The Church Remorseful

Today’s Policy is Tomorrow’s Apology

Since the Second Vatican Council, popes have issued formal apologies for what they consider some of the gravest institutional failures in Christian history. The cumulative weight of those apologies sits uneasily alongside the Church’s increasingly assertive commentary on the socio-political questions of our own age.

The subject of papal apologies is often derailed by convoluted discussions over what constitutes an apology, whether the apology was warranted, whether a given pope’s apology was sufficient, and so on. While these are all valid and interesting questions, we are going to set them aside for the purposes of this essay, which is construing the term apology more broadly as any public statement—whether framed as an expression of sorrow, an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, a request for forgiveness, or an act of penitence—in which a pope recognizes that harm was done by representatives of the Church and expresses solidarity, to whatever degree, with the perspective of those harmed.

Understood thus, the post-Conciliar era offers an interesting litany of papal apologies for the Church’s history.

The post-Conciliar apologies can be said to have begun with the historic 1965 joint declaration of Paul VI and Athenagoras of Constantinople, after their historic meeting at the Mount of Olives the previous year. The joint declaration is not a formal “apology” per se, but it contains all the essential elements of an apology. There is a recounting of “painful incidents” and “excesses,” and a statement that the pope and patriarch “deplore…events which “led to the effective rupture of ecclesiastical communion” in 1054. There was a request for “mutual pardon” and expression of “regret for historical wrongs.” The 1965 joint declaration is thus widely regarded as a penitential act of historic significance—the pope highlights an aspect of Church history where he finds fault with the actions of the Church or its representatives, expresses regret at said actions, and pledges a course correction. It is clear that he is sorry for the Church’s role in the schism.

But it is Pope John Paul II who was the papal apologizer par excellence. It is estimated that he issued around 100 public expressions of contrition on behalf of the Church, far more than any of his predecessors. Indeed, John Paul II’s apologies were so many it would be tedious to list each one. A few of the more notable include, in chronological order:

In August of 1985 during a trip to Cameroon he apologized to Africans for Catholic complicity in the slave trade.

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In 1992 he addressed the Galileo controversy, calling the affair a “painful misunderstanding” and “tragic mutual incomprehension” involving Galileo and the Church.

That same year the pontiff apologized to indigenous peoples of Latin America for “pain and suffering” caused during the Church’s 500-year presence in the Americas, during a visit to the Dominican Republic.

In 1998 he apologized for missionary abuses against aboriginal peoples in Oceania. This was reaffirmed by a formal apology in the 2001 document Ecclesia in Oceania.

In one of his more notable apologies, John Paul II’s 1995 “Letter to Women,” apologized for the Church’s historical role in the marginalization of women and for failures of its own members in relation to the treatment of women, for which he was “truly sorry.”

In March 1998 the Vatican’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, expressing sorrow for the silence and inaction of many Catholics during the Holocaust.

In December 1999, John Paul II expressed “deep regret” for the execution of Czech reformer Jan Hus in 1415 at the Council of Constance.

On March 12, 2000, John Paul II celebrated the “Day of Pardon” Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica during the Great Jubilee, formally asking forgiveness for a broad catalogue of Church sins, including: the Crusades and religious wars, the Inquisition, offenses against Jews, wrongs against women, violations of human rights, and divisions among Christians, and all acts of “discrimination, exclusion, and oppression.” This became the occasion of an entire document by the International Theological Commission entitled Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past.

Less than two weeks later, he visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and prayed for the victims of the Holocaust, expressing sorrow for the failures of Christians who did not act.

In May of 2001 he apologized to the Greek Orthodox Church for the Catholic crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204, during a visit to Athens.

In October of the same year the pope apologized to China for the conduct of Catholic missionaries during the colonial era.

The following month he issued an apology (via email, notably the first digital papal apology) for clerical sexual abuse and for the Church-backed forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families in Australia, the so-called “Stolen Generations.”

Pope Benedict XVI continued his predecessor’s apology tour. During his 2008 visit to the United States, Benedict expressed personal sorrow to victims of clerical sex abuse during his visit to the United States, telling them he was “deeply ashamed.”

His 2010 Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland likewise apologized to victims of clerical sexual abuse, saying he was “truly sorry” for the betrayal of trust and criticizing Church leaders’ “grave errors of judgment” in failing to respond adequately.

In September of 2006, Pope Benedict inaugurated a papal first by addressing his own statements in his famous Regensburg Lecture. The pope expressed a waffling apology, not for his comments directly, but for the way they were received.

The public apologies of Benedict XVI were notable for this kind of circumlocution, as the pope preferred apologies for secondary level effects, like how things were received or handled after the fact, rather than deploring events or words themselves, for which his apologies were frequently lambasted as not “true” apologies.

Pope Francis was far more explicit in the nature of his apologies, of which we have many examples.

In July 2015, he apologized in Santa Cruz, Bolivia for the Church’s “grave sins” against indigenous peoples during the colonial conquest of the Americas, going further than his predecessors by explicitly asking forgiveness for the crimes of the institutional Church, not only its individual members.

In July 2016 Francis said the Catholic Church owes an apology to gay people (and others it has marginalized), during an in-flight press conference returning from Armenia. Francis’s statements here were quite sweeping, suggesting that “as Christians, we should apologize over and over again,” not only for the treatment of gays, but for failure to help families in need, for ostracism of divorced persons, for failure to help the poor, and a litany of other sins of omission.

In January 2018 Francis issued a written apology to Chilean bishops and abuse victims, acknowledging serious mistakes in his own handling of the case of Bishop Juan Barros, who was accused of covering up abuse by serial abuser Fr. Fernando Karadima. The pope expressed “sorrow and shame” and asked for forgiveness.

Pope Francis expressed apologies for clerical sex abuse scandals on multiple occasions: in his 2018 “Letter to the People of God,” issued in response to the Pennsylvania grand jury report and accelerating global revelations; in 2018 to Irish abuse victims during his visit to Dublin; and in July 2022 in Quebec City, promising “never again” would the Church collude with such evil.

The year 2022 saw two apologies by Francis relating to the Church’s missionary work in Canada. In April he apologized at the Vatican to delegations of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples from Canada for the Catholic Church’s role in the residential school system, saying he felt “indignation and shame.” In July this was followed up by a formal on-soil apology in Alberta, Canada, asking forgiveness for the Church’s co-operation in the residential school system and its destruction of indigenous cultural identity. He described the trip as a “penitential pilgrimage.” It should be noted these apologies were issued in wake of the much-publicized announcement of hundreds of mass graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. It has subsequently been clarified that the alleged “mass graves” were merely inferred, not discovered. To date, not a single grave has been excavated at Kamloops, not a single body discovered, not a single bone fragment retrieved.

One of Francis’s more humorous apologies came in May 2024 after reports surfaced that he used an anti-gay slur (frociaggine) in a closed-door meeting with Italian bishops. The Vatican statement said he “never meant to offend or use homophobic language.”