Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday 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.” 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.”
