The National Catholic Register portal reports that the current usurper on Peter’s throne, Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost), issued his encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas* on May 15, 2026, in which he apologized for the Catholic Church’s historical role in slavery, citing papal bulls from the 1400s—specifically Pope Eugenius IV’s *Sicut Dudum* and *Etsi Suscepti*, and Pope Nicholas V’s *Dum Diversas* and *Romanus Pontifex*—as examples of when the Holy See “sought to regulate and legitimize” subjugation. The encyclical frames this as a “development of doctrine,” claiming the Church “gradually came to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues.” Tom Nash, a staff apologist for Catholic Answers, is quoted defending these statements as consistent with prior magisterial teaching and not representing a change in doctrine. This entire enterprise is a textbook example of the modernist heresy condemned by St. Pius X: the notion that doctrine “evolves” over time, that past popes taught erroneously, and that the Church must apologize for her own sacred history—all while the conciliar sect continues its relentless campaign of self-destruction under the guise of “reform.”
The Modernist Heresy of “Doctrinal Development” Applied to the Magisterium Itself
The central claim of Leo XIV’s encyclical—that the Church has “gradually come to a deeper awareness” of the moral evil of slavery—is nothing less than the condemned modernist proposition that dogma is subject to “a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason” (Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius IX, 1864, prop. 5). This is precisely the error that St. Pius X identified as “the synthesis of all errors” in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907): the idea that religious truth is not fixed and immutable but evolves with human consciousness and historical circumstances.
The proposition condemned by the Holy Office in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907) states: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (prop. 58). This is exactly the philosophical framework Leo XIV employs. By asserting that the Church’s understanding of slavery underwent a “development” from the 15th century to the 19th century, the usurper implicitly denies that the Church possessed the fullness of moral truth from her founding—a direct contradiction of the Catholic teaching that the Church, guided by the Holy Ghost, cannot err in matters of faith and morals.
Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason” (prop. 5). Leo XIV’s encyclical applies this very principle not to abstract theological concepts but to the Church’s own historical magisterium, effectively declaring that popes from Nicholas V to Eugenius IV were morally deficient in their understanding—a claim that strikes at the heart of the Church’s divine constitution.
The Condemnation of Legitimate Papal Acts as a Revolutionary Act
What makes Leo XIV’s encyclical particularly egregious is its explicit critique of specific papal bulls from the 15th century. The usurper writes that popes “intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation” and that “political and, at times, even economic needs overcame the demands of the Gospel.” This is not merely an apology—it is a formal accusation that the Vicars of Christ failed in their sacred duty.
Pope Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) were issued in the context of the Portuguese exploration of West Africa and the ongoing conflict with the Ottoman Empire. These bulls authorized the Portuguese crown to engage in just war against Muslim combatants and to reduce captured enemies to servitude—a practice universally accepted in the law of nations at the time and consistent with the natural law principle that the fruits of a just war belong to the victor. The Church’s teaching authority was exercised in regulating this already-existing practice, not in creating it.
Pope Eugenius IV’s Sicut Dudum (1435) explicitly excommunicated anyone who enslaved Christians or those seeking baptism on the Canary Islands. As Tom Nash himself acknowledges, this bull “did not sanction slavery but instead excommunicated anyone who enslaved Christians.” The bull’s purpose was to protect the most vulnerable—indigenous converts—from the abuses of colonizers, not to endorse the institution of slavery as such.
By framing these legitimate acts of papal governance as moral failures requiring apology, Leo XIV commits the gravest of errors: he judges the Magisterium itself by the standards of a later age, applying anachronistic moral criteria to historical acts that were, in their context, consistent with both natural law and the Church’s teaching authority. This is the very essence of the modernist error condemned by St. Pius X: “The Church listening cooperates in such a way with the Church teaching in defining truths of faith, that the Church teaching should only approve the common opinions of the Church listening” (Lamentabili, prop. 6). Leo XIV effectively subordinates the teaching authority of the Church to the shifting opinions of contemporary secular society.
The Myth of “Gradual Awareness” and the Denial of Infallibility
The claim that a “formal, absolute, and universal condemnation of slavery” was not issued until Pope Leo XIII’s 1888 encyclical is historically and theologically false. As the article itself notes, Pope Paul III’s Sublimis Deus (1537) “strongly rebuked enslavement of Indigenous Americans more than three centuries earlier” and “expressly stated that this prohibition on enslavement of the Indigenous Americans applies regardless of anything that has been issued before, effectively superseding Nicholas V’s papal bulls from a century earlier.”
This is the critical point that Leo XIV’s modernist framework deliberately obscures: the Church has always possessed the fullness of moral truth. The various papal interventions on slavery were not stages in a “gradual development” of doctrine but applications of immutable principles to different historical circumstances. The Church’s teaching on the inherent dignity of every human person—rooted in the natural law and confirmed by divine revelation—has been constant from the beginning.
St. Paul’s teaching is unequivocal: “There is neither slave nor free person… for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The Epistle to Philemon demonstrates that the Christian dispensation fundamentally transforms the relationship between master and slave, elevating the slave to the status of “a brother” (Philemon 16). The Church Fathers, including St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom, consistently taught that slavery was a consequence of sin, not a natural condition. Pope Gregory XVI’s In Supremo Apostolatus (1839) condemned the slave trade in its entirety, and Pope Pius VII actively lobbied for the abolition of the slave trade in the early 19th century.
The notion that the Church “gradually came to a deeper awareness” is a modernist fiction designed to undermine the Church’s claim to infallible teaching authority. If the Church’s moral teaching can “develop” in this manner, then no doctrine is safe from future revision—including the very doctrines that Leo XIV and the conciliar sect have already abandoned: the existence of hell, the necessity of baptism, the sinfulness of contraception, and the uniqueness of Christ’s saving mission.
The Apology as a Weapon Against the Church’s Own History
The most insidious aspect of Leo XIV’s encyclical is its function as a tool of the conciliar revolution’s ongoing war against Tradition. By apologizing for the Church’s historical involvement in slavery, the usurper accomplishes several objectives simultaneously:
First, he reinforces the modernist narrative that the Church has been historically “wrong” on moral matters and has only recently “caught up” to secular standards of justice. This narrative serves to legitimize the conciliar sect’s own departures from traditional teaching, framing them as further “developments” in the same direction.
Second, he implicitly condemns the entire tradition of Catholic moral theology, which for centuries distinguished between the moral legitimacy of various forms of servitude and the absolute moral evil of treating human persons as mere chattel. The Church’s nuanced teaching on just war, legitimate authority, and the natural law distinctions between different forms of subjugation is reduced to a simple narrative of guilt and apology.
Third, he provides ammunition for those who wish to subject the Church’s teaching authority to external judgment—whether from secular governments, international organizations, or the court of public opinion. If the Church must apologize for the acts of 15th-century popes, then by what authority does she claim to teach infallibly on any moral matter today?
This is precisely the error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (prop. 80). Leo XIV’s apology is not an act of humility but an act of capitulation—a surrender of the Church’s divine authority to the spirit of the age.
The Silence on the Church’s True Teaching
What is conspicuously absent from Leo XIV’s encyclical is any affirmation of the Church’s constant teaching on the inherent dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27). There is no mention of the Church’s tireless work in evangelizing and baptizing millions of enslaved persons throughout history, nor of the countless saints—including St. Callistus I, a former slave who became pope and martyr—who lived and died in witness to the equal dignity of all human persons in Christ.
There is no acknowledgment that the Church’s “delay” in issuing a universal condemnation of slavery was not a failure of moral perception but a prudent application of the natural law principle that the Church must work within the conditions of the societies she seeks to evangelize, gradually elevating them to the fullness of Christian truth rather than imposing abstract ideals that would be rejected and cause greater harm.
Most critically, there is no mention of the Church’s teaching that the primary slavery is the slavery of sin—that all human persons, free and enslaved alike, are slaves of sin until liberated by the grace of Christ (Romans 6:6-7). The Church’s mission has always been to liberate souls from the bondage of Satan, not merely to reform temporal institutions. By reducing the Church’s moral teaching to a question of social justice, Leo XIV reveals the naturalistic and modernist character of his entire pontificate.
The Conciliar Sect’s Pattern of Self-Flagellation
Leo XIV’s apology for slavery follows a well-established pattern of the conciliar sect’s self-flagellation that began with John Paul II’s numerous apologies for historical “sins” of the Church. This pattern serves a specific ideological function: by constantly apologizing for the past, the conciliar sect creates the impression that the Church has been historically deficient in her moral teaching, thereby legitimizing her present departures from traditional doctrine.
The same logic that leads Leo XIV to apologize for 15th-century papal bulls leads the conciliar sect to apologize for the Church’s teaching on the morality of homosexuality, the indissolubility of marriage, the existence of hell, and the necessity of Catholic baptism. Each apology is a step further along the path of total capitulation to the spirit of the world—the very spirit that St. John identifies as “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16).
Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), warned that the rejection of Christ’s kingship over human society would lead to “seeds of discord sown everywhere, flames of envy and hostility” and “the whole society profoundly shaken and heading towards destruction.” Leo XIV’s apology is not a step toward peace and reconciliation but a further manifestation of the secularism that Pius XI identified as “the plague that poisons human society.”
Conclusion: The True Face of the Conciliar Revolution
Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is not a genuine act of repentance but a calculated act of revolutionary warfare against the Church’s own Tradition. By condemning the legitimate acts of past popes, by framing the Church’s moral teaching as subject to “development,” and by capitulating to the spirit of the age, the usurper reveals the true character of the conciliar sect: it is not the Catholic Church but a counterfeit institution that has abandoned the faith of the Apostles and substituted the ever-changing opinions of the world for the immutable truth of the Gospel.
The true Catholic response to this apostasy is not to join in the self-flagellation but to affirm with St. Paul: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema” (Galatians 1:8). The Church’s teaching on the dignity of every human person has always been true and constant. What has changed is not the Church’s doctrine but the courage of her professed leaders to proclaim it without apology or compromise.
[Antichurch] Leo XIV’s Slavery Apology: Modernist Revisionism Masquerading as Virtue
The National Catholic Register portal reports that the current usurper on Peter’s throne, Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost), issued his encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas* on May 15, 2026, in which he apologized for the Catholic Church’s historical role in slavery, citing papal bulls from the 1400s—specifically Pope Eugenius IV’s *Sicut Dudum* and *Etsi Suscepti*, and Pope Nicholas V’s *Dum Diversas* and *Romanus Pontifex*—as examples of when the Holy See “sought to regulate and legitimize” subjugation. The encyclical frames this as a “development of doctrine,” claiming the Church “gradually came to a deeper awareness of the gravity of these issues.” Tom Nash, a staff apologist for Catholic Answers, is quoted defending these statements as consistent with prior magisterial teaching and not representing a change in doctrine. This entire enterprise is a textbook example of the modernist heresy condemned by St. Pius X: the notion that doctrine “evolves” over time, that past popes taught erroneously, and that the Church must apologize for her own sacred history—all while the conciliar sect continues its relentless campaign of self-destruction under the guise of “reform.”
The Modernist Heresy of “Doctrinal Development” Applied to the Magisterium Itself
The central claim of Leo XIV’s encyclical—that the Church has “gradually come to a deeper awareness” of the moral evil of slavery—is nothing less than the condemned modernist proposition that dogma is subject to “a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason” (Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius IX, 1864, prop. 5). This is precisely the error that St. Pius X identified as “the synthesis of all errors” in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907): the idea that religious truth is not fixed and immutable but evolves with human consciousness and historical circumstances.
The proposition condemned by the Holy Office in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907) states: “Truth changes with man, because it develops with him, in him, and through him” (prop. 58). This is exactly the philosophical framework Leo XIV employs. By asserting that the Church’s understanding of slavery underwent a “development” from the 15th century to the 19th century, the usurper implicitly denies that the Church possessed the fullness of moral truth from her founding—a direct contradiction of the Catholic teaching that the Church, guided by the Holy Ghost, cannot err in matters of faith and morals.
Pope Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason” (prop. 5). Leo XIV’s encyclical applies this very principle not to abstract theological concepts but to the Church’s own historical magisterium, effectively declaring that popes from Nicholas V to Eugenius IV were morally deficient in their understanding—a claim that strikes at the heart of the Church’s divine constitution.
The Condemnation of Legitimate Papal Acts as a Revolutionary Act
What makes Leo XIV’s encyclical particularly egregious is its explicit critique of specific papal bulls from the 15th century. The usurper writes that popes “intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation” and that “political and, at times, even economic needs overcame the demands of the Gospel.” This is not merely an apology—it is a formal accusation that the Vicars of Christ failed in their sacred duty.
Pope Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) were issued in the context of the Portuguese exploration of West Africa and the ongoing conflict with the Ottoman Empire. These bulls authorized the Portuguese crown to engage in just war against Muslim combatants and to reduce captured enemies to servitude—a practice universally accepted in the law of nations at the time and consistent with the natural law principle that the fruits of a just war belong to the victor. The Church’s teaching authority was exercised in regulating this already-existing practice, not in creating it.
Pope Eugenius IV’s Sicut Dudum (1435) explicitly excommunicated anyone who enslaved Christians or those seeking baptism on the Canary Islands. As Tom Nash himself acknowledges, this bull “did not sanction slavery but instead excommunicated anyone who enslaved Christians.” The bull’s purpose was to protect the most vulnerable—indigenous converts—from the abuses of colonizers, not to endorse the institution of slavery as such.
By framing these legitimate acts of papal governance as moral failures requiring apology, Leo XIV commits the gravest of errors: he judges the Magisterium itself by the standards of a later age, applying anachronistic moral criteria to historical acts that were, in their context, consistent with both natural law and the Church’s teaching authority. This is the very essence of the modernist error condemned by St. Pius X: “The Church listening cooperates in such a way with the Church teaching in defining truths of faith, that the Church teaching should only approve the common opinions of the Church listening” (Lamentabili, prop. 6). Leo XIV effectively subordinates the teaching authority of the Church to the shifting opinions of contemporary secular society.
The Myth of “Gradual Awareness” and the Denial of Infallibility
The claim that a “formal, absolute, and universal condemnation of slavery” was not issued until Pope Leo XIII’s 1888 encyclical is historically and theologically false. As the article itself notes, Pope Paul III’s Sublimis Deus (1537) “strongly rebuked enslavement of Indigenous Americans more than three centuries earlier” and “expressly stated that this prohibition on enslavement of the Indigenous Americans applies regardless of anything that has been issued before, effectively superseding Nicholas V’s papal bulls from a century earlier.”
This is the critical point that Leo XIV’s modernist framework deliberately obscures: the Church has always possessed the fullness of moral truth. The various papal interventions on slavery were not stages in a “gradual development” of doctrine but applications of immutable principles to different historical circumstances. The Church’s teaching on the inherent dignity of every human person—rooted in the natural law and confirmed by divine revelation—has been constant from the beginning.
St. Paul’s teaching is unequivocal: “There is neither slave nor free person… for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The Epistle to Philemon demonstrates that the Christian dispensation fundamentally transforms the relationship between master and slave, elevating the slave to the status of “a brother” (Philemon 16). The Church Fathers, including St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom, consistently taught that slavery was a consequence of sin, not a natural condition. Pope Gregory XVI’s In Supremo Apostolatus (1839) condemned the slave trade in its entirety, and Pope Pius VII actively lobbied for the abolition of the slave trade in the early 19th century.
The notion that the Church “gradually came to a deeper awareness” is a modernist fiction designed to undermine the Church’s claim to infallible teaching authority. If the Church’s moral teaching can “develop” in this manner, then no doctrine is safe from future revision—including the very doctrines that Leo XIV and the conciliar sect have already abandoned: the existence of hell, the necessity of baptism, the sinfulness of contraception, and the uniqueness of Christ’s saving mission.
The Apology as a Weapon Against the Church’s Own History
The most insidious aspect of Leo XIV’s encyclical is its function as a tool of the conciliar revolution’s ongoing war against Tradition. By apologizing for the Church’s historical involvement in slavery, the usurper accomplishes several objectives simultaneously:
First, he reinforces the modernist narrative that the Church has been historically “wrong” on moral matters and has only recently “caught up” to secular standards of justice. This narrative serves to legitimize the conciliar sect’s own departures from traditional teaching, framing them as further “developments” in the same direction.
Second, he implicitly condemns the entire tradition of Catholic moral theology, which for centuries distinguished between the moral legitimacy of various forms of servitude and the absolute moral evil of treating human persons as mere chattel. The Church’s nuanced teaching on just war, legitimate authority, and the natural law distinctions between different forms of subjugation is reduced to a simple narrative of guilt and apology.
Third, he provides ammunition for those who wish to subject the Church’s teaching authority to external judgment—whether from secular governments, international organizations, or the court of public opinion. If the Church must apologize for the acts of 15th-century popes, then by what authority does she claim to teach infallibly on any moral matter today?
This is precisely the error condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors: “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (prop. 80). Leo XIV’s apology is not an act of humility but an act of capitulation—a surrender of the Church’s divine authority to the spirit of the age.
The Silence on the Church’s True Teaching
What is conspicuously absent from Leo XIV’s encyclical is any affirmation of the Church’s constant teaching on the inherent dignity of every human person, created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27). There is no mention of the Church’s tireless work in evangelizing and baptizing millions of enslaved persons throughout history, nor of the countless saints—including St. Callistus I, a former slave who became pope and martyr—who lived and died in witness to the equal dignity of all human persons in Christ.
There is no acknowledgment that the Church’s “delay” in issuing a universal condemnation of slavery was not a failure of moral perception but a prudent application of the natural law principle that the Church must work within the conditions of the societies she seeks to evangelize, gradually elevating them to the fullness of Christian truth rather than imposing abstract ideals that would be rejected and cause greater harm.
Most critically, there is no mention of the Church’s teaching that the primary slavery is the slavery of sin—that all human persons, free and enslaved alike, are slaves of sin until liberated by the grace of Christ (Romans 6:6-7). The Church’s mission has always been to liberate souls from the bondage of Satan, not merely to reform temporal institutions. By reducing the Church’s moral teaching to a question of social justice, Leo XIV reveals the naturalistic and modernist character of his entire pontificate.
The Conciliar Sect’s Pattern of Self-Flagellation
Leo XIV’s apology for slavery follows a well-established pattern of the conciliar sect’s self-flagellation that began with John Paul II’s numerous apologies for historical “sins” of the Church. This pattern serves a specific ideological function: by constantly apologizing for the past, the conciliar sect creates the impression that the Church has been historically deficient in her moral teaching, thereby legitimizing her present departures from traditional doctrine.
The same logic that leads Leo XIV to apologize for 15th-century papal bulls leads the conciliar sect to apologize for the Church’s teaching on the morality of homosexuality, the indissolubility of marriage, the existence of hell, and the necessity of Catholic baptism. Each apology is a step further along the path of total capitulation to the spirit of the world—the very spirit that St. John identifies as “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16).
Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical Quas Primas (1925), warned that the rejection of Christ’s kingship over human society would lead to “seeds of discord sown everywhere, flames of envy and hostility” and “the whole society profoundly shaken and heading towards destruction.” Leo XIV’s apology is not a step toward peace and reconciliation but a further manifestation of the secularism that Pius XI identified as “the plague that poisons human society.”
Conclusion: The True Face of the Conciliar Revolution
Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is not a genuine act of repentance but a calculated act of revolutionary warfare against the Church’s own Tradition. By condemning the legitimate acts of past popes, by framing the Church’s moral teaching as subject to “development,” and by capitulating to the spirit of the age, the usurper reveals the true character of the conciliar sect: it is not the Catholic Church but a counterfeit institution that has abandoned the faith of the Apostles and substituted the ever-changing opinions of the world for the immutable truth of the Gospel.
The true Catholic response to this apostasy is not to join in the self-flagellation but to affirm with St. Paul: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema” (Galatians 1:8). The Church’s teaching on the dignity of every human person has always been true and constant. What has changed is not the Church’s doctrine but the courage of her professed leaders to proclaim it without apology or compromise.
Source:
Pope Leo XIV Builds On Teachings of Prior Pontiffs With Apology for Slavery, Church’s Role (ncregister.com)
Date: 09.06.2026