Pope Leo XIV called for Angolans to combat corruption with a "culture of justice" as he began a visit Sunday to a historic Catholic shrine that served as a central hub in the African slave trade, marking a significant moment for the first U.S.-born pope whose own ancestry includes both enslaved people and slave owners.
Leo celebrated Mass before an estimated 100,000 people in Kilamba, a Chinese-built development about 25 kilometers outside the capital, where he denounced the exploitation of Angola's mineral-rich land and urged the nation to overcome divisions left by a brutal post-independence civil war. "We wish to build a country where old divisions are overcome once and for all, where hatred and violence disappear, and where the scourge of corruption is healed by a new culture of justice and sharing," Leo said.
Historical Significance of the Shrine
Later Sunday, Leo was to celebrate the Rosary prayer at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, located about 110 kilometers south of Luanda. The Church of Our Lady of Muxima, built by Portuguese colonizers at the end of the 16th century as part of a fortress complex, became a hub in the slave trade where enslaved Africans were gathered to be baptized by Portuguese priests before being forced to walk to the port of Luanda to be put on ships to the Americas.
While it is Angola's most popular Catholic shrine today, its history is emblematic of the Catholic Church's role in the slave trade, the forced baptisms of enslaved people and what some scholars say is the Holy See's continued refusal to fully acknowledge it and atone for it. The visit is particularly significant because the Creole ancestors of the first U.S.-born pope include enslaved people and slave owners, according to genealogical research.
"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.
Papal Bulls and the Doctrine of Discovery
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, 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, 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 in 2023 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 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. Kellerman recalled 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.
He said the first pope to condemn slavery itself was Pope Leo XIII, the current pope's namesake and inspiration, in two encyclicals in 1888 and 1890, after most countries had already abolished slavery. But Kellerman said that pope and others since have continued to perpetuate the "false narrative" that the Holy See was always against slavery, when the historical record says otherwise.
The Pope's Family Heritage
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."
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."
While Leo's visit to Muxima was in honor of its role as a shrine, Kellerman said he hoped that the visit would also 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."
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."
Why This Matters:
Pope Leo XIV's visit to Angola confronts an institution's historical accountability in a manner that resonates beyond religious circles. The Vatican's 2023 repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery represents institutional acknowledgment, yet the continued existence of the original papal bulls from 1452 and 1455 raises questions about the completeness of that reckoning. The Church's role in legitimizing colonial exploitation through formal ecclesiastical authority demonstrates how institutions can enable systems that violate individual liberty and human dignity. For Angola, a nation still recovering from civil war and grappling with corruption in its resource-rich economy, the pope's call for a "culture of justice" addresses governance failures that have hindered prosperity. The historical record shows that institutional overreach and the abandonment of fundamental principles of human liberty created lasting damage that markets and civil society continue to address generations later.