25.5.2026
After centuries of silence the Catholic Church on Monday formally apologised for keeping quiet while Europeans shipped millions of Africans to the Americas into cruel forced labour.
Head of the Catholic Church Pope Leo XIV said Monday that the slavery remains “a wound in Christian memory.”
“For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” Pope Leo wrote in a major text that warned about “new forms of slavery” behind the digital economy.
The US born Pope pointed out that the Church owned slaves until the Middle Ages, and it also advised European sovereigns on how to justify the enslavement of “infidels”.
It was only in the 19th century that “a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated,” he wrote in “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity), a document focused primarily on the rise of artificial intelligence.
“It is true that past events cannot be judged anachronistically, as though the moral criteria that matured over time had always been available. Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.”
“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.
John Paul II denounced it in 1992 before issuing a sweeping request for forgiveness for historical injustices in 2000.
Pope Francis has also repeatedly denounced contemporary forms of slavery. Agency reports
The Atlantic slave trade...darkest period in human existence.
Photo: History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)