Pope Leo XIV delivered an unprecedented apology Monday for the Holy See's institutional role in legitimizing slavery through centuries of papal directives, acknowledging what he termed a "wound in Christian memory" in his first encyclical released yesterday. The apology directly addressed the Vatican's 15th-century papal bulls that granted European sovereigns explicit authority to enslave non-Christians, marking the first time a pope has publicly acknowledged and apologized for these specific institutional actions rather than the general involvement of individual Christians in the slave trade.
The Historical Record
In his encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas" (Magnificent Humanity), Leo confronted a series of 15th-century directives that formed the legal foundation for colonial-era slavery. In 1452, 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.
Leo said it was impossible to judge the morality of the decisions with today's standards, but added, "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 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 recognized." He said, "This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached."
Institutional Accountability and Modern Parallels
The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. The Vatican says a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and were not to be enslaved. In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, long after many countries had abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, church institutions and even popes—Gregory the Great—had slaves, Kellerman said.
Leo also said the church must firmly condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution "if we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith." The pope raised the slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling.
Scholarly and Community Response
Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings, beyond generic apologies for the involvement of individual Christians. Shannen Dee Williams, historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, "Subversive Habits," welcomed the apology as a "monumental step toward the kind of essential truth-telling and reparation that many Catholics have prayed and worked to witness." She said, "The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy," and added, "Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church's leading roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery--and thus by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today."
Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the church's complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly "speak to the current issues of technological enslavement." She said, "For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apology from the pope."
Kellerman welcomed Leo's apology but said more needs to be done to further acknowledge how the Catholic Church legitimized and expanded slavery. He said, "Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admission and apology today." He added, "Hopefully a future document will explain in more detail the church's involvement with slaveholding. As a scholar I have some quibbles with the wording, but this is a truly remarkable moment."
During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it, but not the popes. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, which was 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." During a visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine at the site of an important hub of the African slave trade during Portugal's colonial rule. While at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, Leo recalled the "sorrow and great suffering" Angolans endured for centuries, but he didn't refer specifically to slavery.
According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo's American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or a free person of color. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates wrote in The New York Times.
Why This Matters:
The apology represents a significant moment of institutional accountability for one of the world's oldest and most influential organizations, addressing centuries-old legal and moral precedents that shaped Western civilization's approach to property rights, sovereignty, and human dignity. By acknowledging the Holy See's direct role in creating the legal framework for colonial expansion and enslavement, rather than merely lamenting the actions of individual Christians, the Vatican confronts the institutional mechanisms that enabled systematic violations of individual liberty. The connection Leo draws to modern digital-age concerns about technological enslavement suggests the church is attempting to establish moral credibility on contemporary issues by addressing historical institutional failures. For the Catholic Church's global moral authority and its ability to speak credibly on issues of human rights and dignity, this acknowledgment of past institutional complicity in denying fundamental freedoms represents both a necessary reckoning and a test of whether words will be followed by substantive institutional reform and fuller disclosure of the church's historical involvement in slaveholding.