Pope Leo XIV issued an unprecedented apology on Monday, May 25, 2026, for the Vatican’s historic role in justifying and legitimizing slavery, describing the Church’s delay in condemning the practice as “a wound in Christian memory”. The apology came in his first major papal encyclical, _Magnifica Humanitas_ (Magnificent Humanity), a wide-ranging text that also addressed artificial intelligence and modern forms of exploitation. In the document, Leo acknowledged that the Catholic Church had taken centuries to fully recognise “the scourge of slavery” as incompatible with human dignity, and admitted that Church institutions owned slaves until the Middle Ages.
The pontiff stated that “in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of ‘infidels’”. He noted that it was only in the 19th century, under Pope Leo XIII, that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated. “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” Leo wrote, expressing deep sorrow for the immense suffering and humiliation endured by enslaved people.
While previous popes, including John Paul II and Francis, had apologized for the involvement of Christians in the slave trade or denounced contemporary slavery, Leo’s statement went further by explicitly acknowledging the Vatican’s direct institutional involvement in legitimizing the practice. Historians point to 15th-century papal bulls such as _Dum Diversas_ and _Romanus Pontifex_ that granted European Catholic monarchs religious authority to conquer non-Christian lands and reduce their inhabitants to perpetual servitude. The Church was also one of the largest landowners and slaveholders in the Caribbean and Latin America, with religious orders operating plantations and mines fueled by enslaved labor.
Leo emphasized that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, but said “neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery”. He connected the historical legacy to present concerns, warning in the same encyclical of “new forms of slavery” linked to the digital economy, including exploitative labor in the extraction of rare minerals for AI chips and factory work producing technological devices. He called for restorative justice to mend historical racial inequities, though the Vatican has stopped short of mandating centralized financial reparations, preferring decentralized reconciliatory initiatives by individual religious orders.
The encyclical marks the most explicit papal admission to date of institutional responsibility, and comes from history’s first US-born pope, whose own family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said he hoped to enlist the pope in his city’s reparations efforts after the apology, while scholars noted that the acknowledgment was long sought by Black American Catholics and activists who have urged the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings.
