On May 15, 2026, Pope Leo made a public apology for the role of the Catholic Church in African slavery. Reuters reported that the apology was issued in a key passage of the Pope’s first papal encyclical.

In the message, Pope Leo said the Church took too long to fully recognize the scourge of slavery as being incompatible with human dignity, describing the entire practice as a “wound in Christian memory,” and offered an apology on behalf of the Church. “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” he wrote in the wide-ranging manifesto, expressing “deep sorrow” for the suffering endured by enslaved people.

He pointed out in the message that Church authorities had, at times, aligned themselves with rulers by regulating and legitimizing forms of subjugation, including the enslavement of non-Christians. While emphasizing this, he stated that the Church only reached a “formal, absolute and universal condemnation” of slavery in the 19th century under Pope Leo XIII, after a long period of silence and inconsistency in its teaching and practice.

The American magazine reported that Shannen Dee Williams, a historian at the University of Dayton and author of the 2022 history of American Black Catholic nuns, Subversive Habits, welcomed the apology as a “monumental step toward the kind of essential truth-telling and reparation that many Catholics have prayed and worked to witness.”

The magazine also quoted Anthea Butler, Senior Fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, who said Pope Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the Church’s complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”

The apology is significant because it marks one of the clearest acknowledgments by the Catholic Church of its historical role in enabling and benefiting from slavery. For many descendants of enslaved Africans and Black Catholics, it represents an important act of truth-telling and institutional accountability. While an apology cannot undo centuries of suffering or erase the lasting effects of the transatlantic slave trade, many historians and advocates see it as a meaningful step toward reconciliation, healing, and a more honest reckoning with the Church’s past. It also reinforces the Church’s commitment to condemning all forms of modern exploitation, including human trafficking, forced labour, and other contemporary forms of slavery, by recognizing that it must first confront its own history.