Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology yesterday for the role the Holy See itself played in legitimising slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory”. Source: NCR Online.
Past popes have apologised for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologised for, the role that past popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels”.
History’s first United States-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo raised the trans-Atlantic slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fuelling, such as the unregulated labour required to procure rare minerals needed for AI chips.
In doing so, Leo responded to decades of calls by Black American Catholics, activists and scholars for the Holy See to atone for its own 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 for 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 authorised Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.
A 1452 papal bull, Dum Diversas, and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimised the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.
In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves.
In his encyclical, Pope Leo said the Church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognised”.
“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.
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Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See’s own role in legitimising slavery (By Nicole Winfield and Paolo Santalucia, AP via NCR Online)
