For the first time in the history of the Catholic Church, a sitting pope has formally apologised not merely for what Christians did but for what popes themselves authorised.
FOR Africa, this apology has a particular weight. The continent whose people were dragged across oceans in chains, whose land was carved up by European powers, and whose subjugation was given moral and legal cover by the most powerful religious institution in the Western world, has waited more than five centuries for a pope to look directly at the documents that made all of it possible and say: we were wrong, and we are sorry.
On Monday, May 25, 2026, that moment came.
Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology for the role the Holy See played in legitimising slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”
The apology is not merely significant. It is, by any measure of ecclesiastical and colonial history, unprecedented. Past popes have apologised for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologised for, the role that past popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave so-called “infidels.”
Until Monday.
The apology was delivered by history’s first American-born pope, whose own family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners. That biographical fact makes the gesture something more than a theological formality. Pope Leo XIV is not apologising for something done by people who look nothing like him, to people with whom he has no personal connection. He is a man whose family tree is itself a map of slavery’s American legacy a descendant of both perpetrators and victims standing at the head of the institution that gave the entire enterprise its divine blessing, and asking for forgiveness.
He delivered the apology in his first encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas” Magnificent Humanity a sweeping manifesto released Monday that is primarily concerned with the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence and the safeguarding of human dignity in a digital age. That a document about the future contains the Church’s most honest reckoning with its past says something about how Leo has chosen to frame his papacy: as one that refuses to look forward without looking back.
Leo wrote: “It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”
To appreciate fully what has been acknowledged, one must understand the documents at the centre of this reckoning documents that have shaped the fate of Africa and its people for nearly six hundred years.
In 1452, 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 possessions including land of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere. The bull also gave the Portuguese explicit permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
Read those words carefully. Perpetual slavery. Authorised by the Bishop of Rome. In writing.
That bull, and another issued three years later called Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery the legal and theological theory that legitimised the colonial-era seizure of land across Africa and the Americas. Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were subsequently confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481, and Pope Leo X in 1514.
Each renewal was a fresh signature on the warrant for Africa’s subjugation.
In acknowledging this record directly in his encyclical, Leo wrote: “Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimise forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.'”
It is a carefully worded sentence. But its meaning is unambiguous: the Vatican did not merely fail to stop slavery. It enabled it.
The Vatican has for centuries defended its record by pointing to a 1537 bull, Sublimis Deus, in which Pope Paul III reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their liberty or their property, and should not be enslaved. In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery but it never formally rescinded, abrogated, or rejected the underlying bulls themselves.
That gap between repudiating the ideology and disowning the documents has long frustrated African historians, Black Catholic scholars, and post-colonial advocates who argued that any genuine reckoning required the Church to name what it had actually done, not merely distance itself from how others had used it.
Leo also recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888 though that condemnation came long after many countries had already abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, even church institutions held slaves.
Black American Catholics, activists, and scholars had long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings going beyond more generic apologies for the involvement of individual Christians. Monday’s encyclical represents the most direct response to that demand in the Church’s history.
For the African continent, the weight of this moment cannot be measured in theological terms alone. The papal bulls of the fifteenth century were not peripheral documents. They were the legal architecture of the Atlantic slave trade, the intellectual scaffolding of centuries of European colonialism, and the moral permission slip for the systematic brutalisation of African peoples. An estimated twelve to fifteen million Africans were transported across the Atlantic in chains between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Millions more died in the crossing, on the continent itself, or in the conditions of colonial labour that followed formal abolition.
Behind all of it behind the Portuguese ships that first moved down the West African coast, behind the treaties that divided the continent at Berlin, behind the catechisms preached to enslaved people telling them that suffering in this world promised reward in the next — stood the authority of the papacy, expressed in documents that no sitting pope had ever been willing to own.
Until Leo XIV, standing before the world on Monday, admitted that they did.
Whether Monday’s apology will be accompanied by material reparations, formal diplomatic gestures toward African nations and their diasporas, or concrete institutional change within the Church remains to be seen. Scholars and advocates have already noted that an apology, however historic, is a starting point rather than a conclusion.
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But as starting points go, it is a seismic one. Six hundred years after Dum Diversas opened Africa to conquest and chains, the successor of the man who signed it has stood before the world and called it, plainly and without evasion, a wound.
Africa has been waiting a long time to hear those words.
