On the banks of Angola’s Kwanza River stands a 430-year-old white-washed church that holds a deeply layered, painful history: built by Portuguese colonizers as part of a 16th-century fortress complex, the Church of Our Lady of Muxima long served as a critical node in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Today, as Pope Leo XIV prepares to visit the site during his first papal tour of Africa, the stop has emerged as a symbolic moment of reckoning, reconciliation, and reimagining for the global Catholic Church.
Pope Leo XIV’s visit to an African church linked to slavery reflects on his own complex heritage
