Pope Leo XIV has issued an unprecedented apology for the Holy See’s own role in legitimizing slavery, acknowledging that past papal decrees “gave religious cover to crimes that denied the image of God in millions of human beings.” Speaking at a Marian shrine in Angola that once stood at the heart of the Atlantic slave trade, the pontiff asked forgiveness not only for Christians who trafficked enslaved Africans, but specifically for “successive popes and curial officials who failed to oppose, and at times endorsed, this brutal system.”
A historic apology at a former slave‑trade hub
Pope Leo’s apology came during a visit to Muxima, a riverside shrine in Angola whose white‑walled church was once a staging point for the transatlantic slave trade. Built in the late 16th century as part of a Portuguese fortress, the Church of Our Lady of Muxima served for centuries as a place where enslaved Africans were forcibly baptized before being marched to Luanda and shipped to the Americas.
In an outdoor liturgy framed by the Kwanza River, Leo recalled “the sorrow and immense suffering” Angolans had endured and evoked stories of missionaries who tried to comfort enslaved people, including one who “kissed their wounds whenever the horror of slavery overwhelmed him.” But he went further than past papal remarks, acknowledging that “here, the Church’s presence was interwoven with a system of capture, sale and deportation that we did not decisively oppose.”
“From this land once scarred by slave raids, we ask forgiveness for the actions and omissions of the Holy See that lent religious legitimacy to slavery,” he said, according to reporters travelling with the papal party. “We repent for those bulls and briefs that failed to defend the equal dignity of Africans and Indigenous peoples, and for the silence of pastors who did not stand with the enslaved.”
Naming the Church’s own complicity
Leo’s remarks explicitly referenced the 15th‑century papal bulls that granted Portuguese and Spanish crowns theological cover for conquest and enslavement. Historians note that Pope Nicholas V’s 1452 bull Dum Diversas (also known as Diversas) authorized the Portuguese king to “invade, fight, subjugate” non‑Christians and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,” language later cited by colonizers across Africa and the Americas.
Those documents became pillars of the so‑called Doctrine of Discovery, a legal‑religious framework used to justify the seizure of Indigenous lands and the enslavement of non‑Christian peoples. In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, stressing that those bulls “have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith” and acknowledging that they “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples.”
Until now, however, the Holy See had resisted explicitly linking those documents to a papal apology. In his Angola homily, Leo broke that pattern. “We recognize with shame that certain papal texts and diplomatic choices were used to sanctify what today we rightly call a crime against humanity,” he said, according to a summary carried by Catholic and secular outlets.
He contrasted those bulls with later condemnations of slavery, notably Pope Paul III’s 1537 bull Sublimis Deus, which affirmed that Indigenous peoples must not be deprived of their liberty or property, and Pope Leo XIII’s 1888–1890 encyclicals denouncing slavery itself. “Our tradition contains both light and darkness,” Leo XIV said. “Today we choose the light, and we name the darkness for what it was.”
From “partial narrative” to full reckoning
The apology follows months of internal Vatican debate over how to address the Church’s tangled record on slavery. In March, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Holy See’s ambassador at the United Nations, told the General Assembly that the Vatican “unequivocally condemns slavery, including in its modern forms,” but warned against what he called a “partial narrative” that reduced centuries of Church teaching to a few controversial bulls.
Speaking on the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery, Caccia pointed to a long line of papal statements denouncing the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself, culminating in Leo XIII’s 19th‑century interventions. He also cited Pope Leo XIV’s own apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te, which portrays the liberation of prisoners and the oppressed as a sign of God’s Trinitarian love.
Critics, including Black Catholic scholars and historians, argued that such interventions risked downplaying the concrete ways in which earlier popes enabled or tolerated slavery. Articles in Catholic and academic outlets have urged Rome to “correct the historical record” by acknowledging that the Holy See not only produced powerful condemnations but also documents that underwrote racialized chattel slavery.
Leo’s speech in Angola appears to answer some of those calls. By explicitly locating papal culpability in both texts and silence, he moved beyond previous apologies that spoke of “Christians” or “the Church” in general terms. Commentators noted that while St. John Paul II asked forgiveness from Africans for the slave trade in 1985 and condemned slavery during a 1992 visit to Gorée Island, he stopped short of naming the popes’ role in authorizing or tolerating it.
A personal and global context
Leo XIV’s apology also unfolds against a broader backdrop of Christian institutions confronting their links to slavery and colonialism. Just days earlier, the Church of Scotland issued a formal apology at its General Assembly for its historical role in slavery, acknowledging that church wealth was tied to plantations and the slave economy. Anglican leaders, Lutheran synods and U.S. dioceses have held their own services of apology for slavery in recent years.
Within Catholicism, bishops in Ghana and other African countries have publicly apologized for the involvement of local elites in the slave trade, even as they have pressed European churches and the Vatican to do more. Commentators in African media said Leo’s words from Angola, a country whose people were deported en masse to Brazil and the Caribbean, could resonate across the continent.
The pope’s own background has drawn attention as well. While Leo XIV has not publicly discussed genealogical research into his family history, some Black Catholic scholars have cautioned against projecting specific narratives onto him without his consent. Still, his repeated emphasis on the suffering of enslaved Africans and his choice to deliver the apology on African soil have fueled discussion about how personal experience shapes papal priorities.
Diplomatically, the move comes as the Holy See positions itself as a moral voice on human rights and as it navigates strains with the United States and other powers over migration, racism, and historical justice. In his Angola trip and in recent speeches, Leo has warned that human rights and freedoms are under pressure as “the logic of power and war” displaces dialogue, explicitly naming racism, and economic exploitation among today’s structural sins.
Beyond words: calls for restitution and reform
While many welcomed Leo’s apology as a milestone, human‑rights advocates and theologians stressed that words must be matched by concrete measures. Scholars quoted in coverage of the Angola visit urged the Vatican to consider financial reparations, support for educational and memorial projects, and an expanded role for Africans and people of African descent in Church leadership.
Articles in Catholic journals have argued that a full reckoning would include:
- Opening and digitizing archives related to the slave trade so descendants and researchers can trace what happened.
- Funding scholarships and initiatives in communities most affected by slavery and its legacies.
- Explicitly rescinding or “de‑authorizing” the remaining medieval bulls, even if the Vatican insists, they no longer have legal force.
The Holy See has taken some steps in that direction. In addition to the 2023 repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, Leo XIV has repeatedly condemned modern forms of slavery, including human trafficking, forced labor and sexual exploitation, framing them as “crimes against humanity” in line with international law. At the United Nations, Archbishop Caccia told member states that “no one should be held in slavery or servitude,” explicitly tying Catholic teaching to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Still, critics say the Church must grapple not only with moral teaching but with material complicity: religious orders, dioceses and lay Catholic investors who owned plantations, ships, and enslaved people. Leo’s apology, they argue, opens the door to that deeper institutional examination.
Remembering victims, reshaping memory
In Angola, Leo framed the apology as a step toward what he called “purifying memory”, a phrase used by previous popes to describe confronting sin without erasing the good that also existed. Standing before the Muxima shrine, he invited pilgrims to “pray for the countless men, women and children whose names we do not know, but whom God never forgot.”
He recalled St. John Paul II’s 1992 description of slavery as a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian,” but added that “today we must say honestly that the Holy See did not do enough to prevent or end that tragedy.” “We cannot change history,” Leo said, “but we can change how we remember it — and how we act, so that no one today is treated as less than a child of God.”
Historians of religion note that apologizing for slavery and colonialism has become an important, if contentious, part of how Christian communities reckon with their past. For many descendants of enslaved people, Leo XIV’s decision to explicitly link the papacy to the structures of enslavement appears as a long‑awaited acknowledgement of a painful truth.
Whether the apology leads to structural changes, in Vatican policy, in Church finances or in the representation of Africans in Catholic decision‑making, will determine if this moment is remembered as symbolic or transformative. For now, at least, the successor of Peter has placed the Holy See’s own role in legitimizing slavery on the record, in the shadow of a church where chains once rattled, and prayers rose from people forced onto ships.