Pope Leo XIV has issued one of the most consequential apologies in modern Catholic history, acknowledging the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery and admitting that the Church failed for centuries to condemn the practice with the moral clarity it demanded.
The apology appeared in Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, released on Monday, May 25, 2026. The document focuses broadly on safeguarding human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence, but its treatment of slavery has already become one of its most significant passages. Vatican News said the encyclical addresses artificial intelligence as one of the defining moral challenges of the contemporary age, linking technological power to questions of dignity, justice, labour and human freedom.
Leo described the Church’s historical record on slavery as a “wound in Christian memory”, noting that ecclesiastical institutions and even the Apostolic See had, at different moments, tolerated or legitimised forms of subjugation. He wrote that the Church took too long to clearly articulate a universal condemnation of slavery, despite its teaching on the dignity of every person created in the image of God.
That admission matters because previous popes had apologised for the involvement of Christians in the transatlantic slave trade, but Leo went further by acknowledging the role of past papal authority itself. AP reported that no pope had previously publicly apologised for papal actions that gave European rulers explicit authority to subjugate and enslave non-Christians.
At the centre of that history are 15th-century papal directives such as Dum Diversas, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1452, and Romanus Pontifex, issued in 1455. These documents helped provide religious cover for European expansion, conquest and enslavement in Africa and the Americas, forming part of the wider ideological foundation later associated with the Doctrine of Discovery.
The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery in 2023, but the legacy of the papal bulls themselves has remained a major point of criticism among Black Catholics, scholars, Indigenous advocates and descendants of enslaved Africans. The apology by Pope Leo XIV, therefore, addresses a demand that has gone beyond general statements of regret, asking the Vatican to confront its institutional responsibility in the machinery of colonial exploitation.
The encyclical does not treat slavery as only a historical matter. Leo connects the past to present forms of exploitation linked to the digital economy, including labour abuses and resource extraction tied to the minerals needed for artificial intelligence systems and advanced technologies. Vatican News said the Pope called for AI to be “disarmed” from systems of domination, exclusion and war, insisting that technological progress must serve human dignity rather than concentrate power in the hands of a few.
This framing gives the apology a wider significance. Leo is not only asking the Church to remember a painful past. He is using that history to challenge new forms of inequality that risk turning vulnerable workers, poor communities and resource-rich regions into instruments of another era of extraction.
For Africa, the encyclical lands with particular weight. The transatlantic slave trade tore millions of people from the continent and helped shape centuries of racial, economic and political inequality. Today, many of the minerals powering the digital age, including cobalt, lithium and rare earths, are also sourced from African countries, often under conditions that raise urgent questions about labour, value capture and global justice.
The apology by Pope Leo XIV is unlikely to settle debates over reparations, restitution or the formal status of the historical papal documents that enabled conquest and enslavement. It will, however, make it harder for the Vatican to speak about dignity, technology and modern exploitation without also facing the historical systems in which the Church itself was implicated.
Leo’s first major teaching document has therefore placed two eras into the same moral frame: the age of colonial enslavement and the age of artificial intelligence. By doing so, he has turned an encyclical on technology into a deeper reckoning with power, memory and the human cost of progress when institutions fail to defend the vulnerable.