The History of Black Catholics in the United States by Cyprian Davis is the best place to start. As with most Protestant groups, the history is complex. Slavery was condoned by canon law into the 20th century and had been reinforced in the conquest of the Americas, though with admonition to treat people well and sometimes to emancipate as an act of charity. Some religious orders owned slaves, and there were certainly Catholic landowners who enslaved.

During the antebellum period, Pius VII condemned the slave trade and Gregory XVI called for abolition, at least of mass slavery as instituted in the US, but the papacy had minimal power in the early 19 c. (The issue of how people became enslaved is an important moral issue in this debate prior to the 19th century, for Catholics and non-Catholics. It was not a simply issue of slavery or no slavery.) US Bishops tended to walk a fine line, depending on their constituency, in how they interpreted and reinforced (or didn't) the Papal position. It is also worth noting that Catholics were not present in large numbers in much of the south, with the exception of Louisiana where most whites defended slavery, and Maryland, which of course was a divided over the issue. In Maryland and in the North, new Catholic immigrants, mostly Irish, did not have a stake in slavery, and some actively supported abolition. Maryland landowning families tended to support slavery since they had something to lose, regardless of their religious affiliation. There were religious orders in Maryland, including orders which were predominantly African-American, which focused on teaching African Americans and generally supported abolition. African Americans in Louisiana were and are predominantly Catholic, and there was a large population of educated, free people, especially in New Orleans, some of whom were active in the abolition movement.

Probably the best book for you to look at on this topic is Madeline Hook Rice’s American Catholic Opinion In The Slavery Controversy (1944).

American Catholics in the North were deeply suspicious of the direction of the new abolitionist movement because of the parallels that they saw with Revolutionary France where Catholics Priests had been martyred only a few decades prior to the American Civil War.

Catholic Popes had issued blanket condemnations and automatic excommunications on those who had participated in things like the slave trade, but Papal power was still weak and not heeded. A good book on that is Joel Panzer’s The Popes and Slavery.

It is true that Jesuits at times owned slaves in places like Maryland. See Thomas Murphy’s Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717-1838. They were not good at forcing the slaves to work though. “As lazy as a Jesuit’s slave” became an insult in the region. Because of this Jesuit plantations were not efficient enough to be sustainable.

Catholic doctrine understands that human beings will have to participate in unjust labor systems because there is no alternative in a fallen world corrupted by human sin. Slavery was seen in the Americas by most Catholics to be just another example of a labor system that was not intrinsically good as God intended everything to be, but that was more or understood to be inevitable.