Black Americans REJECT the Pope’s Apology for the Church Involvement in Slavery!
Black Americans REJECT the Pope’s Apology for the Church Involvement in Slavery!
Okay, 3:00 p.m.
Sharp.
It’s a little too late for a sorry, sir.
We’ve done our healing through virtual therapy, seeking emotional intelligence, looking for the God within us cuz that outside God might be on demon time.
Sorry’s without action is just sweet [music] talk, [ __ ] The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.
We need salaries, reparations.
No, [ __ ] I don’t want a mule.
How about that big body buggy?
Some horsepower.
Yes, I happen to be a man a man with a horse.
Let my people go, [ __ ] It’s a [ __ ] ape.
You got the sprenceries on every [ __ ] block.
>> I’m seeing a lot of pale Catholics pissed off that the Pope has finally acknowledged the hand that the Catholic Church played in the Atlantic slave trade.
As a child that was brought up in the Catholic Church, it’s about [ __ ] time.
Catholic Church profited off of people that look like me and allowed Native Americans to do so.
I seriously believe that white people who are Christians and Catholics think that their history is so clean.
Your history is based on destruction.
It’s based on invasion of other cultures and other countries.
Just because you whitewash history doesn’t make it true.
Y’all owe a lot to people that look like me.
You owe a lot to Native Americans, especially on this soil.
No, we never going to get [ __ ] reparations, at least acknowledge the [ __ ] I’ll put it to you like this, white folks y’all were never [ __ ] saviors.
Y’all were always the destruction on Earth.
Y’all have wiped out civilization all in the name of Jesus.
Y’all actually think that’s right.
>> Stepping up and owning your history is the least y’all can [ __ ] do.
>> Pope Leo just apologized for the Vatican’s role in slavery.
And Pope Leo chose today to apologize for the Vatican’s role in slavery.
And I know what you’re about to say, but other Popes have apologized before.
Stop because no, they apologized for Christians being involved.
And that’s easy, but what Pope Leo did was he apologized for the role that specifically the Popes played themselves.
The role that they had in giving European kings explicit authority to subjugate and enslave people that they called infidels.
[music] No Pope has ever apologized for that before, let alone acknowledge it.
>> An apology without action is just a press release with a cross.
That is the line of black voice [music] spoken to a camera the day Pope Leo, the first American-born Pope, stood up in front of the world and admitted what the Vatican had been refusing to admit for 500 years.
The Catholic Church did not just witness slavery.
The Catholic Church authorized it.
And what you are about to hear is foundational Black America delivering the response that the history books have been waiting on.
Family, sit with me.
What you are about to watch is a string of foundational Black Americans on camera, in their own words, responding to Pope [music] Leo’s historic apology for the role the Catholic Church played in legitimizing the transatlantic slave trade.
Pope Leo is the first American-born Pope.
He carries blood in his own family tree from both sides of the womb, from the enslaved and from the enslavers.
And the apology he delivered is not the same apology Pope John Paul II gave back in 1985, which only acknowledged individual Christians being involved.
Pope Leo apologized for the role the Popes themselves played, the Popes, the chair, the institution that is new.
This documentary is going to walk through the response in pieces.
After each piece, we are going to sit down together and break down what was said, what it means, and what we as a people are supposed to do with it.
[music] Take a breath.
We’re walking into this one together.
>> Intelligence, looking for the God within us.
Cuz that outside God might be on demon time.
Sorry’s without action is just sweet talk, [music] [ __ ] The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice.
We need salaries.
Reparations?
Nope, [ __ ] I don’t want a mule.
How about that big body buggy?
Some horsepower.
Yes, I happen to be a a man with a horse.
Let my people go, [ __ ] It’s a [ __ ] ape.
You got the sprenseries on every [ __ ] block.
>> I’m seeing a lot of pale Catholics pissed off that the Pope has finally acknowledged the hand that the Catholic Church played in the Atlantic slave trade.
As a child that was brought up in the Catholic Church, it’s about [ __ ] time.
Catholic Church profited off of people that look like me and unallowed Native Americans to do so.
I seriously believe that white people who are Christians and Catholics think that their history is so clean.
Your history is based on destruction.
It’s based on invasion of other cultures and other countries.
Just because you whitewash history doesn’t make it true.
Y’all owe a lot to people that look like me.
You owe a lot to Native Americans.
Especially on this soil.
No, we never going to get [ __ ] reparations.
At least acknowledge the [ __ ] I’ll put it to you like this.
White folks y’all were never [ __ ] saviors.
Y’all were always the destruction on Earth.
Y’all have wiped out civilization all in the name of Jesus.
Y’all actually think that’s right.
Well, stepping up and owning your history is the least y’all can [ __ ] do.
Pope Leo just apologized for the Vatican’s role in slavery.
And Pope Leo chose today to apologize for the Vatican’s role in slavery.
And I know what you’re about to say, but other Popes have apologized before.
Stop.
Because no, they apologized for Christians being involved.
And that’s easy, but what Pope Leo did was he apologized for the role that specifically the Popes played themselves.
The role that they had in giving European kings explicit authority to subjugate and enslave people that they called infidels.
No Pope has ever apologized for that before, let alone acknowledge it.
And y’all remember Pope Leo?
He one of those.
Because I need y’all to understand Pope Leo is the first American born Pope who carries blood from both the enslaved and the enslavers.
He has blood from both sides of the wound, [ __ ] One historian put it this way, and I want this in y’all’s mouth the next time somebody tries to tell you that the church was innocent.
They said this, and I quote, “The Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy.”
Black Catholics have waited a long time to hear the Vatican speak honestly about the church’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.
And by extension, the enduring systems of anti-black racism in the world today.
Now, yes, this apology is historic, but please, let’s remember that an apology without action is just a press release with a cross.
So, the question is is what happens next?
Reparations?
Land acknowledgement?
Material accountability?
Or just a Latin title in a press conference tour?
>> The Pope just apologized for the role the Christian Church played in the slave trade.
>> [music] >> I have so many thoughts.
First of all, the church didn’t play a role.
It was the chief approver.
In the 15th century, Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bulls that granted European powers the explicit authority to reduce non-Christians to perpetual slavery.
This is the foundation of the doctrine of discovery.
The church made money off of slavery.
I contend that before the priests were interfering with white kids, enslaved Africans were the first victims.
In 1985, Pope John Paul II apologized for the involvement of individual Christians in the slave trade.
On behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, he did not take ownership of the origin >> Hear what they just said.
>> 500 years of silence from the same chair that signed off on the doctrine that put our ancestors on those ships.
And now the apology lands in 2026 like a text message from somebody who left the wedding without saying goodbye.
But hear me family, taking the second thing they said.
They said the apology even at this late hour is not nothing [music] because Pope Leo did something no Pope has ever done before.
He did not apologize for individual Christians.
He apologized for the role the Popes themselves played in giving European kings the explicit authority to enslave us.
That is the difference.
That is the line nobody crossed for half a millennium.
And then comes the line we have to take with us out of this video.
An apology without action is just a press release with a cross.
Family, that is the receipt.
Words on a Tuesday do not pay the bill on a debt that has been compounding since 1452.
The question is not whether the apology was sincere.
The question is what gets transferred?
Land, businesses, patents, stolen labor.
The buildings in Rome that were paid for brick by brick with our [music] blood.
The first response is in.
Now hold on.
The next clip walks us into the receipt itself.
>> since of the slave trade.
Because of this apology, I expect a lot of pickaninnies to clap like seals.
That won’t be me.
Until we see a check.
So, I’ve been around the world but the first thing I thought about is Brazil.
I visited some of the oldest churches in Brazil.
They were built on stolen land.
And they were built by slave labor.
The benefits of all of that still rolls into the church.
They owe us reparations.
They owe us retribution.
I will never be comfortable with an institution that took 300 years to apologize for one of the greatest crimes in humanity.
>> Look at this.
The Pope made historical apology for the church’s role in legitimizing slavery.
He didn’t apologize for slavery.
He did something bigger.
He apologized for the church’s role in legitimizing it.
>> In the 1400s, Popes issued these decrees called papal bulls.
They sent them around to all these European kingdoms basically saying you have our authority to enslave people that aren’t Christian.
Now, this gave Portugal and Spain the moral cover to begin what we know as chattel slavery.
In the 1440s and 1450s, Portugal began kidnapping and purchasing enslaved Africans.
But in 1452, Portugal started its first sugar cane plantation on the island of Madeira.
It was the first time enslaved Africans were used on an industrial scale to produce a cash crop.
It’s also where we begin to see Christopher Columbus and Spanish explorers begin to go to North and South America and the Caribbean enslaving and ending the lives of thousands of indigenous people.
The transatlantic slave trade would have never happened if the church did not authorize it.
>> apology this morning in legitimizing the Vatican’s role in slavery.
>> Where should I begin?
Okay, I’m going to start here.
Okay, so black people, it’s just me and you.
Can we talk about how and I’ve mentioned it before, how we have black looking folks running around in our community talking about some we don’t need reparations?
How is it that now everybody wants to get up to the mic and give all their apologies >> [snorts] >> and heartfelt um
We know it was wrong blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But ain’t nobody coming with no [ __ ] money.
Like, where the [ __ ] is the money?
Like, run my community the money.
See, everybody just wants to focus on slavery.
Okay.
What happened after slavery?
Redlining, gentrification, we still dealing with medical discrimination, housing discrimination.
Oh my god, what about the black woman that lost their jobs under this administration?
What about project 2025, who is just a white supremacist manifesto, that not only is targeting women, but is gunning for the black community.
What the Where is the [ __ ] reparations?
Our word your reparations.
I feel my community deserves every [ __ ] thing they lost from land, property, businesses, patents.
Where is the [ __ ] money, Lords of London?
Cuz you decided to get up and admit that y’all were financing [ __ ] slaves, using slaves on the stock exchange?
Wall Street, Wall Street, those stocks are ours.
Those businesses are ours.
Sweat equity, chattel property.
That’s why America was so [ __ ] great, cuz white people were using black bodies to profit off of.
Where is the [ __ ] reparations?
>> So, according to a PBS article, Pope Leo has apologized for the papacy’s involvement in authorizing the transatlantic slave trade.
For those of you who may not know, it was Pope Nicholas V’s papal bull Dum Diversas that initially gave the Portuguese sovereign and all his successors the ability to go into Africa into the areas of the Saracens black people and allow them to take their land, take their resources and perpetually put the people in slavery.
Those who were not Christians.
You see before that there was an argument about some of the people that was taken from the Canary Islands between Portugal and Spain that were Christian already and they were brought into slavery and yet they were darker skin.
So >> This is the section that has to be in every black classroom in America by next semester.
In the year 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued a document called a papal bull.
That bull granted European kingdoms the explicit authority to reduce non-Christians to what the document called perpetual slavery.
That is not interpretation.
That is the document.
That bull is the foundation of what historians call the doctrine of discovery.
The legal and moral cover that Portugal, Spain, France and England used to walk into Africa, the Caribbean, North America and South America and to take what they took.
That same year, 1452, Portugal opened its first industrial sugarcane plantation on the island of Madeira and for the first time in human history enslaved Africans were used at industrial scale to produce a cash crop.
Christopher Columbus [music] sails 40 years later in 1492 under that same Vatican authority.
You hear what they are saying?
The church did not play a supporting role in slavery.
The church wrote the script.
The church handed out the moral cover.
The church profited off of it for the next 300 years.
Family, when a black voice in that clip says the Catholic Church has never been an innocent bystander in the history of white supremacy, that is not rhetoric.
That is documented Vatican paperwork.
That is the receipt in the original Latin.
Now, watch what they say about the receipt itself.
>> Before that, Clement was like Pope Clement said, “No, you cannot enslave your fellow Christians, but go in and you can enslave the non-Christians.”
And then Pope Nicholas V doubled down on it with his Dum Diversas, saying that “Yeah, yeah, you can go in and you can enslave these people and in the Americas as well.
” And then uh another Pope after him, I can’t say his name correctly, and the Roman Pontifical said that yes, you can definitely go and you should go.
It’s your Christian duty to go and enslave African people and colonize them and take their resources, take their land.
You get many other Popes who are in support of slavery thereafter, and it is not until 1888 when you have the first Pope Leo, Leo XIII, who says that slavery is condemned, that God loves all his children, including the Africans and the Americans.
But in 1880, slavery around the modern world at that time frame, the Western world, and had already been abolished.
So, they were Johnny-come-lately to the party.
They changed when the culture changed.
You see, before that, the Popes all had >> [music] >> uh made these papal bulls based on what the culture was already doing, or they were establishing the culture themselves.
Popes like Pope Gregory himself had slaves.
So, [music] it was common for them to do whatever the culture was doing.
But now, Pope Leo uh the 14th has come out and said that they apologize and he’s asking for those who are the descendants of those slaves, those who are the descendants of the colonization in Africa, to give them a pardon, to forgive them.
You see a pardon is an interesting word.
You see when you pardon someone, you say that yes, you committed a crime but I’m not going to punish you for the crime no nor do I seek [music] any type of repayment from that crime.
You’re just pardoned.
It’s wiped away.
It’s a clean slate.
Because as he said, this is a stain in the memory of Christianity.
You would have to be a fool to accept this with any type of glee because there are no teeth behind it.
None whatsoever.
It reminds me of World War II.
If you were to go do the research of the aftermath of World War II then one of the things that you’re going to find is the Conference on Jewish Material uh Claims Agency Claims Against Germany.
In that up to 2005 tens of billions of euros have been paid back to the victims of the Holocaust.
[music] Not just to those who had survived the Holocaust, but to the descendants as well.
Lands that were stolen payments have been received back.
Lands in other countries payments have been received.
There are still to this day this organization just acquired another 105 million dollars that will be paid out through 2027 meaning that it is still being paid today.
Reparations to the descendants of those who are survivors of the Holocaust rep uh reparations to those whose families were destroyed and whose society was devastated by the Holocaust.
You see the Pope coming out and saying that please pardon us.
Please forgive us.
We’re all God’s children.
But without any type of reparations being paid to the countries or the people that it has most affected, it lacks teeth.
It’s interesting how the European Jews were able to get money to rebuy houses, land, to re- educate themselves in colleges and universities, to establish for themselves a culture that is supported [music] by funds that enable them to have levels of power within government.
And I know that most of the world just said that slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonization was the worst thing that has ever happened in human history and denounced it.
Save for countries like America who did not want to participate in that.
Because the admission of guilt now means that you’re open to having to pay.
To having to uplift those communities that you have devastated for centuries.
>> This is where the conversation gets honest in a way that mainstream news will not touch.
Because the voices in this clip are not asking for sentiment.
They are reading the ledger out loud.
Lloyd’s of London, the insurance institution that openly admitted in 2020 that it built [music] part of its fortune on insuring the slave trade.
The London Stock Exchange, Wall Street, the Bank of England, the cotton brokers, the shipping companies, the universities whose endowments still carry the interest on slave trade dollars.
These are not abstract institutions.
These are receivable accounts.
And what these foundational black Americans are pointing at plainly is the difference between an apology and a transfer.
[music] An apology says we feel bad.
A transfer says we are returning what was taken.
Family, hear me.
Reparations is not a tip.
Reparations is a return.
Land, property, businesses, patents, the inventions our great-grandfathers [music] built that white companies still hold the rights to.
Sweat equity in the markets that we built and were locked out of.
And then they pivot in this section to the part that has to be named.
Slavery is not the only ledger.
Redlining, gentrification, medical discrimination, housing discrimination, the black women losing their jobs under every economic turn this country takes, the targeting of our community by political projects designed in rooms we were never invited
To.
The bill did not stop in 1865.
The bill kept compounding, and the apology on its own does not touch a single line on the page.
>> You see, the papacy sits in a house of gold.
I’ve been to the Vatican.
It’s a lot of gold.
Jewels all throughout the Vatican.
You go to many of these Catholic churches as they pray for the poor while surrounded by all the gold, ivory, jewels.
While the papacy owns almost more land than any other organization in the world, save for governments, yet they want you to pardon them, forgive them without payment.
Only only to the to the African and to the African-American and any others in the diaspora.
Do they ask us to always forgive them?
Let them have a pardon without them having to pay for the devastation that they have caused throughout our communities and for generations.
That the the situation that has allowed for racism to continue to flourish to the point where a black person seems to always been thought of as the criminal, as the person who’s lazy, as the person who is destroying the country.
They ask us for a pardon and I say hell no.
And as far as Pope Leo, it might have been in the you know, good thought process, but you didn’t think it through.
How about some of all that gold that you got up there in your churches?
How about you use some of that to create an educational fund for the people who were affected by this?
How about you use some of that gold to repurchase land and buy and and help start up businesses [music] in these colonized African countries, in the Americas, in Europe.
How about you utilize some money, some finances to put behind the people and the generations that you’ve [music] devastated so that they can truly have equal footing in this world instead of your sorry ass apology.
So, Pope Leo, as well intended as it may be, it is not received.
You are not pardoned.
The Christian Church is not pardoned.
The Papal See is not pardoned.
Until you actively put together some reparations, you are still guilty of initiating what the world has condemned as the worst time frame in history.
See, it’s kind of like if I came to you and I burned down your house.
And then I come back to you and say, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
I still have a burned down house.
So, until you come and you give me the resources to rebuild my house, which is what real repentance is according to your religion, repentance is not just saying I’m sorry, but real repentance is rebuild my house.
Re-establish the way it was.
Make everything new again.
When you do that, then you can be forgiven.
But, you will never >> This is where the documentary [clears throat] turns a page.
Because the apology, the papal bulls, the reparations [music] conversation, all of that is the bill on the front of the ledger.
The back of the ledger is who we actually are.
The voices in this clip start opening scripture.
Lamentations chapter 4, [music] verse 8.
Their visage is blacker than a coal.
Job chapter 30, verse 30.
My skin is black upon me.
Zephaniah chapter 3, [music] verse 10.
Speaking of the faithful coming from beyond the rivers of Ethiopia.
These are not new readings.
These verses have been sitting on the page since the King James Bible was first printed in 1611.
Anybody can open the book tonight and read them in their own living room.
Then they point at the maps.
In 1747, a European cartographer drew a slave coast map [music] of West Africa and labeled an entire region the kingdom of Judah.
By 1771, the same label is gone.
Quietly removed.
The location stayed.
Only the name on the parchment was erased.
The Igbo people, people of Nigeria, one of the largest ethnic groups in West Africa, one of the largest source populations of the transatlantic slave trade, still tell the same story their elders told them.
That they descend from ancient Israel.
They circumcise on the eighth day.
They observe clean and unclean foods.
Their oral history names their ancestors back to the same biblical line that mainstream history has been 400 years pretending it could not find.
Family, hear me.
You were not given a new history.
You were given somebody else’s edit of an old one.
You come from the oldest people on this earth.
The first bone science has ever pulled out of the ground are still sitting in our soil.
The mathematics, the medicine, the writing systems half this planet still uses came out of our hands.
And the lineage that the Bible itself describes in dark-skinned terms is sitting in the same book that was handed to us on a plantation as a tool of control.
The same book becomes the proof when you read it for yourself.
So, here is where we land, family.
The Vatican issued a press release.
The Catholic Church owes a transfer.
Lloyd’s of London owes a transfer.
Wall Street owes a transfer.
The universities, the insurance companies, the cotton brokers, they all owe a transfer.
And while we wait for what is [music] owed, we do not wait to know who we are.
We build for ourselves.
We educate our children in our own history.
We open the book and read the verses they hoped we would skip.
We trace the maps they hoped we would never find.
We circulate our dollars inside our own community.
We protect and honor our women.
We refuse to wait for permission from any institution that has never had our interests at heart.
The apology came 500 years late.
The receipt is in our hands now.
And family, [music] I believe we know what to do with it.
Walk in that.
Walk like you are who the book said you are.
