Gorée Island, Magnifica Humanitas, and Beyond: Ecclesial Repentance for Slavery

On March 12, 2000, the Catholic Church marked a Day of Pardon, an occasion that was part of the celebrations to mark the Jubilee Year. This was also the first Saturday of Lent. In Rome, the pope presided over a penitential service at which “Bishops and Ecclesial Communities in various parts of the world knelt before God, in the name of the entire people to implore his forgiveness.” According to the Pope, this act was “a sincere recognition of the sins committed by the Church’s children in the distant and recent past, and a humble plea for God's forgiveness.” The Pope's ultimate hope was for reconciliation among peoples, a reconciliation which springs from “forgiveness reciprocally given and received.”

During the actual ceremony, on the day of pardon, petitions were offered for various sins of the past. Then Cardinal Ratzinger prayed for forgiveness for “sins committed in the service of truth.” He prayed that each of us recognize “that even men of the church, in the name of faith and morals, have sometimes used methods not in keeping with the gospel in the solemn duty of defending the truth.” Prayers were also offered that Christians may be given the grace to repent “of the words and attitudes caused by pride, by hatred, by the desire to dominate others.”[1]

The 2000 Day of Pardon did not happen in a vacuum. It was a high point of many years leading up to the 2000 Jubilee year during which, in many of his interactions with various groups all over the world, Pope John Paul II asked “forgiveness” for the “sins” of Christians down the centuries. In 1992, for example, he asked forgiveness from the Indigenous peoples of South America for the “pain and suffering” caused by the Church’s 500 years of presence in the Americas.[2] In 1995 he wrote a letter to women in which he apologized for the lack of acknowledgement of the dignity of women down the centuries. Although he argued that it was “no easy task to assign the blame for this, considering the many cultural conditions and historical realities which down the centuries have shaped ways of thinking and acting,” he still asked for forgiveness for the actions of any Christians in several historical contexts who would have contributed to this situation. He prayed,

May this regret be transformed, on the part of the whole Church, into a renewed commitment of fidelity to the Gospel vision. When it comes to setting women free from every kind of exploitation and domination, the Gospel contains an ever-relevant message which goes back to the attitude of Jesus Christ himself. Transcending the established norms of his own culture, Jesus treated women with openness, respect, acceptance, and tenderness. In this way he honored the dignity which women have always possessed according to God's plan and in his love. As we look to Christ at the end of this Second Millennium, it is natural to ask ourselves: how much of his message has been heard and acted upon?

In all, Pope John Paul II issued apologies for over 100 historical or moral situations in which the Church was involved down through its history.[3] One of the last ones before his death was for the child sex abuse crisis, which came up significantly towards the end of his papacy. These apologies are usually for obtaining pardon from God and the communities so wronged and for “the purification of memory; this calls everyone to make an act of courage and humility in recognizing the wrongs done by those who have borne or bear the name of Christian” (Incarnationis Mysterium). One of the prayers which the pope offered on this day of pardon sums up clearly the reason for these pleas for forgiveness:

Lord God, our Father, you created the human being, man and woman, in your image and likeness and you willed the diversity of peoples within the unity of the human family. At times, however, the equality of your sons and daughters has not been acknowledged, and Christians have been guilty of attitudes of rejection and exclusion consenting to acts of discrimination on the basis of racial and ethnic difference. Forgive us and grant us the grace to heal the wounds still present in your community on account of sin so that we will all feel ourselves to be your sons and daughters.[4]

Focus On Slavery

Since Pope John Paul II’s ecclesial pleas for forgiveness, the discussion regarding forgiveness has been extremely complicated. My focus here is on slavery. I am not offering any detailed presentation on this matter, as there has been abundant scholarship out there on the involvement of the Church in slavery over the centuries. John T. Noonan, the great historian of ideas and renowned jurist, devotes a large chunk of his 2005 book, A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching, to the question of slavery. Noonan’s book is not about slavery per se. It is a study of the idea of intrinsic evil in Catholic moral theology. What was it? How does the Church arrive at the determination of intrinsically evil deeds with regard to certain behaviors? It is, more precisely, an attempt to determine whether there could be disagreements among conscientious people about what constitutes intrinsic evil.

To answer these questions, Noonan studies four issues that he believes are central to how the Church characterizes the gravity of intrinsically evil issues and how the notion has fared in the Church’s moral discourse down the centuries. Noonan shows how various thinkers in the Church have held divergent views on any number of these matters. In this regard, for example, he points out that although Pope John Paul II and John Henry Newman agree that an intrinsically evil act cannot be done without sin, they disagreed on whether slavery in all forms and at every time was to be considered intrinsically evil.

Noonan analyzes a little piece of writing in which Newman seems to argue that although slavery was wrong, it did not always constitute an intrinsic evil. Had slavery been intrinsically evil, he argued, Paul would have told Philemon to liberate all his slaves at once. Noonan argues that Newman was, to his mind,

Following a classic pattern. He supposes the slave’s soul to be unaffected by the body's servile state. Imagined in this way, slavery does not destroy or even impair the essential self. Newman's vision of slavery is the antithesis of an account of slavery that sees it as an assault upon the person. The dualism implied in this view is a prime reason why slavery was so long seen as acceptable.[5]

Newman was not alone in his position on slavery. Noonan claims in his study of the subject that for much of the Church’s history there was hardly any direct condemnation of the institution of slavery. There were certainly discussions on the treatment of slaves and on conditions of enslavement, but no direct condemnation of the institution. The breakthrough came at Vatican II.

Vatican II did make the mutation, but not with fanfare and trumpets, not after a bitter theological battle, not a conscious correction of the old theology. By 1960, everyone knew that slavery was bad . . . The evils of the practice of slavery in the few corners of world where it existed were not controversial issues.[6]

So in §27 of Gaudium et Spes, the Church stresses respect for each human person and enumerates certain “crimes” which violate this respect. These include:

All offenses against life itself, such as murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia and willful suicide; all violations of the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, physical and mental torture, undue psychological pressure; all offences against human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children, degrading working conditions where people are treated as mere tools for profit rather than free and responsible persons: all these and the like are criminal: they poison civilization; and they debase the perpetrators more than the victims and militate against the honor of the creator.

An even more forceful condemnation of slavery comes some years after the council in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The seventh commandment forbids acts or enterprises that for any reason—selfish or ideological, commercial or totalitarian—lead to the enslavement of human beings, to their being bought, sold and exchanged like merchandise, in disregard for their personal dignity. It is a sin against the dignity of persons and their fundamental rights to reduce them by violence to their productive value or to a source of profit. Saint Paul directed a Christian master to treat his Christian slave “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, as a beloved brother . . . both in the flesh and in the Lord” (CCC §2414).

Pope John Paul II in Gorée Island (Senegal)

The next and perhaps most definitive chapter on the Church and slavery came during the trip of Pope John Paul II to Gorée Island. This trip is important for a number of reasons. First, it was, up to that point, as far as I know, the first official acknowledgement of Christian involvement in the sin of slavery. Also, it offers some important roadmaps on how to deal with this issue.

Pope John Paul II visited Gorée Island on February 22, 1992. Gorée Island is a small island that is located just three kilometers off Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. It is a particularly prominent place in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. It was one of the last points from which thousands of enslaved African peoples were shipped off to the New World. It was one of the four places on the Atlantic Coast of Africa from which Europeans carted away many Africans into slavery to various parts of the world. Gorée was not the biggest of these ports or points of no return, but it still represents an important reminder of this sordid trade between Africa and the New World.

Gorée Island was designated a World Heritage site in 1978 by UNESCO. Earlier, in 1962, the “House of Slaves” (Maison des Esclaves) with its “Door of No Return” was made a museum. UNESCO has also designated Gorée Island a “memory Island” and “a symbol of human exploitation and a sanctuary for reconciliation. When Pope John Paul II visited Gorée Island on Saturday, February 22, 1992, he gave two speeches. The first was a prepared speech that he delivered to the Catholic Community of the Island gathered at St. Charles Borromeo Church. The second was a short impromptu speech he gave at the Maison des Esclaves. Because both speeches “speak” to my intention in this article, I will discuss them in some detail.

The Speech of Pope John Paul II at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Gorée Island

After the usual pleasantries and the sentiments of joy and thanksgiving to God and to his hosts at Gorée, the pope gave a speech mainly centered on Gorée as a slave port. The speech begins with a lament—the overwhelming “sadness at the thought of the sordid deeds that this place (Gorée) evokes” (§3). The pope recounts that:

For a whole period of the history of the African continent, men, women, and children were brought to this narrow piece of land, taken by force from their motherlands, separated from their relations to be sold as goods. They came from various countries, in shackles, and heading for other foreign lands; the last picture they had of their native Africa was the huge mass of the basaltic rock of Gorée. We can say that the island remains in the memory of all the black diaspora.

For the Pope, “these men and women were the victims of a disgraceful trade, in which baptized people who did not live their faith, took part” (§3). The pope also celebrated these victims of the slave trade by memorializing them: “How can we forget the outrageous sufferings inflicted, in contempt of the most elementary human rights, to the deported populations, of the African continent? How can we forget the human lives destroyed by slavery?"

The third part of the pope’s speech is a general confession of guilt: “we must confess that sin of man against man, of man against God, with utmost sincerity and humility.”

He laments that despite all of the types of things which took place at Gorée and other such places, the human race has yet to “consider and respect themselves as God’s image” and to love each other as sons and daughters of the same heavenly father.” In a dramatic move, the Pope asked forgiveness from God for sins of the children of the Church over the centuries: “From this African sanctuary of the suffering of Black people, we implore God's forgiveness. We pray that, in the future the followers of Christ show full observance of the command of brotherly love inherited from their Lord.”

From “this sanctuary of the suffering of Black people,” the pope offered a number of prayers: for the followers of Christ, to show full observance of the command of brotherly love inherited from the Lord; that Christians no longer indulge in any oppression of their brothers and sisters but rather seek always to show compassion like the good Samaritan helping people in need; that the scourge of slavery disappear forever and that each side effect and some of the painful incidents that have recently occurred in Africa keep us all alert and urge people to pursue the long and painful conversion of the heart.

The pope called for strong opposition to “new and often insidious forms of slavery such as organized prostitution which disgracefully takes advantage of the misery of third world populations.” He notes that Africa still suffers the consequences of the forced depletion of her populations and will do so for a long time. “It is therefore only justice to provide the aid that she urgently needs so that through effective solidarity she can overcome the tragic difficulties in which she finds herself.” He also prayed that “God grants the human race the conditions for effective and active solidarity” so we can overcome the tragic conditions in which we find ourselves.

Speech at “Maison des Esclaves”

Following his encounter with the faithful gathered at St. Borromeo Church on the Island, the Pope also visited the infamous “Maison Des Esclaves” on the Island. Here he gave a short and impromptu impassioned speech during which he spoke again of the injustice of Gorée. This injustice was all the more insidious coming from a world which “considered itself to be Christian.” What happened at Gorée and places like it was a tragedy of immense proportions.

From Gorée there continue to rise up cries. The pope had come to Gorée, he said, “to listen to this cry from centuries and from generations of Black peoples, of slaves” (§1). He had come here “to pay tribute to all those victims, unknown victims; we do not know exactly how many they were, and who exactly they were.”

Magnifica Humanitas and Slavery

On May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV briefly but significantly revisited the question of slavery in his encyclical on artificial intelligence. As he notes the reality of slavery and the modern forms it is taking as we head full steam into the era of artificial intelligence, he touches on the ancient and persistent aspects of the reality of slavery. In §176 of Magnifica Humanitas, he speaks of the involvement of the institutional Church in slavery. His main source of anguish was the blindness which for a long time prevented the Church from realizing the contradiction between its proclamation and the reality of its practice on the matter of slavery over much of its history.

The Church had on occasions in the past “intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and in certain cases, the enslavement of ‘infidels’—all the while still teaching and speaking about the ‘dignity of every human being, created in the image of God.” Like John Paul II before him, Pope Leo XIV expresses sorrow at the inauthenticity of the Church’s witness on this matter. “It is impossible,” he says, “not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon” (MH §176).

A lot has happened since Pope John Paul II went to Gorée. One of the significant developments was the March 25, 2026 UN resolution that

Emphasizes the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity by reason of the definitive break in world history, scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labor, property and capital.

The declaration also “affirms the importance of addressing historical wrongs affecting Africans and people of African descent in a manner that promotes justice, human rights, dignity and healing,” and “emphasizes that claims for reparations represent a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs against Africans and people of African descent.” This call for reparations from the UN resolution echoes a growing, long-standing opinion on this matter, especially from African peoples and governments.

After Gorée?

Although the Pope’s Gorée trip happened many years after Vatican II and the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the papal trip to Gorée still offers us the most explicit example of how to deal with this issue of slavery, from the perspective of the Catholic Church. Many people have written over time calling for some form of reparations for slavery, as did the UN in its March 2026 declaration. This is fraught with a lot of problems if by this they mean paying out money to any set of groups or peoples for the wrong that was done during those 400 years of slavery. I do not think this will work. Whom do you pay? How do you pay? For what do you pay? How much do you pay?

On the contrary, the pope’s trip to Gorée offers us some ways to attend to this sordid past in our human history. First of all, we must do whatever it takes to remember. The title of Elochukwu Uzukwu’s book comes to mind here.[7] We must continuously memorialize the unsung. We must continuously remember them. What I have in mind here is akin to what the Jews continue to do about certain painful aspects of their history. They have Hanukkah, and they have other ritual times which help them never to forget what they have been through. Christian involvement in slavery was massive enough to warrant repeated and ecclesial-wide rituals of remembrance. What if we set aside some day in Lent to do what the pope did on March 12, 2000, that is proclaim a day of repentance during which we pray for forgiveness for the past sins of the Church, including slavery.

The bishops of Africa did precisely this type of thing about eleven years after the pope's visit to Gorée. In October 2003, the bishops came back to Senegal for their plenary assembly, and they returned to the island for a spiritual pilgrimage, this time joined by a delegation from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The American delegation, on that occasion, noted that places like Elmina, in Ghana, Zanzibar in Tanzania, and many other locations in Africa, the continent lost her most precious treasures, her children. The wounds of that reality are still lingering, and their aftereffects are evident in racism and many forms of institutionalized injustices towards the children of Africa everywhere.

These have continued to trouble not only Africa and her descendants but also all humanity. The bishops of Africa themselves, on that occasion in 2003, held a penitential service in which they stated that they had come to Gorée in the footsteps of the pope and as leaders of the local African churches to ask forgiveness for the sins of the Church and the Children of the Church, who unmindful of their faith in the Son of God, came to Africa to engage in the odious trade of Black Africans as beasts. They pleaded for forgiveness for the silence of the Church during these five centuries. “We recognize that this tacit complicity has been fearful, as a result of an increased weight of this history of woe for the Black race.” They are concerned that slavery has continued unabated in other forms by white and Black Christians who have continued the sins of our fathers—"in the person of children under guardianship, of the child victims of modern slave traders, in the women victimized by pimping, in the victims of wars provoked and maintained for the easy access to diamonds, petrol, other riches of the African subsoil."[8]

Gorée is not the end of the history of slavery in Africa. Through global capitalism, more lethal, hidden, forms of "slow violence" (Rob Nixon)[9] are being carried out in Africa today by the same Western "Christian" nations that were the key agents of colonialism and slavery in Africa for 400 years. We must therefore acknowledge that slavery and colonialism have not ended; they may have changed names, but they continue in new and more lethal forms of extraction of land, lives, bodies, and resources.

We must think about what reparation means in the context of ongoing sacrifice of African lives. What does it even mean to do theology not just after Gorée but in the midst of Gorée? This is because Gorée is not Africa's past; it is in many ways Africa's present. That present is evident in the reality many Black persons live in this country and elsewhere today; Gorée continues in new ways and forms in ideologies, structures, systems, and practices that consider African/Black lives, here and everywhere, "less than" equal to other human lives. It is this situation which prompted the reaction of the U.S. Catholic bishops to issue their 2001 Pastoral letter, Solidarity with Africa.

In 2001 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter in which they invited the generality of Americans, but especially Catholics, to pay closer attention to Africa. The title of this pastoral, A Call to Solidarity with Africa, was itself a clarion call to all Americans for greater interest and involvement in Africa. While acknowledging the complexity of the African reality, which on one hand gives reason for hope, and on the other provides a lot of cause for concern, the bishops insist that the people and especially the Church in America must be in solidarity with Africa. In their text, the bishops speak of:

The many destructive forces that have robbed, and continue to threaten, the integral development of the peoples and nations of Africa. Slavery, a system fundamentally evil and base, stole from the African continent many of its most precious resources: men, women, and children. Millions of people were forcefully uprooted from their families and communities to lands and conditions so alienating and dehumanizing that words cannot convey the depth of their suffering. Our own nation, as well as the rest of the Americas, still lives with the effects of this evil. Our own people still bear slavery’s scars and live its history—a history that has not yet been fully acknowledged or entirely reconciled. America's own responsibility to overcome this legacy of slavery and racism should be reflected in our domestic and international programs and policies. Moreover, great efforts must also be made by African nations and the international community to eliminate the ongoing practice of slavery in countries such as Sudan and Mauritania.[10]

The most important thing in this text is that the bishops chose to remember and to acknowledge the ongoing devastation of slavery and its aftermath on African and Black peoples everywhere. They call for solidarity with Africa. Being in solidarity with Africa would first of all mean taking Africa seriously as a continent of human beings. As Pope John Paul II points out, the exercise of solidarity is valid when we recognize one another as persons.[11]

The rest of the world hardly takes Africa seriously enough. What happens on the continent is either exaggerated (when they are bad) or underrated (when they are good). There is no doubt that Africa has had more than its fair share of diseases, political instabilities, and other forms of disasters—natural and human-made. Ecclesial repentance of the Church’s role in slavery must be an ongoing reality—in ritual form.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally presented as a lecture at a conference sponsored by the Notre Dame Office of Human Life and Dignity in 2025.