Pope Leo XIV just became the first pontiff in history to publicly own the Vatican’s direct role in slavery, and he didn’t hold back about it.
In his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” released Monday, the American-born pope called the Holy See’s record on slavery “a wound in Christian memory” that the church can’t just brush off.
This isn’t some vague apology for what Christians did; it’s the pope admitting that past popes literally gave European kings permission to conquer Africa and enslave non-Christians. The receipts go back centuries. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull called Dum Diversas that straight-up authorized Portuguese rulers to invade, conquer, and enslave anyone they deemed “infidels.”
Three years later, another bull called Romanus Pontifex doubled down on that authority. These documents became the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery, the legal framework that justified colonizing entire continents and treating people like property. Multiple popes after Nicholas V—Callixtus III, Sixtus IV, and Leo X—all confirmed or renewed these permissions, according to historical records.