Tucked well into the second half of the new papal encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”) is one paragraph rather different from the rest. In Paragraph 176 of a document largely about artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV asks forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s approval of the enslavement of African people. 

Those who only skim papal documents might overlook this paragraph, unaware of its landmark significance. In the midst of his timely, extensive reflections on artificial intelligence and its potential for the good of humanity (or to bring about new forms of slavery), the pontiff formally asks forgiveness for the institutional church’s official sanction of human slavery. In the American context, this involved transporting as many as 12 million West African human beings in the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas in subhuman conditions. 

Many served as “beasts of burden” in chattel slavery on the plantations of the American South, part of a system that created great wealth for plantation owners and disenfranchised a whole community of people. The negative consequences of that era continue to affect people of color in the United States today. It is regrettable that some Americans of European descent argue incorrectly that all of these negative consequences have been overcome and that those who think contemporary “white privilege” is real and linked to slavery are clinging to obsolete grievances. They would do well to read Edward E. Baptist’s important book on the subject, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.

Pope Leo’s formal apology and plea for forgiveness is long overdue. It is important not only for African Americans but also for all Americans and the people of Africa, the continent where the Catholic faith is growing faster than any place else in the world. Hopefully, it is not too late for the pope’s words to have a significant positive impact on the church and the people of the United States.

“In the development of her doctrine, the Church has gradually come to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues,” Leo writes in Paragraph 176. “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.” 

The Holy Father continues:

In antiquity and the Middle Ages many individuals and even ecclesiastical institutions had slaves. Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to requests from Sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, the enslavement of “infidels.” It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII.

Many Africans, African Americans and other Catholics may feel compelled to ask: Why is this extremely important statement inserted in a lengthy examination of the challenges posed by the brave new world of artificial intelligence? Does putting it there run the risk of it going unnoticed? Why does this critical paragraph speak of “slavery” as if it existed in a vacuum, with no mention of Africa or African Americans? 

Slavery in the United States   

Archbishop John Carroll, the first bishop of Baltimore, owned enslaved people on his plantation in Maryland during the years he served. When he established Georgetown University, he approved using enslaved people to erect campus buildings. Carroll informed the Holy See about the large number of enslaved people in his diocese. But the Vatican did not condemn the practice—which, at the time, was common among land-owning Catholics in the United States.

The Jesuits of the Maryland Province, which included Georgetown University, owned enslaved people until 1838. Georgetown might not have survived without the money earned by their plantations and the eventual sale of 272 enslaved people to a plantation in Louisiana, one of the largest mass sales of human beings in American history. This history was all but forgotten until 2004, when the Georgetown Memory Project and the Jesuits began to identify more than 10,000 descendants of those who had been enslaved. In 2019, the GU272 Descendants Association and the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States committed to work together to establish and begin to fund the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation in order to help heal the wounds of this moral atrocity.  

In 1857, Roger B. Taney, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and a devout Catholic who owned enslaved human beings, wrote the infamous majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford. He ruled that since enslaved and free Africans were not citizens of the United States, they could not sue in federal court, and that Congress had no constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories, since Africans in America were “beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the White man was bound to respect.” Therefore, Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, were declared to be someone else’s property even though they lived in the free state of Illinois. 

The chief justice may have thought the Dred Scott ruling would end the national debate concerning slavery. But in fact, it polarized the nation and led many Americans to question the credibility of the Supreme Court. The backlash strengthened the fledgling anti-slavery Republican Party, paving the way for Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860. Some historians argue this gravely immoral, anti-Christian decision was the catalyst for the Civil War.

Unfortunately, the Vatican did not condemn the Dred Scott decision. At that time, the Holy See and the bishops of the United States did not oppose the institution of human slavery. Some church leaders even argued that earlier papal decrees gave church approval to certain forms of the practice. Nor did the church definitively condemn human slavery until Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical “In Plurimis” in 1888. 

In 1999, when St. John Paul II visited the Archdiocese of St. Louis (where the Dred Scott case originated), he unambiguously condemned the ruling as a profound moral failure. In 2018, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in the pastoral letter “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love,” condemned the Dred Scott decision as a flaw at the foundation of the country’s relationship to people of color, a shameful judicial milestone and a tragic example of denying the dignity and value of every human person. 

In “Magnifica Humanitas,” The Bishop of Rome concludes Paragraph 176 with the following:

[T]here has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized. This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached. It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.

The Holy Father’s own words might spur the reader to ask further questions: If the church has actually affirmed through the centuries the dignity of every human being created in the image of God, how it is possible that it took 1,800 years for the church to recognize the obvious fact that the enslavement of African people was incompatible with this perennial truth? How is it possible that Roger Taney, a devout Catholic, could describe Africans as “beings of an inferior order”? What was lacking in his Catholic formation and that of his contemporaries?

Different outcomes

“Magnifica Humanitas” was signed on May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of “Rerum Novarum,” Pope Leo XIII’s consequential encyclical establishing modern Catholic social teaching in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. But what if Pope Leo XIII’s 1888 encyclical “In Plurimis” had done more than condemn slavery as a violation of the Christian doctrine of the equality of all people? What if in 1878, at the beginning of his long pontificate, Leo XIII had forcefully condemned human slavery, decreed that any Catholic involved with the sin and heresy of slavery would be excommunicated and, in the name of the church, sincerely asked for forgiveness for the institutional church’s legitimization of slavery? 

Of course, we must acknowledge that Leo XIII was a man of his time and his vision allowed him to see only so far. However, what a difference it would have made for the descendants of enslaved people and for the church in the United States if he could have seen much further. What if Leo XIII had stressed the sinfulness of slavery and racism throughout his pontificate and made it clear to the bishops of the United States that as leaders of the Catholic Church, they were morally obliged to make these Catholic moral teachings as forcefully clear to Catholic clergy, religious and laity as the bishops and priests today forcefully teach the grave immorality of abortion? 

If Leo XIII had done that, perhaps Roger Taney would have recanted his repulsive 1857 Dred Scott decision. Perhaps the majority of Catholics would have vigorously opposed post-Civil War Jim Crow laws, discrimination in employment, racially segregated neighborhoods, segregated Catholic parishes and schools, segregated orders of religious sisters, and the exclusion of African Americans from diocesan seminaries and from the priesthood and the episcopacy. Perhaps they would have rejected unions led by Catholics that excluded people of color. Perhaps they would refuse to support segregated sports teams. 

If the moral truth that racial prejudice is a sin and a heresy had been consistently taught in Catholic schools and preached effectively from the pulpits of Catholic churches, Catholic people might not have participated so readily in “white flight” as soon as an African American family moved into their neighborhoods. Perhaps Catholic legislators and judges would not have supported laws that prevented African Americans from exercising their right as citizens to vote. 

(This right has been undermined anew by recent Supreme Court decisions. On June 25, 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts, a Catholic, wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act as unconstitutional. On April 29, 2026, the chief justice voted with the majority in the Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, disregarding decades of precedent by all but eliminating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which limits protection against discriminatory redistricting.)

If all that had happened, many African American people would have felt welcome in the Catholic Church rather than seeking their spiritual homes in Baptist churches and establishing the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Because of this painful history, when we ask why there are so few African American Catholics, it must be acknowledged that the real question is this: How can there be so many?

By engaging the world of Silicon Valley and the whole human family in a serious conversation about artificial intelligence, the most astounding technological development in our time, the first American pope’s encyclical is a bold effort to continue the mandate of the Second Vatican Council’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World” (“Gaudium et Spes”). We hope and pray that those with eyes to see will see what the pontiff has written in Paragraph 176 and grasp its far-reaching implications.

On Wednesday, July 29, 2026, after a Global Concert for Peace at Borgo Laudato Si’ in the gardens of the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, Pope Leo XIV made his first public comments about his ancestry in response to a question from NBC News anchor Tom Llamas. “I come from a family of immigrants,” he said. “On my mother’s side, we have people who were both slaves and slaveowners.” 

The fact that enslaved African people were a part of his background was first brought to light by the research of the New Orleans genealogist Jari Honora and Henry Louis Gates Jr. of Harvard University. According to this research, the pope’s maternal grandparents, Joseph Martinez and Louise Baquié, were identified in historical records as Black and lived in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, one of the oldest communities of Creole and Black Catholic people in the United States. These records show that 17 of his ancestors were described as Black, Creole, mixed-race or free people of color.

This history gives Paragraph 176 of “Magnifica Humanitas” an added significance—not because of any implications concerning the pope’s personal racial identity, but because it suggests a familial link between him and the African and African American peoples about whom he writes in the paragraph. There is now a profound personal dimension to his remarks about the Catholic Church’s sad pro-slavery record as “a wound in Christian memory.” Now that he has spoken about his family’s connection to human slavery, there is a new poignancy to his words when he apologizes and asks the world to forgive the church for centuries of moral blindness. 

There is a paradox in all of this: It is happening at a time when voices in the U.S. federal government are expressing a desire to diminish the acknowledgment of the country’s painful racial history of enslaving free human beings. Would Paragraph 176 have a greater impact if it had been issued as a more fully developed, stand-alone document or expanded as a part of the Holy Father’s July 4, 2026, letter to the American people marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States?

The Most Rev. Edward K. Braxton is bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Belleville, Ill., and a past contributor to America.