By Desire Emmanuel with Agency Reports
Catholic pontiff, Pope Leo, on Monday, May 25, made a historic apology for the role the Holy See itself played in legitimising slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory,” the Associated Press reported.
The Holy See is the headquarters of the Catholic Church worldwide.
Past popes have apologised for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologised for, the role that past popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”
History’s first US-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released on Monday.
The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo raised the trans-Atlantic slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling, such as the unregulated labor required to procure rare minerals needed for AI chips.
In doing so, Leo responded to decades of calls by Black American Catholics, activists and scholars for the Holy See to atone for its own role in the colonial-era trade in human beings.
“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,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” he added.
The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorised Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.
In 1452, for example, 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 take 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 permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.
In acknowledging the Holy See’s own role and the 15th-century papal bulls, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “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 legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’”
Leo said that it wasn’t possible to judge the morality of the decisions with today’s standards.
“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.
The pope said that the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognised.”
