Vatican City — Pope Leo
Previous popes have apologized for Christian involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. But no pope has publicly acknowledged, let alone apologized for, the role played by previous popes in granting European kings explicit power to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”
The first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes enslaved people and slave owners, offered the apology in his first “Remarkable Humanity” post, which was released Monday.
The comprehensive statement is about protecting humanity in the age of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Liu raised the slave trade in relation to what he called new forms of slavery and colonialism fueled by the digital revolution.
More | The Pope calls for strong regulation of artificial intelligence in a statement considering the future of humanity
Pope Leo XIV called on Monday for strong regulation of artificial intelligence, and for its developers to work for the common good, not profit.
Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called on the Holy See to atone for its role in colonial-era human trafficking, going beyond public apologies for the involvement of individual Christians.
“It is impossible not to feel profound sadness when thinking of the enormous suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as people infinitely loved by the Lord,” Liu wrote. “For this reason, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for forgiveness.”
Pope Leo
Shannen D. Williams, a historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, “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.”
“The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy,” Williams said. “Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak frankly about the Church’s leading roles in the transatlantic slave trade and slavery — and by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today.”
Centuries of legalization of slavery for European colonists
The Vatican has insisted that it always supports the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of directives issued by the Vatican in the 15th century allowed Portuguese kings to invade 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 seize all property—including lands—of “Muslims, pagans, and other infidels and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.
The bull also gave permission to the Portuguese to “convert their persons into perpetual slavery.”
This bull, and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized land seizures in Africa and the Americas in the colonial era.
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, Abolition, and the Catholic Church.
The Spanish kings gained rights to the Americas.
In 2023, the Vatican formally rejected the doctrine of discovery, but never formally abolished, abolished, or rejected it. The Vatican insists that a later edict, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their freedom or possession of their property, nor should they be enslaved.
Liu says that the Holy See was late in condemning slavery
In his encyclical, Leo stated that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, long after many countries had abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, church institutions and even popes — Gregory the Great — had slaves, Kellerman said.
Recognizing the papal bulls of the fifteenth century, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “In the early modern period, the Holy See in Rome, in response to the requests of the kings, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation and, in some cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels’.”
Liu said it is not possible to judge the morality of the decisions by today’s standards.
He added: “However, we cannot deny or belittle the delay with which society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.”
The Church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, the pope said, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its complete incompatibility with slavery to be clearly recognized.”
He added: “This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, from which we cannot consider ourselves separate.”
Liu said the church must strongly condemn all forms of trafficking related 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.”
Anthea Butler, a senior fellow at the Koch Center for History at Oxford University, said Liu needed to acknowledge and atone for the church’s complicity in historical slavery if he wanted to “speak credibly about current issues of technological slavery.”
“For the descendants of slaves, this is once again a much-needed apology from the pope,” said Butler, who is Black.
Liu’s family history and past apologies
Scholar Kellerman welcomed Liu’s apology but said more needs to be done to more fully acknowledge how slavery was legitimized and expanded by the Catholic Church.
“Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this confession and apology today,” he told the Associated Press. “Hopefully a future document will explain in more detail the Church’s involvement in slave enslavement. As a scholar, I have some quibbles about the wording, but this is a truly remarkable moment.”
During a visit to Cameroon in 1985, Saint John Paul II asked Africans for forgiveness for the slave trade on behalf of the Christians who participated in it, but not the popes. On a 1992 visit to Goree Island in Senegal, which was the largest slave trade center in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery as “the tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christianity.”
According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were black, and were listed in census records as mulatto, black, creole, or free person of color. Gates wrote in the New York Times that his family tree includes slave owners and enslaved people.
During a visit to Angola last month, Liu prayed at a Catholic shrine at a site that was an important center for the African slave trade during Portuguese colonial rule. While at Mama Muxima’s shelter, Leo recalled the “great sorrow and suffering” that Angolans had endured for centuries, but did not specifically refer to slavery.
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Winfield reported from Middletown, Connecticut.
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