In doing so, Leo responded to decades of calls by Black American Catholics, activists and scholars for the Holy See. VATICAN CITY, — Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the role the Holy See itself played in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.” Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope has ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes themselves played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and…