Pope Pope Leo has issued what is described as the most direct apology yet from a pontiff over the Catholic Church’s historical involvement in slavery, acknowledging both its long delay in condemning the practice and its institutional participation in systems that enabled it.
In a significant section of his first encyclical, the pontiff admitted that the Church took centuries to fully recognise “the scourge of slavery” as incompatible with human dignity, describing its legacy as “a wound in Christian memory.”
“For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” he wrote, adding that he feels “deep sorrow” for the suffering endured by enslaved people.
He noted that Church authorities at various points responded to ruling powers by regulating or legitimising forms of enslavement, including the subjugation of non-Christians.
He also acknowledged that some ecclesiastical institutions owned slaves during the Middle Ages.
According to the Pope, it was not until the 19th century under Pope Pope Leo XIII that the Church arrived at a “formal, absolute and universal condemnation” of slavery, after what he described as a prolonged period of inconsistency between teaching and practice.
The remarks marked the strongest papal admission to date of institutional responsibility, going beyond earlier statements that largely focused on the actions of individual Christians rather than the Vatican as an institution.
During a 1985 visit to Africa, Pope Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness from Africans for suffering inflicted by “men belonging to Christian nations” who took part in the slave trade.
His successor, Pope Pope Francis, later condemned modern slavery and formally rejected 15th-century papal documents that had been used by colonial powers to justify slavery and other abuses.
However, those earlier interventions stopped short of directly addressing institutional responsibility at the level now acknowledged by Leo.
Pope Leo made the statement in his first encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas, which focused on the ethical risks of artificial intelligence and warns about emerging forms of exploitation in the global economy.
Separately, genealogical research released after his election last year indicated that the first U.S.-born pope has ancestry linked both to enslaved people and to slave owners, adding further historical complexity to his public reflections.
