Georgetown University – which has been at the center of the U.S. Catholic Church’s acknowledgement and reckoning of its involvement with slavery – hosted a Nov. 9 dialogue where panelists praised Pope Leo XIV’s slavery apology in his recent encyclical on artificial intelligence, saying it offered a call to action to work for healing and justice.
Panelist Rachel L. Swarns said she was “deeply and profoundly moved” by the words of Pope Leo, who called slavery “a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached.”
Her 2023 book “The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church,” chronicled the story of how in 1838, the Maryland Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, sold 272 enslaved men, women and children to Louisiana sugar plantation owners, and that sale helped ensure the financial survival of Georgetown College, now the university.
She noted that the pope in his encyclical letter “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” was “explicitly acknowledging the Church’s complicity in condoning and legitimizing the slave trade. He was explicitly asking for pardon, and he was saying quite clearly that… these efforts at atonement, should be happening now.”
Swarns – a journalist and contributing writer for The New York Times and an associate professor of journalism at New York University – was among the panelists at the Dahlgren Dialogue on “Repentance, Repair and Prevention: Slavery and Human Dignity in Magnifica Humanitas.” The dialogue was sponsored by Georgetown University’s Office of Mission & Ministry, the university’s Center for the Study of Slavery and its Legacies, and Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life.
The panelists also included Washington Auxiliary Bishop Robert P. Boxie III; Adam Rothman, the director of Georgetown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies; and Sister Mūmbi Kīgūtha, a member of the Sisters of the Precious Blood of Dayton, Ohio, who serves as the president of Friends in Solidarity that promotes awareness and provides support for people in South Sudan and other African nations.
Like the other panelists that evening, Swarns emphasized that the pope was issuing a call for reflection and action to address the continuing impact of that injustice.
“So we cannot turn our backs, and I think it was very important for him to raise his voice in this way and in this time, and I think that the Church can play a very important role in this way and in this time,” Swarns said.
That point was emphasized in opening remarks by Joseph Ferrera, Georgetown’s senior vice president for strategic engagement, who noted how following the recommendations of a working group, in 2017 the president of Georgetown, the leadership of the North American Jesuits and the Archdiocese of Washington offered an apology to descendants for perpetuating the injustice of slavery and the enslavement of their ancestors. The university has also pledged to raise $100 million for the Descendants Truth and Reconciliation Foundation.
Ferrera noted how in the encyclical after asking for pardon for the Church’s involvement with slavery and the suffering it caused, the pontiff wrote, “This is why the memory of past complicity and blindness in the face of the injustice of slavery becomes a call to vigilance. What we have learned must be translated into discernment and responsibility in the present.”
“I am reminded of how much work remains to be done,” the Georgetown administrator said, adding, “An apology, even one offered with the deepest humility, is still only a beginning. What follows is engagement and action, as the pope says.”
The dialogue’s moderator – Kimberly Mazyck, the associate director of engagement at the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life – like other speakers that evening commented on Georgetown’s historic connection to slavery.
“I’m a Hoya, and as a Hoya, I owe my cherished degree to the men, women, and children whose dignity was disregarded in order to save this university,” Mazyck said.
Bishop Boxie in his remarks said it might seem that the issues of slavery and artificial intelligence in Pope Leo’s encyclical are unrelated, but the document’s emphasis on safeguarding human dignity ties together past injustices and emerging technologies.
“Slavery and the systems that allowed it to take hold reduced persons to economic value, property, prosperity for someone else, really denying that full dignity that they were given by the simple fact of being created in the image and likeness of God,” the bishop said, adding, “AI has a related harm. It’s run by algorithms, data collection, efficiency, profitability... You can’t determine the value of a human by what they produce or what they’re worth or their economic output.”
“Technology isn’t the enemy, but it must progress along moral lines,” Bishop Boxie said. “We risk digitizing the very injustices that we are trying to overcome… We should insist that yesterday’s moral failures do not become repeated through the technologies of tomorrow.”
In her remarks, Sister Mūmbi Kīgūtha said “new forms of slavery are emerging. Slavery has never really disappeared from this earth.”
She noted how children in the world are being exploited as laborers and as child soldiers, and how young women from Africa and Asia sometimes end up as domestic workers in the Middle East in a “modern form of slavery,” drawn to abusive lives by technology, as were the African men lured to fight for Russia in that country’s war against Ukraine. Sister Mūmbi also pointed out a recent documentary exposed how human trafficking of young girls is happening in Washington, D.C., not far from the U.S. Capitol.
Adam Rothman underscored how Pope Leo in Magnifica Humanitas identified new forms of slavery connected to artificial intelligence and related technological advances, “for example, the exploitation connected to the mining of rare earth metals, (and) the exploitation of data workers who train the AI models, (who are) often underpaid and overworked.”
Bishop Boxie said slavery is an issue that the Church and this country have not fully reckoned with. “We’re attached to this wound not just by history, but because this painful history has consequences today, what we experience right now in 21st century America. Yes, slavery was abolished legally, but the attitudes, the inequalities, the structures, the systems, the distorted understandings of the human person that allowed it to happen still remain,” he said.
The bishop pointed out how a new national survey by CARA, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, found that “Sixty-seven percent of those in the survey agree that racism could end if we contend with the policies and institutional barriers that perpetuate it and preserve it. Forty percent of Catholics have experienced race discrimination. That’s right now, and the highest (rates are) among Blacks and Latinos and Asians. Sixty percent of folks believe that racism still exists in their community.”
Then he added, “We haven’t addressed it, folks.”
Catholics as people of faith need to have “hard conversations” about these issues, “because ultimately all of us seek reconciliation, which is really a restoring of our relationship with God, with one another and with ourselves,” Bishop Boxie said.
He emphasized that the Church with its Catholic social teachings on human dignity and solidarity and its commitment to truth and healing has “an automatic framework to go about this work of healing and restoration.”
Adam Rothman, who is a professor of history at Georgetown in addition to leading the university’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies, noted how the first marriage record at neighboring Holy Trinity Parish in Washington from 1795 records the marriage of a free man of color with an enslaved woman in “the college chapel.”
That is one of many records that show the close connection of Georgetown University with the history of slavery, which he said is “a difficult history, but a history that’s very present with us.”
He noted that Pope Leo’s acknowledgement of the Church’s involvement with slavery and his apology come at a time when people “don’t want us to examine our history because it brings up feelings of discomfort and shame.”
Swarns said that reluctance to confront history is not only coming from state, local and national officials, sometimes it comes from “the folks who we’re sitting next to in the pews. Sometimes it comes from our clergy. To be Black and Catholic in this country is to be painfully aware of just how much work needs to be done,” she said.
The pope’s “call to vigilance” in addressing the historic legacy and impact of slavery can be seen in the work of groups like CROSS (Catholic Religious Organizations Studying Slavery) that hosted a conference at Georgetown last year, Rothman said, noting they are combing Church archival records to bring that history to light.
Students at nearby Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School, which was founded in 1799 and is sponsored by the Visitation sisters, study their school’s historic connections to slavery, and students at the Jesuits’ Gonzaga College High School, which was founded in Washington in 1821, are also engaged in those studies.
The history professor said Catholic institutions can “provide spaces and opportunities for education about this history, for reflection about this history, and for reconciliation and repair.”
As a reporter for The New York Times in 2016, Rachel Swarns learned about and wrote a series of articles on the 1838 sale of 272 enslaved men, women and children that sustained the financial survival of Georgetown. “I’m Black and Catholic, and I had no idea, and I was not alone in that,” she said.
At that time, only a handful of descendants had been identified, and now there are known to be more than 6,000 living descendants. Her New York Times articles and her book chronicled the stories not only of the enslaved people in that sale, but also how their descendants have come to learn about their families’ stories.
Since then, developments, like the Jesuits adopting the first high school curriculum about the Church’s connection to slavery, and the pope’s encyclical, point the way forward, “and are really meaningful to me,” Swarns said.
“People would sometimes say to me, ‘Oh, you know, you’re Black and practicing, and you do this work, and it’s such painful history. That must be so hard.’ And it is painful. And it is hard,” Swarns said, adding, “But I also have to tell you that spending time in these records, these kinds of records that Adam was describing, and spending time with descendants has also really deepened my faith. I feel inspired by the struggles of the people that I have learned about and their faith, and it has helped me to see my own connections to the Church far more clearly than I ever did.”
Bishop Boxie – one of the country’s African American bishops who at 46 years old is the nation’s youngest Catholic bishop – noted that Pope Leo’s “personal family history” may have shaped the pontiff’s reflection on slavery in his recent encyclical. The pope’s maternal grandparents were listed in census documents as being Black or mulatto.
Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas “offers a program for us right now,” Bishop Boxie said, adding that the laity and the clergy are “co-responsible” for where the pope and the Holy Spirit are leading the Church in that work for reckoning with the past and building the future.
“I think we have more power as individuals, as citizens, as parishioners, as members of the Body of Christ, than we think” the bishop said.
Reflecting on that work, Sister Mūmbi said, “Peace building is not just cultivating a culture of reconciliation. It’s also providing the basic necessities, ensuring that people have access to shelter, food, water, health care and education. And this is not just an issue in countries facing conflict. This is an issue right here in America, that there are more people now going hungry than ever before.”
In her closing remarks, Rachel Swarns noted how Pope Leo wrote about the deep sorrow that should be felt by the Church when contemplating the “immense suffering and humiliation endured” by those who were enslaved.
The pontiff is emphasizing the importance “of being present with people in their struggles, in their suffering, so that when you are learning, reading, researching and also listening with full hearts to folks when they discuss their wounds, these historic ones and the ones that we’re still living with, I feel like that is one of the most important steps that we can take toward reconciliation,” Swarns said.
Sister Mūmbi said she hopes that “reckoning with slavery leads to reckoning with so many other things that are interconnected,” including ways that people continue to be stripped of their dignity today. Reconciliation “is a practice we need to inculcate in our everyday living,” she said.
Adam Rothman quoted John DeGioia, Georgetown’s former president who launched its reconciliation efforts and once said, “A knowledge of history can expand our moral imaginations.”
“Knowing history gives us an opportunity to break these cycles of history, those patterns that seem to repeat and repeat. It gives us that possibility of transcendence. I guess that’s my hope,” Rothman said.
Bishop Boxie said that as Georgetown students learn about their university’s history and later graduate and move out into the world, he hopes their hearts are transformed to “do something about it as citizens of this country, citizens of the world, and as members of the Church, that they feel compelled to work on healing and reconciliation, because what they received here at this university is directly tied to this painful legacy of slavery.”
