In a historic turning point for the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV issued an unprecedented apology on Monday, explicitly acknowledging the Vatican’s past role in justifying and regulating slavery. The pontiff characterized the Church’s long delay in completely condemning the practice as “a wound in Christian memory.”
The admission came within a major new text titled Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity), in which the Pope also warned of modern-day exploitation emerging within the global digital economy.
In the document, Leo frankly detailed how Church institutions actively owned enslaved people until the Middle Ages and later provided religious backing for the practice during the era of global exploration.
”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,'” Leo wrote.
While previous pontiffs have expressed deep remorse for the actions of individual Christians during the transatlantic slave trade—most notably Pope John Paul II in 1992 and 2000, and Pope Francis in his denunciations of modern human trafficking—Leo’s statement marks the first time a pope has directly confronted the Holy See’s institutional complicity.
The text notes that a definitive, universal condemnation of slavery from the Vatican did not emerge until the 19th century.
”For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” Leo wrote.
Acknowledging the complexities of looking back at church history through a modern lens, the Pope emphasized that historical context does not absolve the institution of its ethical responsibilities or the slow pace of its moral awakening.
”It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he said. “This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached.”