Pope Leo XIV prayed Sunday at a Catholic shrine in Angola that was a major hub of the African slave trade, but did not explicitly reference slavery during his visit to the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima. The American pope spoke of the ‘sorrow and great suffering’ that Angolans endured for centuries at the sanctuary, originally built by Portuguese colonizers at the end of the 16th century as part of a fortress complex.
The visit marks a significant moment for Black Catholics, who said the pope’s acknowledgment of the sanctuary’s painful history reflects a belated reckoning by the Catholic Church with its institutional role in slavery and forced baptism of enslaved people.
The Sanctuary’s Sacred and Profane History
The Sanctuary of Mama Muxima sits in the Angolan savanna surrounded by baobab trees at the edge of the Kwanza River. Believers reported an appearance by the Virgin Mary around 1833, transforming the site into a major pilgrimage destination. But beneath its spiritual significance lies a painful history: the sanctuary served as a processing hub of the transatlantic slave trade for centuries.
The Church of Our Lady of Muxima was originally built by Portuguese colonizers at the end of the 16th century as part of a fortress complex. It became a center where enslaved Africans were forcibly baptized by Portuguese priests before beginning a brutal 110-kilometer walk to the port of Luanda, where they were loaded onto ships headed for the Americas.
More than 5 million people left from Angola on the trans-Atlantic slave route—more than from any other single country and nearly half of the roughly 12.5 million African slaves sent across the ocean.
The Vatican’s Historical Role
Behind this exploitation lay explicit papal authorization. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which granted the Portuguese king and his successors the right to “invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and enslave “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere in the world. The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
Three years later, the Vatican issued Romanus Pontifex, which formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery—the theory that legitimized 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 But it never formally rescinded, abrogated, or rejected the papal bulls themselves. The Vatican maintains that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their liberty or property and were not to be enslaved.
According to Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church, most of the enslaved people sold from Angola were trafficked by other Africans rather than captured by Europeans. But “at the time of the building of Muxima, the Portuguese were doing both—buying enslaved people and colonizing,” Kellerman said. “So they were fully using their papal permissions during this time.”
Centuries of Papal Silence
Pope Leo XIII—the namesake of the current pontiff—was the first pope to condemn slavery itself, issuing two encyclicals on the subject in 1888 and 1890, decades after most countries had already abolished it. Kellerman noted that Pope Leo XIII and later popes continued to perpetuate what he called a “false narrative” that the Holy See always opposed slavery, when the historical record says otherwise.
“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,” Kellerman said. “It would be so powerful if at some point Pope Leo were to apologize for the popes’ role in the trade.”
When Pope John Paul II visited Cameroon in 1985, he 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, 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.”
Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Muxima on Sunday continued this pattern of measured acknowledgment. Standing before an estimated 30,000 people, he spoke in Portuguese of the site as a place “where, for centuries, many men and women have prayed in times of joy and also in moments of sorrow and great suffering in the history of this country.” He did not refer specifically to slavery.
After viewing plans to build a basilica at the site, he urged the crowd to build “a better, more welcoming world, where there are no more wars, no injustices, no poverty, no dishonesty.”
For Black Catholic scholars, the visit carries significant weight. “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. Many Black Catholics are Catholic because of slavery and the Code Noir, a law that required enslaved people purchased by Catholic owners to be baptized in the church.
A Pope With Roots in American Slavery
Genealogical research into Pope Leo XIV’s American ancestry has added another dimension to his engagement with this history. According to research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of the pope’s American ancestors were listed in census records as Black, mulatto, Creole, or a free person of color. His family tree includes both slaveholders and enslaved people.
Gates, a Harvard University professor and host of the PBS documentary series Finding Your Roots, presented his research to Pope Leo during a July 2025 audience at the Vatican. The pope asked about ancestors, both Black and white, who were enslavers.
Pope Leo has not spoken publicly about his family heritage or the genealogical research. Some Black Catholic scholars expressed caution about imposing a narrative about his identity that he himself has not addressed.
“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.”
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the retired archbishop of Washington and the first African American cardinal, facilitated the Gates-Leo encounter and said he 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 that the pope has roots in our own heritage,” Gregory said. “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.”