Pope’s slavery apology ‘proper and just,’ says bishop who heads National Black Catholic Congress

(OSV News) — Pope Leo XIV’s acknowledgment of the Church’s role in slavery is “only proper and just,” said Bishop Roy E. Campbell Jr., who is president of the National Black Catholic Congress.

And the task ahead is to take concrete action to heal slavery’s legacy, added the prelate, who retired recently as an auxiliary bishop of Washington.

The official apology — endorsed as well by the Knights of Peter Claver, one of one of the Catholic Church’s largest historically Black Catholic lay fraternal organizations — was included in “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” Pope Leo’s first encyclical.

Released May 25, the text invoked the wisdom of the Church’s social teaching — which articulates the means of building a just society and living out holiness in modern life — as a framework for shaping AI amid rapid technological advances, a fractured global order and accelerating threats to human dignity.

Warning against AI’s potential to cause “new forms of slavery” — especially by facilitating human trafficking and exploiting laborers, including children, in mining resource minerals for the technology — Pope Leo lamented “the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.”

The transatlantic slave trade saw some 12 million to 20 million Africans enslaved in various Western nations, including the U.S., over a period of four centuries.

The Church’s hesitation to address slavery spanned some 18 centuries, Pope Leo noted, describing such inaction as “a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached.”

The pope “is taking the initiative to admit that the Church was complicit by either allowing (slavery) or looking the other way, and we ask forgiveness for that,” said Bishop Campbell, who continues to serve as pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Largo, Maryland.

Once “you recognize the wrong, and you’re sorry for the wrong,” said Bishop Campbell, the question becomes, “now, what do we do to correct it?”

He pointed to recent efforts in the Archdiocese of Washington to “honor those who were formerly enslaved and buried in unmarked graves.”

“The starting point with that (project) is one of our churches, Sacred Heart in Bowie, Maryland,” he explained.

The church and its cemetery were formerly the site of White Marsh Plantation, bequeathed to the Jesuits in 1729 by James Carroll, cousin to Archbishop John Carroll, the inaugural bishop of Baltimore.

As one of several Jesuit plantations in the state of Maryland, White Marsh had, at times, some 100 enslaved persons.

The plantation had been “the motherhouse for the Jesuits in that area” of what is now Prince George’s County in Maryland, said Bishop Campbell.

Through the use of ground-penetrating radar, he said, “we’ve identified over a thousand sites consistent with” unmarked graves.

The Jesuits have acknowledged their participation in slavery, and in 2017 the order issued a public apology addressed in particular to some 100 descendants of 272 enslaved persons, including children, the order had sold in 1838 to keep Georgetown University financially solvent.

“They said, ‘It was wrong, and this is what we’re trying to do to correct it for the descendants,'” said Bishop Campbell, who blessed the graveyard during a 2025 pilgrimage of remembrance.

“Obviously the only thing we can do is honor the memory of those who were enslaved,” he said.

But Pope Leo’s apology enables the Church “on a universal scale” to “help the descendants reach peace, and know that there’s justice,” said the bishop.

The faithful can participate in that by doing “what Our Lord calls us to do — to love, to forgive and to work to help your neighbor,” Bishop Campbell said.

That summons reaches all people of goodwill, he added.

While surveying the graveyard a few years ago, “a gentleman pulled up in his truck and said, ‘Hey, I heard y’all were clearing ground and you found unmarked graves. Me and my sons want to be part of how we can help clear the ground and identify these graves,'” Bishop Campbell recalled. “He wasn’t even Catholic; he just knew that this was a way to identify and honor those who have been treated so wrongly in their lives.”

Catholics, whether they are “Black, white or any other shade of skin color,” can work to mend the wrongs of slavery “by the way we treat those among us now,” while striving “to honor the culture, the lives of those who have gone before us,” he said.

He lamented that “unfortunately in our country, it seems like a lot of times, how you’re treated depends on how you look, what language you speak, what culture you practice.”

“We’re a nation of immigrants,” said Bishop Campbell, adding that the mission is to now “treat others the way we want to be treated … because quite honestly, we’re all one in Christ.”

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