31/05/2026
Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Catholic Church’s role in slavery
May 27, 2026
By Erick Johnson
Centuries after Blacks were kidnapped from Africa and used to enrich wealthy landowners and countries across the globe, Pope Leo XIV on May 25 made a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s role in perpetuating slavery.
The apology comes as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and a Chicago delegation prepare to travel this week to the Vatican in Rome for a private meeting with the pope.
Rev. Dr. Marshall Hatch said he will be among the delegation traveling to Rome with the mayor. He said in a statement regarding this historic journey, “As African American clergy, we come supporting the courageous and prophetic voice of Pope Leo in a season of global fear, rising callousness, and emerging fascism.”
Pope Leo was born at Mercy Hospital in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood in 1955. He grew up in south suburban Dolton in a modest, single-family brick home that the village purchase for plans to turn into a museum.
The latest news is Pope Leo’s historic apology for the Catholic Church’s role in slavery. Chicago Cardinal Blasé Cupich and Bishop Robert J. McClory of the diocese of Gary have not released statements in response to Pope Leo’s apology.
Mayor Johnson reportedly will speak to Pope Leo as part of an effort to get reparations for descendants of enslaved Blacks.
Pope Leo’s apology was welcomed by Black American Catholics, activists and scholars who have long called for the Holy See to go beyond generic apologies and atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings.
Pope Leo, the world’s first American pontiff whose family history includes enslaved people and slave owners, said in his Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) “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.”
For centuries, the Vatican and the Papal States actively utilized and traded slaves. These efforts were fueled by the Doctrine of Discovery, which the Vatican issued in 1452. The doctrine authorized colonial powers to Spain and Portugal to seize lands and subjugate people in Africa and the “New World,” as long as people on the lands were not Christians.
In 1838 in America, a group of most prominent Catholic priests, the Society of Jesuits, sold 272 enslaved Blacks to save Georgetown University from financial ruin. The sale included the separation of children from their parents, a common feature of the slave trade.
In 2022, Georgetown University and the Jesuits have made a $27 million pledge to the descendants of enslaved people sold to fund the school.
According to Author Rachel Swarns, Catholic priests in Maryland were among the largest slaveholders in the state, and they prayed for the souls of the people they held captive even as they enslaved and sold their bodies.
Shannen Dee Williams, a historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, “Subversive Habits,” told the Associated Press, “The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy. Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church’s leading roles in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery–and thus by extension the enduring systems of anti-Black racism in the world today.”
According to the Associated Press, 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.”
In his encyclical, Pope Leo recalled that Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888.
