Overview
- In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published Monday, Pope Leo XIV acknowledged that the Apostolic See intervened to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation in the early modern period and asked the Church’s pardon for that record.
- The pope is the first pontiff to explicitly apologize for the Holy See’s own institutional role in authorizing conquest and enslavement rather than only expressing regret for Christians’ participation.
- The encyclical cites 15th-century papal bulls such as Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) as part of the legal-theological basis for the Doctrine of Discovery, noting that the Vatican repudiated the Doctrine in 2023 but had not rescinded those original bulls until now being publicly confronted.
- Leo links that history to present risks by naming new forms of slavery in the digital economy, including unregulated labor in the extraction of minerals for AI chips and the invisible work of content moderation and data labeling.
- The apology responds to long-running demands from Black Catholics, scholars and activists and could prompt renewed calls for access to archives, formal institutional reckonings, and policy engagement on labor and AI ethics.