Bishop Emeritus Braxton Writings

Paragraph 176 tucked into the text of His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), asks forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s approval of the enslavement of African People. Those who only skim papal documents could easily skim past the paragraph without grasping its landmark significance.

In the midst of his timely, extensive reflections on Artificial Intelligence and its potential for the good of humanity and its potential to bring about new forms of slavery, the pontiff formally apologizes for and, more importantly, asks forgiveness for the institutional Catholic Church’s official approval of human slavery. This involved transporting of as many as 12 million chained free West African human beings in the Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas in subhuman conditions. They served as “beast of burden” on the plantations that created wealth for the landowners and disenfranchised a whole community of people with negative consequences lingering to modern times. (See Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.)