Pope in historic apology for the Vatican's role in legitimizing slavery

May 25, 2026

Pope Leo XIV during the Pentecost Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, Sunday, May 24, 2026.

Today, Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology for the role the Holy See played in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries. In the apology, which came as part of his first encyclical (that is, a papal letter sent to the Catholic church), he called the Vatican’s involvement a “wound in Christian memory.”

17th-century portrait depicting Pope Nicolaus V (born 1397, died 1455), who issued the papal bulls *Dum Diversas* and *Romanus Pontifex*, granting the church’s sanction for Portugal’s conquests and slavery in Africa

The Catholic Church played a crucial role in legitimizing the enslavement of Africans. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas, a papal bull that granted King Afonso V of Portugal the right to subjugate all:

“Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property [...] and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude”.

In 1455, the same pope issued a new bull – Romanus Pontifex – which even more clearly specified the Portuguese king’s right to invade and take over territories south of Cape Bojador in present-day Western Sahara, and to enslave their non-Christian inhabitants. In Born in Blackness, American journalist Howard W. French writes:

“These papal bulls did more than grant the Portuguese exclusive rights. They signaled to the rest of Christian Europe that the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans was not only accepted but encouraged.”

Previous popes, such as John Paul II during a visit to Cameroon in 1985, have apologized for Christian involvement, but this is the first time a pope has explicitly apologized for the role the papacy itself played.