Pope Leo XIV issued a historic apology Monday for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery and for centuries of silence in condemning it, describing the Vatican’s past as “a wound in Christian memory.”
While previous popes have expressed regret over Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, no pontiff had publicly acknowledged or apologized for the direct role earlier popes played in granting European powers authority to conquer, subjugate and enslave so-called “infidels.”
The first American-born pope, whose own family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), released Monday.
The broad manifesto focuses on protecting human dignity in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. Leo linked the trans-Atlantic slave trade to what he described as modern forms of slavery and colonialism emerging through the digital revolution, including the largely unregulated labor used to extract rare minerals essential for AI technology.
In doing so, Leo responded to decades of calls by Black American Catholics, activists and scholars for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings.
“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask pardon.”
The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorized Portuguese sovereigns 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 subjugate” and take all possessions, including land, of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.
The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.
Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481, and Pope Leo X in 1514, according to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.
Spanish kings received the rights for the Americas.
In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus, issued in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their liberty or property and were not to be enslaved.
In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, though that came long after many countries had already abolished it. Before then, during antiquity and the Middle Ages, even church institutions owned slaves.
In acknowledging the Holy See’s role and the 15th-century papal bulls, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’”
Leo said it was not possible to judge the morality of those decisions by today’s standards.
“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he said.
The pope said the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took 18 centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized.”
“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.
Leo said the church today must firmly condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution “if we want to avoid the need to ask pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith.”
During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it, but not for the popes’ own role. During a 1992 visit to Goree Island, once the largest slave-trading center in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it “a tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”
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, Black, Creole or free people of color. His family tree includes both slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates wrote in The New York Times.
During a visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine located at the site of a major hub in the African slave trade during Portugal’s colonial rule. At the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, Leo recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” endured by Angolans for centuries, though he did not specifically mention slavery.
