Pope’s Angola pilgrimage confronts Catholic Church’s complicity in transatlantic slavery and ongoing structural racism in global Christianity
Original framing: “Pope Leo XIV heads to Catholic shrine in Angola that was a center of African slave trade - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The original framing omits the Catholic Church’s direct economic ties to slavery, including the sale of enslaved Africans by religious orders, the use of papal bulls like *Sublimis Deus* (1537) to justify enslavement, and the modern wealth of the Church derived from colonial-era assets. It also ignores the resilience of African Christian traditions that resisted colonial imposition, such as the Kimbanguist Church in Congo, and the ongoing marginalization of Black clergy within the Vatican. Indigenous African spiritual practices that syncretized with Christianity are erased, as are the voices of descendants of enslaved Africans in the diaspora.
Medium structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by AP News, a Western-centric wire service, for a global audience conditioned to view the Catholic Church as a moral authority rather than an institution with historical culpability. The framing serves to sanitize the Church’s past by presenting the Pope’s visit as an act of contrition rather than a reckoning with systemic power structures. This obscures the role of European colonial powers, Vatican-sanctioned theology, and the economic systems that relied on slavery, while centering the Church’s narrative of redemption over accountability.
The transatlantic slave trade was not an isolated event but a systemic project enabled by the Catholic Church’s theological justifications, including the 1452 papal bull *Dum Diversas*, which authorized the enslavement of non-Christians. The shrine in Angola, built in 1604, was a key site for the Portuguese crown and Church to legitimize slavery through conversion narratives. This history parallels other colonial-era religious sites, such as the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, which was built atop indigenous sacred spaces. The Church’s role in slavery extended beyond moral failure to economic exploitation, with religious orders owning enslaved people and profiting from their labor.
The Pope’s pilgrimage to Angola is not merely a historical reckoning but a confrontation with the Catholic Church’s foundational role in the transatlantic slave trade, a system that relied on theological justifications, economic extraction, and racial hierarchies.