Well, isn’t this interesting?
Over there at Mediaite is this headline: “Pope Leo Makes Historic Public Apology for Vatican’s Complicity in Slavery,” but silence on reparations.
This jewel of a story reports:
Pope Leo XIV issued the first explicit papal apology for the Vatican’s role in legitimizing slavery through the rulings of past pontiffs, calling the delay in acknowledging the Holy See’s role “a wound in Christian memory.”
The historic admission came in the first encyclical of the U.S.-born pontiff, Magnifica Humanitas, a sweeping document published Monday focused largely on artificial intelligence and modern forms of exploitation. But the text also directly addressed centuries of criticism over the Catholic Church’s involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote.
That the pope would feel compelled to apologize for “the Vatican’s role in legitimizing slavery through the rulings of past pontiffs” is interesting on its own.
But it also raises a question for Americans. Namely: If an apology for supporting slavery is good enough for the Church based in Rome, what about an apology from the American Democratic Party? The Democrats, it appears to be forgotten, were strong supporters of, yes, slavery.
A look back at, say, the 1852 Democrat Party Platform and one finds it saying:
That Congress has no power under the Constitution to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of the Several states, and that such States are the sole and proper judges of everything appertaining to their own affairs not prohibited by the Constitution; that all efforts of the abolitionists or others made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences; and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union, and ought not to be countenanced by any friend of our political institutions.
It goes on to add: “Resolved, That the Democratic Party will resist all attempts at renewing in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question, under whatever shape or color the attempt may be made.”
In other words? In other words leave the Democrat support for slavery alone.
Safe to say there were other Democrat platforms expressing this view.
Which brings us back to the apology from the current Catholic Pope Leo XIV for issuing “the first explicit papal apology for the Vatican’s role in legitimizing slavery.”
If a public apology for supporting slavery is good enough for the Catholic Church, it should be more than good enough for America’s Democrats.
Why the silence on a slavery apology from, say, Congresswoman AOC? Former President Joe Biden? The Democratic National Committee? Senate Democrat Leader Charles Schumer of New York? Democrat Senators with names like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Christopher Murphy, and others? Not to mention any and every Democrat planning on running for president in 2028?
It is hard historical fact that the Democrat Party is out there on the historical record with support for slavery, with nary a peep of apology.
Will this change? It would certainly seem, again, that if an apology for supporting slavery has finally been made by the pope on behalf of the Catholic Church, the Democrat Party would be more than capable of doing the same.
Keep checking.
But don’t hold your breath.
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