies, political stances, and theological innovations—while sanitizing contradictions and moral failures.

Anselm is lauded for his defense of Church independence against royal interference (e.g., the investiture controversy), but this “independence” also helped consolidate authoritarian clerical power, suppressing lay and national influence over religion. His insistence on clerical celibacy, for instance, wasn’t just a spiritual reform—it helped redirect property and loyalty away from family lines toward the Roman Church.

Celibacy laws were historically economic and political tools, not moral imperatives rooted in Torah. The Torah never mandated celibacy for religious leaders; the kohanim were expected to marry and raise families. Anselm’s elevation of celibacy represents a departure from Hebraic covenantal norms and a step toward Hellenistic dualism—exalting spirit over body and institutional control over familial loyalty.

Anselm’s most influential theological contribution, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), introduced the satisfaction theory of atonement—that human sin dishonored God, and only the death of a divine-human being could satisfy God’s justice. It lays the groundwork for supersessionist and antisemitic theologies, portraying the Torah system as insufficient or obsolete by replacing t’shuvah (repentance), korbanot (offerings), and covenantal accountability with a metaphysical debt-payment model.

Rather than upholding justice, Anselm’s model sacralized human sacrifice, violating both Torah and prophetic ethics. In Deuteronomy, God explicitly rejects human sacrifice (Deut. 12:31). Anselm reintroduces this abhorrent idea under a theological guise.

His role as counselor to Pope Gregory VII and William the Conqueror reflects a willingness to work within violent, coercive regimes. The Norman Conquest of England, which devastated the Anglo-Saxon populace and imposed a rigid feudal hierarchy occurred under his watch and blessing. His revisionist theology perverted Church theology with conquest and dominance, cloaked in terms like “eternal salvation.”

Never has the church ever addressed the war crimes of the medieval Church’s rule—its support for crusades, its crushing of heretics, its dehumanization of Jews, Muslims, and others labeled “infidels”, and its justification of African slavery. The very prayer that “his intercession may bring us salvation” conceals the violence of a theology that damns all non-Christians, erases Torah as the foundation of justice, and endorses empire-building as divine will.

The glorification of Catholic saints like Anselm often functions as historical whitewash, embedding spiritual prestige in those who advanced Rome’s theological, political, and cultural conquest. Their legacies should be re-examined.

The role of Catholic “saints” like Anselm—and the broader Church—in relation to African slavery is a damning example of how theological authority was weaponized to sanctify economic exploitation, racial hierarchy, and imperial conquest. While Anselm himself predates the Atlantic slave trade, the ideological groundwork laid by thinkers like him—particularly in the areas of substitutionary atonement, supersessionism, ecclesial supremacy, and the fusion of theology with empire—enabled and justified later systems of racialized slavery.

The Atlantic slave trade was not an accident of history—it was theologically sanctioned by both Catholic and Protestant authorities. The idea that the Church replaced Israel as God’s chosen people also implied that Torah law—including its protections for the dignity and freedom of persons—was no longer binding. This paved the way for dehumanizing laws that lacked any covenantal ethic.

Anselm’s satisfaction theory, salvation became detached from justice. Slavery could be justified as a way to “discipline” sinful nations or “save” heathens through baptism—even while denying them freedom and humanity. Papal bulls like Dum Diversas (1452): Pope Nicholas V granted the Portuguese crown the right to “invade, search out, capture, and subjugate” Saracens, pagans, and “infidels,” authorizing perpetual slavery of Africans.

The Catholic Church not only failed to oppose African slavery—it actively profited from it; the Jesuits owned slaves. Churches and monasteries in Brazil, Cuba, and the Americas used enslaved Africans as laborers. Baptism was used not to liberate slaves, but to enslave them more deeply under a Christianized form of bondage. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the Church instituted the Inquisition to torture Jews forced to convert. Canon law adapted to accommodate slavery rather than challenge it. Church authorities taught that as long as a slave’s soul was “saved,” their body could remain in bondage.

Saints like Anselm, Augustine, and Aquinas are venerated for their theological brilliance—but this veneration shields their failures and the oppressive systems they supported or made possible. These criminal theologians treated non-Christians as ontologically inferior. Removed justice from the earthly, national realm and spiritualized it. Their sainthood thus whitewashes the Church’s role in racial slavery, presenting these figures as moral authorities rather than ideological precursors to oppression.

Modern Catholic and Christian institutions have issued apologies for slavery, but they rarely dismantle the theological foundations that enabled it. Canonization of these theological prostitutes compares to the attempts to declare Pope Pius XII a saint. To honor saints like Anselm while refusing to interrogate their legacies is to preserve a sanctified lie—a lie that allowed millions of Africans to be dehumanized in the name of Christian salvation. Until the Church renounces not only slavery but the theological frameworks that enabled it—Anselm’s among them—its saints remain symbols of unrepented moral complicity.

mosckerr