History’s first US-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people & slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.

#PopeLeo #apology #slavery #Vatican

Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said #PopeLeo needed to acknowledge & atone for the Catholic Church’s complicity in historic #slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”

“For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apology from the pope,” said Butler….

#PopeLeo XIV made a historic #apology Monday for the role the Holy See played in #slavery & for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the #Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”

Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate & enslave “infidels.”
apnews.com/article/pope-apolog…