VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the role the Holy See played in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”History’s first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo raised the trans-Atlantic slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling, such as the unregulated labor practices in procuring rare minerals needed for AI chips.
Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the Catholic Church’s complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”
