The Vatican is now apologizing for events that occurred centuries before anyone alive today was born.
Pope Leo XIV formally apologized on Monday for the Catholic Church’s role in “legitimizing” slavery, according to the Associated Press.
The apology reportedly appeared in Leo’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which mostly focused on artificial intelligence.
“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many,” Leo wrote.
It was the first-ever official papal apology, and it assigned blame to the Vatican for the slave trade.
“For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon,” the holy father added.
He called the church’s record on slavery “a wound in Christian memory.”
“The pope said that the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, ‘even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized,'” the Associated Press article read.
“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached.”
His encyclical also mentioned that the Holy See had “intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation.”
“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he wrote.
Since the beginning of his papacy last year, Leo, a Chicago native, has repeatedly embraced liberal policies and climate change narratives.
CBS News reported on his criticism of the U.S. government back in April, with regards to the Iran conflict and enforcement of federal immigration law.
The outlet declared that “Pope Leo’s church has emerged as a voice of moral opposition to the war in Iran and the crackdown on immigration.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
