MUXIMA, Angola (TV Delmarva) — During a visit to Angola on Sunday, Pope Leo XIV acknowledged the “sorrow and great suffering” experienced by Angolans throughout history as he conducted prayers at a Catholic sanctuary that once served as a central location in the African slave trade under Portuguese colonial control.
The American pontiff visited the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, situated among Angola’s baobab tree savannas along the Kwanza River’s banks. The location became a significant pilgrimage site following reported Virgin Mary apparitions around 1833.
However, Portuguese colonizers originally constructed the Church of Our Lady of Muxima in the late 1500s as part of a fortress system, and it evolved into a slave trade center. Enslaved Africans were assembled there for baptism by Portuguese clergy before being compelled to march more than 110 kilometers (70 miles) north to Luanda’s port for transport to the Americas.
Pope Leo, whose family lineage includes both enslaved individuals and slave owners, conducted Rosary prayers at the simple white church with blue accents housing a Madonna statue. Speaking Portuguese, he reflected on how “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.”
The pope avoided directly mentioning slavery. Following his review of basilica construction plans for the location, Leo encouraged approximately 30,000 gathered attendees to work toward building “a better, more welcoming world, where there are no more wars, no injustices, no poverty, no dishonesty.”
Muxima’s past represents the Catholic Church’s involvement in slave trading, forced baptisms of enslaved people, and what scholars describe as the Vatican’s ongoing reluctance to completely acknowledge and make amends for this history.
“For Black Catholics, Pope Leo’s visit to the Muxima shrine is an important moment of healing,” stated Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch Center, Oxford University.
Butler observed that numerous Black Catholics practice the faith due to slavery and the “Code Noir,” which mandated baptism in the church for slaves bought by Catholic owners.
“Others were already Catholic when they were trafficked from Angola to slave-holding colonies,” explained Butler, a Black Catholic scholar whose mother’s family originated from Louisiana, where the pope’s ancestors also had roots.
Portuguese colonizers in Angola received support from 15th-century Vatican directives authorizing the enslavement of non-Christians.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, granting the Portuguese king and successors authority “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and seize all possessions—including territory—from “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” globally, according to Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”
The document also authorized Portuguese forces “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”
This bull, along with Romanus Pontifex issued three years afterward, established the foundation for the Doctrine of Discovery, justifying colonial-era land seizures in Africa and the Americas.
While the Vatican formally rejected the Doctrine of Discovery in 2023, it has never officially rescinded or nullified the original bulls. Vatican officials maintain that a subsequent 1537 bull, Sublimis Deus, confirmed that Indigenous peoples should retain their freedom and property rights without enslavement.
Angola ultimately became the departure point for over 5 million people on trans-Atlantic slave routes—more than any other nation and representing nearly half of approximately 12.5 million African slaves transported across the ocean.
Kellerman noted that most victims were sold into slavery by other Africans rather than captured by Europeans.
“That being said, at the time of the building of Muxima, the Portuguese were doing both — buying enslaved people and colonizing/slave raiding. So they were fully using their papal permissions during this time,” Kellerman explained in email comments to The Associated Press.
He identified Pope Leo XIII, the current pope’s namesake, as the first pontiff to condemn slavery directly through two encyclicals in 1888 and 1890, after most nations had already abolished the practice. However, Kellerman said that pope and subsequent leaders have maintained the “false narrative” that the Holy See consistently opposed slavery, contradicting historical evidence.
Although Leo’s Muxima visit commemorated its shrine status, Kellerman expressed hope that Leo had also learned about its slave trade connections.
“The popes repeatedly authorized Portugal’s colonization 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 apologize for the popes’ role in the trade.”
During a 1985 Cameroon visit, St. John Paul II sought African forgiveness for Christian participation in slave trading, though not for papal involvement specifically. In 1992 at Goree Island, Senegal—West Africa’s largest slave-trading center—he condemned slavery’s injustice, calling it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”
Genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr. indicates that 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black, recorded in census documents as mulatto, Black, Creole, or free people of color. Gates wrote in the New York Times that the pope’s family tree includes both slaveholders and enslaved individuals.
Gates, a Harvard University professor hosting the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” presented his findings to Leo during a July 5 Vatican audience. The Harvard Gazette reported that “The pope asked about ancestors, both Black and white, who were enslavers.”
Leo has remained publicly silent regarding his family background or the genealogical findings, and some Black Catholic scholars hesitate to impose identity narratives he hasn’t personally addressed.
“It’s important that we tell our own stories,” said Tia Noelle Pratt, a religion sociologist 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,” stated Pratt, author of “Faithful and Devoted: Racism and Identity in the African American Catholic Experience.”
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, retired Washington archbishop and the first African American cardinal, said he arranged the Gates-Leo meeting and felt “delighted” to facilitate it.
“It’s one of the things that I think for many African Americans and people of color, 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.”
