Pope Leo XIV issued a historic apology on Monday for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery and for failing to condemn the practice for centuries, calling the Vatican’s historical record a “wound in Christian memory.” The apology is the first of its kind from a pontiff, marking a departure from past papal expressions of regret that stopped short of acknowledging the church’s institutional authorship of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The apology appeared in “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity), Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, released on May 25. The sweeping document addresses both the church’s historical complicity in human bondage and its responsibility to safeguard human dignity in an era of rapid technological change.
“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 in the encyclical. “For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”
The encyclical confronts a series of 15th-century papal directives that explicitly authorized European monarchs to subjugate and enslave non-Christians. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the bull Dum Diversas, granting Portuguese sovereigns the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and to “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” These permissions were later renewed by popes Callixtus III, Sixtus IV, and Leo X, eventually forming the legal foundation for the colonial-era Doctrine of Discovery.
In the encyclical, Leo acknowledged that “already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’” He noted that it took eighteen centuries for the church to explicitly recognize humanity’s full incompatibility with slavery.
While Leo cautioned against judging past moral decisions by modern standards, he emphasized that the church cannot distance itself from its historical failures. “Neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he stated. Although the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery in 2023, it never rescinded the original bulls themselves, maintaining that a 1537 bull, Sublimis Deus, later reaffirmed the liberty of Indigenous peoples.
Black American Catholics, historians, and scholars have long advocated for the Holy See to atone specifically for its institutional role in the colonial trade, rather than offering only generic apologies for the actions of individual Christians. Shannen Dee Williams, a historian at the University of Dayton and author of Subversive Habits, welcomed Monday’s apology as a “monumental step toward the kind of essential truth-telling and reparation that many Catholics have prayed and worked to witness.”
“The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy,” Williams said. She added that Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about its leading roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, and by extension, the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today.
Anthea Butler, a senior fellow at the Koch History Center at Oxford University, noted that historical accountability is necessary for the pope to address contemporary issues effectively. “For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apology from the pope,” said Butler. “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.”
The encyclical links historical slavery to modern technological challenges, calling for robust regulation of artificial intelligence and urging developers to prioritize the common good over profit. Leo raised the slave trade specifically in connection with what he described as new forms of slavery and colonialism fueled by the digital revolution, warning the church must condemn all related trafficking to avoid future pardons for failing to respect human dignity.
The Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church, said the admission strengthens the church’s moral standing. “Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admission and apology today,” Kellerman told The Associated Press. “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.”
Pope Leo XIV’s personal history intersects with the subject of the encyclical. According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of the pope’s American ancestors were listed in census records as Black, mulatto, Creole, or free persons of color, and his family tree includes both enslaved people and slaveholders. His first U.S.-born papacy and this first encyclical frame a moment of institutional reckoning that previous pontiffs approached but never fully articulated. Prior apologies from St. John Paul II in 1985 and 1992 condemned the injustice of slavery on behalf of Christians but did not acknowledge the role past popes played in authorizing it, and Leo’s recent visit to an Angolan slave-trade shrine last month referenced sorrow and suffering without explicitly naming the institution of slavery.