Pope Leo XIV on Monday issued a sweeping first encyclical in which he apologized for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery and for centuries in which the Vatican did not condemn it, calling the church’s history a “wound in Christian memory.” The pope, who is the history’s first U.S.-born pontiff, made the apology in “Magnifica Humanitas,” released on Monday.
In the encyclical, Leo said the church must “firmly condemn all forms of trafficking” connected to the digital technological revolution, linking the historical violence of slavery and colonialism with what he described as new forms emerging as societies rely more heavily on artificial intelligence and related systems. He also called for “robust regulation” of artificial intelligence and said developers should work for the common good rather than profit.
Leo’s apology distinguished past popes’ generalized remorse for Christians’ personal involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade from what he described as a more direct institutional role. Past popes, the reporting notes, have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the slave trade, but Leo’s encyclical publicly acknowledged the part that earlier popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”
In the document, Leo cited early-modern Vatican interventions responding to requests by sovereigns to regulate and legitimize forms of “subjugation” and, in certain cases, “including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’” He also said that it was not possible to judge those decisions by “today’s standards,” while adding that the delay in denouncing slavery was still condemnable. He said it took the church “eighteen centuries” to explicitly recognize slavery’s incompatibility with Christian doctrine and said, “Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.”
The encyclical also recalled specific Vatican authorizations from the 15th century that the reporting says were used to support European conquest and enslavement beyond Christianity. It pointed to a 1452 papal bull, Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V, describing permissions that gave the Portuguese king and successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take possessions from “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere, along with permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.” The reporting said a subsequent bull, Romanus Pontifex, formed part of the basis for the Doctrine of Discovery, which was later used to justify colonial-era seizure of land.
While the Vatican has said it repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery in 2023, the reporting said it had not formally rescinded the original 15th-century bulls themselves. The reporting said the Vatican has argued that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their liberty or their property and should not be enslaved.
The encyclical’s apology also prompted responses from scholars who have worked on the intersection of Black Catholic history and the Vatican’s treatment of slavery. Shannen Dee Williams, a historian at the University of Dayton and the author of 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 that Black Catholics had waited for the Vatican to 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.”
Other historians also said the apology was significant but argued that more work remains to fully explain what the church did and how it expanded slavery’s institutional legitimacy. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of All Oppression Shall Cease, told The Associated Press that Leo “has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admission and apology,” while saying he hoped a future document would explain the church’s involvement with slaveholding in greater detail.