Pope Leo XIV opened a day in Angola by denouncing the “scourge of corruption” and exploitation in a country still marked by the scars of a brutal, post-independence civil war, while heading toward a Catholic shrine built by Portuguese colonizers that became a hub in the slave trade. The American pope celebrated Mass before an estimated 100,000 people outside the capital and called for a “new culture of justice and sharing,” but the ground beneath the ceremony carries a far uglier history: enslaved Africans were gathered there, baptized by Portuguese priests, and forced to walk to the port of Luanda to be shipped to the Americas.
Who Built the Shrine, Who Paid the Price
Later Sunday, Leo was to celebrate the Rosary prayer at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, an important Catholic shrine on the edge of the Kwanza River about 110 kilometers (70 miles) south of Luanda. The Church of Our Lady of Muxima was built by Portuguese colonizers at the end of the 16th century as part of a fortress complex. It became a hub in the slave trade, and its history remains tied to the Catholic Church’s role in forced baptisms and the trafficking of enslaved people.
While it is Angola’s most popular Catholic shrine today, the site stands as a reminder of how religious authority and colonial power worked together. The article notes that some scholars say the Holy See has continued to refuse to fully acknowledge and atone for that role. The Vatican in 2023 formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves.
The Old Paper Trail of Domination
Angola’s Portuguese colonizers were emboldened by 15th-century directives from the Vatican that authorized them to enslave non-Christians. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, giving 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, said the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.” 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. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and were not to be enslaved. But the historical record described in the article shows the machinery of empire was already in motion, with papal permissions helping grease the wheels.
Kellerman said that most of the 12.5 million Africans who were direct victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade were sold into slavery by other Africans and were not captured by Europeans. “That being said, at the time of the building of Muxima, the Portuguese were doing both — buying enslaved people and colonizing/slave raiding. So they were fully using their papal permissions during this time,” he said in emailed comments to The Associated Press.
Healing Talk, Unfinished Accounting
For Black Catholics, the visit has been framed as a moment of healing. “For Black Catholics, Pope Leo’s visit to the Muxima shrine is an important moment of healing,” said Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch Center, Oxford University. She noted that many Black Catholics are Catholic because of slavery and the “Code Noir,” which she said required slaves purchased by Catholic owners to be baptized in the church. “Others were already Catholic when they were trafficked from Angola to slave holding colonies,” said Butler, a Black Catholic scholar whose maternal family hails from Louisiana, where the pope’s ancestors also had their roots.
The visit is especially loaded because the Creole ancestors of the first U.S.-born pope include enslaved people and slave owners, according to genealogical research. 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 reported in an essay in the New York Times. Gates, a Harvard University professor who hosts the popular PBS documentary series “Finding Your Roots,” presented his research to Leo during a July 5 audience at the Vatican.
According to a report of their meeting in The Harvard Gazette, “The pope asked about ancestors, both Black and white, who were enslavers.” Leo has not spoken publicly about his family heritage or the Gates research, and some Black Catholic scholars are hesitant to impose on him a narrative about his identity that he himself has not yet addressed publicly. “It’s important that we tell our own stories,” said Tia Noelle Pratt, a sociologist of religion and professor at Villanova University, the pope’s alma mater. “We haven’t heard anything from him about what he thinks about it, and so to impose anything on him, I think would be completely inappropriate,” said Pratt, author of “Faithful and Devoted: Racism and Identity in the African-American Catholic Experience.”
Kellerman said he hoped the visit would give Leo a chance to learn about the history of the slave trade. “The popes repeatedly authorized Portugal’s colonization efforts in Africa and Portuguese participation in the slave trade, but the Vatican has never fully admitted this,” he said. “It would be so powerful if at some point Pope Leo were to apologize for the popes’ role in the trade.”
The article also notes that 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, albeit not for the Holy See’s own role. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, 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.”
Leo also praised the cease-fire in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah as a “sign of hope” that he prayed would bring peace permanently to the Middle East. Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the retired archbishop of Washington and the first African American cardinal, said he facilitated the Gates-Leo encounter and was “delighted” to have done so. “It’s one of the things that I think for many African Americans and people of color, they identify with great pride the pope has roots in our own heritage,” Gregory told AP. “And I think he’s happy about that too, because it’s another link to the people that he tries to serve and is called to serve.”