Pope Leo on Monday issued the clearest apology yet from a pontiff over the Catholic Church’s historic role in slavery, acknowledging both its delayed condemnation of the practice and its institutional involvement in legitimising it.
In a major section of his first papal encyclical, Leo said the Church took centuries to fully recognise “the scourge of slavery” as incompatible with human dignity, describing the legacy as “a wound in Christian memory.”
“For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” he wrote, expressing “deep sorrow” for the suffering endured by enslaved people.
Leo said Church authorities had at times responded to rulers by regulating and legitimising forms of subjugation, including the enslavement of non-Christians.
He also acknowledged that ecclesiastical institutions owned slaves during the Middle Ages.
According to the pope, the Church only reached a “formal, absolute and universal condemnation” of slavery in the 19th century under Pope Leo XIII, following what he described as a prolonged period of inconsistency in Church teaching and practice.
The remarks represent the most direct papal admission yet of institutional responsibility, going beyond previous statements that focused mainly on the actions of individual Christians rather than the Vatican itself.
During a 1985 visit to Africa, Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness from Africans for suffering caused by “men belonging to Christian nations” involved in the slave trade.
Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, condemned modern-day slavery and formally repudiated 15th-century papal documents used by colonial powers to justify actions including slavery.
However, previous statements stopped short of directly addressing the role of the papacy itself.
Leo made the intervention in his debut encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which examines the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence and warns against new forms of exploitation linked to the global economy.
Genealogical research published after Leo’s election last year showed that the first US-born pope had ancestry linked to both enslaved people and slaveholders.
Faridah Abdulkadiri
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