Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See’s own role in legitimizing slavery
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV On Monday, he offered a historic apology for the Vatican’s role in legitimizing slavery and its failure to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “scar in Christian memory.”
Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope has publicly acknowledged and apologized for the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “heretics.”
The first US-born pope in history whose family history This figure, which includes both enslaved people and slave owners, apologized in its first circular, “Magnifica Humanitas,” published Monday.
The comprehensive manifesto is aimed at protecting humanity. The period when dependence on artificial intelligence increases. Leo brought up the trans-Atlantic slave trade in connection with what he called new forms of slavery and colonialism fueled by the digital revolution, such as the unregulated labor required to supply rare minerals needed for artificial intelligence chips.
In doing so, Leo responded to decades-long calls by Black American Catholics, activists, and scholars for the Vatican to atone for its own role in colonial-era human trafficking.
Leo wrote: “It is impossible not to feel a deep sadness when considering the tremendous pain and humiliation endured by so many, which stands in stark contrast to the immeasurable dignity they enjoy as those infinitely loved by the Lord.” “For this, I sincerely ask for forgiveness on behalf of the Church.”
Centuries of justification of slavery for European colonists
The Vatican has always insisted that it upholds the dignity of all people as children of God. However, a series of directives from the 15th century Vatican It gave Portuguese rulers the authority to conquer Africa and the Americas and to enslave non-Christians.
In 1452, for example, 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 possessions everywhere, including the lands of “Saracens, pagans, and other heretics, and enemies of the name of Christ.”
The bull also gave the Portuguese permission to “reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.”
This bull and the Romanus Pontifex issued three years later formed the basis of this document. Discovery DoctrineTheory that legitimized the seizure of land during the colonial period in Africa and the Americas.
Nicholas V’s permissions for the Portuguese were granted by Pope Paul III in 1456. Callixtus was confirmed or renewed by Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514; according to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall End: Slavery, Abolition, and the History of the Catholic Church.”
Spanish kings acquired rights to the Americas.
In 2023, the Vatican officially rejected it. Discovery Doctrinebut he never officially annulled, repealed, or repudiated the bulls. The Vatican insists that a later bull in 1537, Sublimis Deus, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their freedom or possession of their property and should not be enslaved.
Leo: Papacy was late to condemn slavery
In his encyclical, Leo, his namesake Pope Pope XIII. He recalled that Leo was the first pope to publicly condemn slavery in 1888; but this was long after many countries had abolished slavery. Before that, in ancient times and the Middle Ages, there were slaves even in church institutions.
Acknowledging the Vatican’s own role and the papal orders of the 15th century, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “Already in the early modern period, the Roman Apostolic See, responding to the demands of the rulers, intervened on several occasions to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, including, in some cases, the enslavement of ‘heretics’.”
Leo said it is not possible to decide whether decisions are moral by today’s standards.
“Yet we cannot deny or diminish the delay in both society and the church in condemning the scourge of slavery,” he said.
The pope said the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its complete incompatibility with slavery to be clearly recognized.”
“This creates a wound in Christian memory from which we cannot separate ourselves,” he said.
Leo said the church must today unequivocally condemn all forms of human trafficking linked to the digital technological revolution “if we are to avoid the need to ask for forgiveness again in the future for failing to respect the treasure of human dignity that our faith requires.”
Leo’s own family history and past apologies
During a visit to Cameroon in 1985, St. John Paul II asked for forgiveness from Africans on behalf of Christians who participated in the slave trade, but not because of the pope’s role in it. During a 1992 visit to Senegal’s Goree Island, West Africa’s largest slave trade center, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it “the tragedy of a civilization that calls itself Christian.”
Henry Louis Gates Jr. According to ancestry research published by Leo, 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black and were listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole, or a free person of color. Gates wrote in The New York Times that his family tree includes slave owners and enslaved people.
During his visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine located on the site of a church. Important center of the African slave trade During Portuguese colonial rule. While at the Mama Muxima Temple, Leo recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” that Angolans had endured for centuries, but did not specifically mention slavery.
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Nicole Winfield reported from Middletown, Connecticut.
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