Religious affairs correspondent, BBC News
A Church "partly shaped by slavery" still needs to make amends, says the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Amid the debate about how meaningful an apology is - when it’s made by people several generations distant from the suffering and trauma inflicted - another question has loomed.
Should there be some form of physical reparation for the terrible trade in people in which Britain had a disproportionate share?
It comes as a bit of a surprise to some that an organisation as benign as the Church of England might have to consider such a question.
But its leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, thinks it must.
The Church owned slaves on plantations in the West Indies. Properties such as the Coddrington estate in Barbados provided the Church’s missionary wing - the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel - with about a third of its income.
Moral problems
It seems that contemporary Anglicans were aware of the moral problems posed by owning slaves. They took comfort in using the income to spread the Christian message.
The slaves were eventually freed in 1834 - 27 years after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire that’s being marked this week.
Government compensation for the loss of slave labour included almost £9,000 for the Church, a huge sum in those days.
We are here, where we are and who we are partly because of terrible things that our forbears did 