In doing so, Leo echoed decades of calls from African American Catholics, activists and scholars to the Holy See.
VATICAN CITY — Pope Leo XIV issued a historic apology Monday for the Holy See’s own role in legalizing slavery and its centuries-long failure to condemn it, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”
Past popes have apologized for Christians’ participation in the transatlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, let alone apologized for, the role that past popes themselves played in giving European sovereign states explicit authority to conquer and enslave “infidels.”
The first pope in history born in the United States, whose family history His apology, which included both enslaved people and slave owners, was published on Monday in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Great Humanity).
The comprehensive declaration is About protecting humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo links the transatlantic slave trade to new forms of slavery and colonialism fueled by the digital revolution, such as the unregulated labor required to procure the rare minerals needed for artificial intelligence chips.
In doing so, Leo echoed decades of calls from African American Catholics, activists and scholars for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era human trade.
“It is impossible not to feel a deep sadness when thinking of the immense pain and humiliation suffered by so many people, which contrasts so sharply with their immeasurable dignity as human beings infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this I sincerely ask for forgiveness in the name of the Church.”
The Vatican insists that it always upholds the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century Vatican decrees authorized the Portuguese sovereign to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.
In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right to “invade, conquer, fight, and conquer” and to seize all property—including land—from “Saracens, pagans, other heathens, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.
The bull also allowed the Portuguese to “bring their people into perpetual servitude.”
This edict and another edict issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, which legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.
The Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Will Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church,” said Nicholas V’s permission to the Portuguese was confirmed or renewed by Popes Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481, and Pope Leo X in 1514.
The King of Spain obtained rights to the Americas.
In 2023, the Vatican officially repudiated the Doctrine of the Discovery, but never officially abolished, abolished or rejected the Bull itself. The Vatican maintains that a later pope’s 1537 Sublimis Deus reaffirmed that indigenous people should not be deprived of liberty or ownership of property, nor should they be enslaved.
In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, even though many countries had already abolished it. Before that, in ancient and medieval times, even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves.
In acknowledging the role of the Holy See itself and the papal bulls of the 15th century, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “As early as the early modern period, the Roman Pontiff responded to the requests of the sovereign by repeatedly intervening to regulate and legitimize forms of conquest, including in some cases the enslavement of ‘heathens.'”
Leo says it’s impossible to judge the morality of these decisions by today’s standards.
“However, we cannot deny or minimize society’s and the church’s delay in condemning the scourge of slavery,” he said.
The church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its teachings, “even if it took eighteen centuries to explicitly acknowledge its complete incompatibility with slavery,” the pope said.
“This constitutes a wound in the memory of Christians that we cannot consider ourselves unrelated to,” he said.
Leo said that the Church today must resolutely condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution “if we want to avoid having to ask for absolution again in the future for failing to respect the treasures of human dignity required by our faith”.
During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked Africans to forgive the slave trade on behalf of Christians involved in it, but not for the pope’s own role in it. In 1992, while visiting Senegal’s Gorée Island, the largest slave trading center in West Africa, he condemned the injustice of slavery and called it “a tragedy of self-proclaimed Christian civilization.”
According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were black and listed in census records as mulatto, Negro, Creole or free person of color. Gates wrote in the New York Times that his family tree includes slave owners and enslaved people.
During a visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine on the site of a church. An important hub of the African slave trade Portuguese colonial period. While at Mama Mujima’s sanctuary, Leo recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” Angolans had suffered over the centuries, but he did not mention slavery specifically.
Nicole Winfield reported from Middletown, Connecticut.
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