POPE LEO XIV APOLOGISES FOR CATHOLIC CHURCH'S ROLE IN TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE. (PHOTO).

 Pope Leo XIV apologises for Catholic Church's role in trans-Atlantic slave trade

Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology 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.”

History’s first U.S.-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology on Monday in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), released on the same day, TRT Afrika reported.

‘I ask for pardon’

In doing so, Leo responded to decades of calls by Black American Catholics, activists and scholars for the Holy See to atone for its own role in the colonial-era trade in human beings.

“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,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”

The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vatican authorised Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.

In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.

The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481, and Pope Leo X in 1514, according to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”