In Paragraph 176 of a document largely about artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV asks forgiveness for the Catholic Church’s approval of the enslavement of African people. At that time, the Holy See and the bishops of the United States did not oppose the institution of human slavery. Nor did the church definitively condemn human slavery until Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical “In Plurimis” in 1888. If all that had happened, many African American people would have felt welcome in the Catholic Church rather than seeking their spiritual homes in Baptist churches and establishing the African Methodist Episcopal Church. This history gives Paragraph 176 of “Magnifica Humanitas” an added significance—not because of any implications concerning the pope’s personal racial identity, but because it suggests a familial link between him and the African and African American peoples about whom he writes in the paragraph.