POPE LEO XIV APOLOGISES FOR CHURCH’S DELAY IN CONDEMNING SLAVERY

Mon 25 May 2026:

Pope Leo XIV issued an apology on Monday for the Catholic Church’s centuries-long delay in condemning slavery, calling it “a wound in Christian memory”.

“For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” Leo wrote in a major text that warned about “new forms of slavery” behind the digital economy.

Popes have in the past have apologised for the involvement of Christians in the slave trade.

John Paul II denounced it in 1992 before issuing a sweeping request for forgiveness for historical injustices in 2000.

Pope Francis has also repeatedly denounced contemporary forms of slavery.

But Leo’s words went further.

The US pope pointed out that the Church owned slaves until the Middle Ages and it also advised European sovereigns on how to justify the enslavement of “infidels”.

It was only in the 19th century that “a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated,” he wrote in “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity), a document focused primarily on the rise of artificial intelligence.

“It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.”

“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.

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Centuries of legitimizing slavery for European colonizers

The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and 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 all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.

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.

Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, 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 Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”

Spanish kings received the rights for the Americas.

In 2023, the Vatican 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 weren’t to be enslaved.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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