30/05/2026
Pope Leo, the first Pontiff from the United States, formally apologized for the Catholic Church's role in legitimizing the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. In his first encyclical, where he gives the Church's stance on various issues, the Pope called the Church's stance on slavery a "wound in Christian memory, where we cannot consider ourselves detached."
The Church has a deep connection to slavery both in Europe and the Americas. Jesuits in 1838 sold over 250 slaves to pay of massive debts of Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Pope Leo would also go on to refer to human trafficking as a "new form of Slavery" and urged for the regulation of A.I. Pope Leo called for "just reparation" for slavery but did not specify what that could look like.
