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Pope Leo XIV has issued a formal apology for the Catholic Church’s “delay” in condemning slavery, describing the shortcoming as “a wound in Christian memory.”
“For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” the US pontiff wrote in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” a landmark document released Monday.
While John Paul II and Francis have previously denounced slavery, Leo went further by explicitly acknowledging the Church’s historical role as a slave-owning institution.
The Church owned slaves until the Middle Ages and once advised European sovereigns on how to justify the enslavement of “infidels,” Leo wrote.
“It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available,” the pope said.
“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.”
It was only in the 19th century, he noted, that “a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated.”
The apology came within a broader encyclical warning about “new forms of slavery” fueling the digital economy and artificial intelligence.
