Pope Leo XIV on Sunday recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” Angolans endured for centuries, as the American pope prayed at a Catholic shrine located at the site of an important hub of the African slave trade during Portugal‘s colonial rule.
Leo travelled to the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, nestled in the Angolan savannas of baobab trees at the edge of the Kwanza River. It became a major pilgrimage destination after believers reported an appearance by the Virgin Mary around 1833.
But the Church of Our Lady of Muxima was originally built by Portuguese colonisers at the end of the 16th century as part of a fortress complex and it became a hub in the slave trade. It was where enslaved Africans were gathered to be baptised by Portuguese priests before being forced to walk to the port of Luanda, over 110 kilometres (70 miles) to the north, to be put on ships to the Americas.
Leo, whose own ancestors include enslaved people and slave owners, prayed the Rosary at the sanctuary, a simple whitewashed church with blue trim and a statue of the Madonna inside. Speaking in Portuguese, he recalled it was here “where, for centuries, many men and women have prayed in times of joy and also in moments of sorrow and great suffering in the history of this country.”
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He didn’t refer specifically to slavery. After viewing plans to build a basilica at the site, Leo urged the estimated 30,000 people gathered outside to also build “a better, more welcoming world, where there are no more wars, no injustices, no poverty, no dishonesty.”
Muxima’s history is emblematic of the Catholic Church’s role in the slave trade, the forced baptisms of enslaved people and what some scholars say is the Holy See’s continued refusal to fully acknowledge it and atone for it.
“For Black Catholics, Pope Leo’s visit to the Muxima shrine is an important moment of healing,” said Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch Center, Oxford University.
She noted that many Black Catholics are Catholic because of slavery and the “Code Noir,” which she said required slaves purchased by Catholic owners to be baptised in the church.
“Others were already Catholic when they were trafficked from Angola to slave-holding colonies,” said Butler, a Black Catholic scholar whose maternal family hails from Louisiana, where the pope’s ancestors also had their roots.
Angola’s Portuguese colonisers were emboldened by 15th-century directives from the Vatican that authorised them to enslave non-Christians.
In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions – including land – of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere, said the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”
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The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discovery, the theory that legitimised the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.
The Vatican in 2023 formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, but it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and were not to be enslaved.
Ultimately, more than 5 million people left from Angola on the trans-Atlantic slave route, more than any other country and nearly half of the roughly 12.5 million African slaves sent across the ocean.
Kellerman recalled that most of these direct victims were sold into slavery by other Africans and were not captured by Europeans.
“That being said, at the time of the building of Muxima, the Portuguese were doing both – buying enslaved people and colonising/slave raiding. So they were fully using their papal permissions during this time,” Kellerman said in emailed comments to The Associated Press.
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He said the first pope to condemn slavery itself was Pope Leo XIII, the current pope’s namesake, in two encyclicals in 1888 and 1890, after most countries had already abolished slavery. But Kellerman said that pope and others since have continued to perpetuate the “false narrative” that the Holy See always opposed slavery, when the historical record says otherwise.
While Leo’s visit to Muxima was to commemorate its role as a shrine, Kellerman said he hoped Leo had also learned about its role in the slave trade.
“The popes repeatedly authorised Portugal’s colonisation efforts in Africa and Portuguese participation in the slave trade, but the Vatican has never fully admitted this,” he said. “It would be so powerful if at some point Pope Leo were to apologise for the popes’ role in the trade.”
During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it, but not for the popes’ own role in it. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, the largest slave-trading centre in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it a “tragedy of a civilisation that called itself Christian.”
According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or a free person of colour. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates wrote in the New York Times.
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Gates, a Harvard University professor who hosts the PBS documentary series “Finding Your Roots,” presented his research to Leo during a July 5 audience at the Vatican. According to a report of their meeting in The Harvard Gazette, “The pope asked about ancestors, both Black and white, who were enslavers.”
Leo has not spoken publicly about his family heritage or the genealogical research, and some Black Catholic scholars were hesitant to impose on him a narrative about his identity that he himself has not yet addressed.
“It’s important that we tell our own stories,” said Tia Noelle Pratt, a sociologist of religion and professor at Villanova University, the pope’s alma mater.
“We haven’t heard anything from him about what he thinks about it, and so to impose anything on him, I think would be completely inappropriate,” said Pratt, author of “Faithful and Devoted: Racism and Identity in the African American Catholic Experience.”
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the retired archbishop of Washington and the first African American cardinal, said he had facilitated the Gates-Leo encounter and was “delighted” to have done so.
“It’s one of the things that I think for many African Americans and people of colour, they identify with great pride that the pope has roots in our own heritage,” Gregory told AP. “And I think he’s happy about that too, because it’s another link to the people that he tries to serve and is called to serve.”
(FRANCE 24 with AP)
