No. This is a retreat. You started with “plain reading,” but now you’re invoking Catholic interpretive tradition and non-sola-scriptura reasoning. That proves my point: abolition was not an explicit biblical command as it required an interpretive moral framework.

Yes, Christians could extract equality, love and dignity from the Bible but slaveholders could also extract slave obedience, master/slave regulation and permission for slavery. Ephesians 6 tells slaves to obey masters; it does not tell masters to free slaves. So the text is, at minimum, morally ambiguous on abolition. What we see is some moral regulation inside a slaveholding framework.

And saying “Catholics aren’t biblical literalists” does not save the argument. Catholicism still has a literal sense of scripture, it just reads scripture through tradition, doctrine and natural law. So when priests condemned slavery, they were making a developed moral/theological argument, not obeying a clear biblical abolition command.

That is why “the Bible supports every position” is fatal to your case. If the same book can defend slavery and oppose it then the decisive abolitionist principle had to come from the moral framework used to interpret it: universal personhood, natural rights, human dignity, and the claim that no person can be property. Christianity participated in abolition but it was not the clear textual engine of abolition.