Monday, June 9, 2026: 'We cannot get beyond our racial, tragic past without a confrontation with our history. We can't get over something that we've never acknowledged.' - Fr. Bryan Massingale

Descendants of slaves once owned and sold by the Jesuits are among those welcoming Pope Leo XIV's formal apology for the Catholic Church's historical involvement in slavery. The move has been largely praised by Black Catholic leaders, scholars and descendant communities as it renews debate over how fully the church has reckoned with its past.

The apology appears in Magnifica Humanitas, Leo's first encyclical. While the document primarily focuses on artificial intelligence and human dignity in the modern world, one paragraph drew immediate attention for addressing slavery and the church's complicity in it.

In paragraph 176, Leo acknowledged that ecclesiastical institutions owned slaves in antiquity and the Middle Ages and that the Apostolic See had "intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation" and even the enslavement of "infidels." He described slavery as "a wound in Christian memory" and concluded: "For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon."

For many Black Catholics and descendants of enslaved people, the statement marked a significant departure from previous papal language because it explicitly connected the institution of the church to slavery rather than focusing solely on individual wrongdoing.

Monique Trusclair Maddox, president and chief executive of the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said her first reaction was surprise. "I felt like he was actually making a step beyond, to bring the enslavement of my family and other Catholic families to the forefront in the U.S. and in the world." Maddox said she came to view the apology as "the first step" rather than a final resolution. "I do not think it's the last word," she said. "I believe it's the beginning of more to come. for descendants, reconciliation is a long-term process rather than a single event.”

"Healing is a journey. It doesn't happen overnight. We may feel better for a moment, but it is a journey," she said. "As someone who lives this past every single day, I work through this foundation and work with Jesuit priests who pray for the families who have been enslaved every single day. That is healing."

Some Black Catholics have said the pope's statement, while welcome, comes too late and did not go far enough. But Jesuit Fr. Timothy Kesicki, chair of the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Trust* and a central figure in Jesuit apologies related to slavery, rejected the notion that acknowledgment can come too late.

"I never think something is too late, because if you say it's too late, that means you can't do it," he said. "I don’t believe that our sins have an expiration date. If I've hurt someone, until I acknowledge that hurt, that pain lives in both of us," he said.

"We want others to replicate what we're doing," Kesicki said. "There are hundreds of universities and banks and insurance companies and churches, to name a few, that benefited and found their roots in slaveholding. This is a way for them to connect with others, their historic descendants and partner together on making our lives better until we heal from this historic sin," he said.

Jesuit Fr. David Collins, a historian at Georgetown who chaired a Georgetown University initiative known as Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation said one of the most important developments over the past decade was the increasing role of descendants themselves in reconciling their ancestors' journeys with the church.  "The real work of racial reconciliation is done by those who can hear words like that and whose hearts are moved," he said. His hope, he added, is that the pope's statement encourages broader participation in reconciliation efforts.

Fr. Bryan Massingale, a professor at Fordham University and one of the most prominent Catholic voices on racial justice in the U.S., described his initial response as surprised.

"I was not expecting this treatment of enslavement, especially about the church's complicity in it," he said. Massingale said that the encyclical includes an important acknowledgment by recognizing that slavery was not merely the work of isolated individuals acting against church teaching.

 "For the first time, we're seeing a pope say that these agents were acting with the official approval of the church," he said. At the same time, he identified limitations. "It's a crack, because nowhere in the document does it talk about the fact that this was a racialized enslavement," he said.

Magnifica Humanitas includes no acknowledgement "of the church's support for and complicity with an ideology of white supremacy that is at the core of enslavement and the core of colonization," Massingale said. "The document is important," he said. "I think it's a positive step, but it's a very limited step, especially when dealing with something that's so complicated and complex in a single paragraph."

Massingale said that future efforts should include a more comprehensive Vatican treatment of slavery, a national truth-and-reconciliation process in the U.S., and stronger formation on racial justice in seminaries and Catholic educational institutions. "We cannot get beyond our racial, tragic past without a confrontation with our history. We can't get over something that we've never acknowledged," he said.