From Papal Bulls to Black Boxes: Pope Leo’s Apology Demands Reparative AI
When Pope Leo XIV apologized this week for the Catholic Church’s role in legitimizing slavery, he did more than name a “wound in Christian memory.” He acknowledged that the Church helped design an economic order built on African bondage. In the same encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, he warns that artificial intelligence, left to existing market logics, risks ushering in new forms of “modern slavery and colonialism.” That pairing is not accidental. It should transform how we talk about AI, reparations, and who this new technological order is really for.
I write on racial economics and reparations, and I’ve argued elsewhere that AI should be governed as an intellectual commons—with structures that deliberately repair, rather than deepen, racial injustice. Pope Leo has now given the global public a vivid moral frame for that argument. If an institution that once sacralized racialized expropriation can finally admit its complicity, then it cannot be content with vague calls for “ethical AI.” It must support AI governance that is explicitly reparative.
Historically, papal authority did not just bless souls; it blessed systems. Fifteenth‑ and sixteenth‑century papal bulls gave European empires permission to conquer, dispossess, and enslave non‑Christian peoples in Africa and the Americas. Those documents helped legitimate a trans‑Atlantic economy that treated African life as collateral and Black bodies as capital. The racial wealth gaps we measure today are not incidental; they are the compound interest on that original design.
Pope Leo’s apology matters because he names this as institutional failure, not just the sin of individual Catholics. He acknowledges that past popes advanced and legitimized slavery, and he asks forgiveness “in the name of the Church.” That is a rare kind of admission: one of the longest‑standing institutions on earth confessing that its own decisions helped construct the global racial order.
But Magnifica Humanitas is not mainly about history. Its central focus is on artificial intelligence, which Leo calls one of the defining challenges of our time. He warns that, in the absence of strong guardrails, AI will magnify existing inequalities, concentrate power in the hands of those who already control capital and data, and create new forms of exploitation in supply chains and digital labor. He is clear that AI must be governed so that its benefits are “universally intended for everyone,” not captured by a small group of firms and governments.
This is where the conversation about AI ethics has to grow up. “For everyone” sounds generous, but in economic terms it is neutral. It does not distinguish between communities that have historically been positioned as the raw material of other people’s progress and those that have accumulated wealth through that extraction. Neutral universalism in a deeply unequal world will simply reproduce the status quo.
A reparative approach to AI starts from a different premise: that Black communities and other peoples targeted by enslavement and colonialism have specific claims on the design, ownership, and benefits of emerging systems. The same racialized political economy that financed cathedrals, banks, and universities also built the industrial base, research institutions, and corporate giants now driving AI. That history creates obligations in the present.
What would it mean to take Pope Leo’s apology seriously in the AI arena?
First, it would mean treating AI infrastructures—data, models, compute—as a kind of commons, but not an abstract or ownerless one. Black and African‑diaspora communities should have co‑governance over how data about them is collected, used, and monetized. That implies community‑controlled data trusts, where access to information is negotiated and value flows back into the communities whose lives and histories are being modeled.
Second, it would mean attaching reparative obligations to AI profits. When high‑value models are trained on data drawn from racialized populations, or depend on hardware supply chains sustained by underpaid workers and resource extraction in the Global South, some share of their returns should be earmarked for reparations funds and community‑owned AI capacity. The point is not charity; it is repayment of long‑running debts.
Third, it would require institutions that are now confessing their role in past injustice to put material skin in the game. Catholic institutions that benefited, directly or indirectly, from slavery and colonialism could commit capital to Black‑led AI cooperatives, education pipelines, and community tech centers. They could use their influence to demand that AI regulation include reparative principles, not just generic risk management.
Finally, it would require that those most affected by earlier regimes of racial control hold seats in the rooms where AI standards are written and governance regimes are designed. If AI is going to be a new global infrastructure, then Black communities and formerly colonized peoples must be architects, not just subjects.
Pope Leo has, perhaps unintentionally, linked two debates that are usually kept separate: the fight over reparations for slavery and the scramble to govern AI. His encyclical insists that the Church must remember its complicity in the past even as it confronts the technologies of the future. That is the right instinct. A future‑oriented ethics that refuses to name historical theft will only automate that theft in new ways.
We stand at a fork in the road. One path turns AI into another layer of extraction built on old wounds. The other treats AI as an opportunity to redistribute power, wealth, and knowledge toward those who were once deemed expendable. An apology without structural change is sentiment. An apology that helps build a reparative AI commons could be the beginning of justice.
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Enith Martin Williams
Enith Martin Williams is Founder & Executive Director of the Center for Reparations Finance and Practice, and Reparations Finance Lab.