By Sir Ronald Sanders
Signed on 15 May 2026 and released on 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, marks a significant moment in the long reckoning with slavery. It contains the clearest papal acknowledgement to date of the Holy See’s role in legitimising the institution and of its failure to condemn it for centuries.
For the Caribbean and Latin America, that acknowledgment has special force. Roman Catholicism did not merely accompany conquest and plantation society in this region; it helped shape the moral language through which empire, hierarchy, and racial domination were too often made to appear lawful and natural.
That is why, as a precocious 11-year-old, I parted company with the Catholic Church when an Irish priest told me that, when I grew up, I would understand the economics of the Church. I had asked why pews at the front, bearing the names of rich white families, were mostly empty while many poor, mostly Black members of the congregation had to stand at the back. That early experience revealed the wider social order that many in our region inherited: race and class ordered not only on the plantation, but also in the pews.
Andrew S. Curran’s recent book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea, released in February 2026, helps explain why such arrangements could endure for so long. Curran’s central thesis is that race was not a natural fact or biological truth, but an invention shaped in the Enlightenment, as European thinkers fashioned rigid hierarchies of human difference to justify slavery, empire, and inequality. If Pope Leo has now acknowledged the Church’s complicity in legitimising slavery, Curran helps us understand the intellectual design that gave that complicity wider force: the dangerous idea that some human beings were naturally meant to command while others were naturally meant to serve.
If Curran explains the idea, Dr Eric Williams explains the system. In Capitalism and Slavery, first published in 1944, Williams argued that slavery was central to the rise of British capitalism and that abolition owed much to changing economic interests. A West Indian to the core, he produced a thesis that remains foundational in the Caribbean: slavery was not a regrettable side note to modern development; it was one of its engines. The wealth extracted from enslaved Africans and from plantation societies in the Caribbean helped finance a wider Atlantic economy from which European powers benefited disproportionately.
Read together, Williams and Curran provide a compelling framework for understanding the deeper meaning of Pope Leo’s apology. Williams explains how slavery generated capital; Curran shows how race provided legitimacy. Church, commerce, law, and pseudo-science did not operate in separate worlds. They converged in the making of an Atlantic order in which African suffering could be rationalised, normalised, and exploited.
That is why Pope Leo’s apology, historic and courageous though it is, cannot be the end of the matter. In Magnifica Humanitas, he speaks of forgiveness, sorrow, and restorative justice, but he stops short of explicitly endorsing reparations. In the nations of the Western Hemisphere, where the legacy of slavery remains visible in unequal development, racial hierarchy, educational disparity, land inequality, and enduring social exclusion, apology without commitment to help repair remains politically unsatisfactory.
The international context is shifting as well. On 25 March 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a landmark resolution that recognises the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. Led by Ghana and backed by an overwhelming majority of African, Latin American, and Caribbean states, the resolution calls for reparations as a concrete step towards remedying these historical wrongs and for much greater attention to justice, dignity, and healing for Africans and their descendants. It does not create new law, but it does send a clear political and moral signal: slavery is not just a closed chapter in history; its consequences still shape lives and opportunities today.
Yet as soon as the discussion turns from memory to reparations, resistance hardens across parts of Europe and North America. In Britain, that unease is visible in the continuing debate over whether the Anglican Church should endorse and finance reparative measures for its historical links to slavery. Critics continue to resist the idea that present-day institutions bear obligations flowing from historical crimes. The pattern is by now familiar: institutions are often prepared to research slavery, regret slavery, and condemn slavery; however, they become markedly less comfortable when justice requires structured commitments to repair.
It need not take the form of giant cheques. Sincere apologies, honestly naming the wrong, matter. But they must be matched by long-term social and economic programmes through which those who profited from slavery commit real resources to help lift up the societies that slavery impoverished and scarred with racism. This is not an idea that should inspire fear. In its genuine implementation, reparative justice can help make the world a wealthier, fairer, and more human place by affirming the dignity of all.
This is especially important at a moment when people of African descent have risen across the Caribbean in government, commerce, and civil society. In Latin America, North America, and Europe, African-descendant communities are also participating more forcefully and more effectively in public policy, diplomacy, academia, activism, and culture. In that context, while expressions of remorse are important, the implementation of systems to ensure equality, equity, respect, and an end to racial discrimination is crucial.
Pope Leo’s apology matters because moral acknowledgment matters. But the descendants of enslaved people do not live by acknowledgment alone. History also teaches that words, however sincere, do not by themselves repair inequality, exclusion, or inherited disadvantage. If the international community is sincere in confronting slavery and its consequences, remembrance must be matched by practical commitments to justice, opportunity, dignity, and an end to racial discrimination. Reparative justice is not about revenge for the past. It is about responsibility for the future.
Descendants of African slaves are not asking for charity from nations whose wealth was built, in part, on slavery and racism; they are asking for practical repair and a better deal now and in the future.