Pope Leo arrives in Angola as feud with Trump continues

Pope Leo arrived in Angola on April 18 for the third leg of his landmark African tour, where he is scheduled to visit the Church of Our Lady of Muxima on Sunday. The 16th-century white-walled church, built by Portuguese colonizers as part of a fortress complex, served as a critical point where enslaved Africans were gathered to be baptized before being forced to march 145 kilometers to Angola's main port of Luanda and shipped to the Americas. More than 5 million people left Angola via the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the largest number from any country and nearly half of the approximately 12.5 million Africans sent across the ocean. The church later became a pilgrimage site after believers reported an appearance by the Virgin Mary around 1833. The visit carries particular significance given recent revelations about Leo's own heritage. A genealogist in the United States discovered that the first American pope, born Robert Prevost, has Creole ancestry with maternal great-grandparents described as people of color in Louisiana census records, including both enslaved people and slave owners. Some of the first slaves to arrive in Louisiana were sent from Angola, according to historians. The pontiff has not spoken publicly about this heritage, but historians note the symbolic weight of an American pope with connections to both enslaved and slave-owning ancestors visiting a site central to the slave trade. Throughout his Africa trip, Leo has delivered pointed warnings against corruption, the exploitation of the continent's resources, and authoritarianism, without directly naming his targets. In Cameroon, he condemned those who "in the name of profit, continue to seize the African continent to exploit and plunder it." Angola, which was a Portuguese colony until 1975 and emerged from a 27-year civil war in 2002, still grapples with poverty despite its oil and diamond wealth, with a third of its 37 million people living below the poverty line. An opposition lawmaker said he hoped the pope would bring a forceful message calling for social justice, while Father Celestino Epalanga, a local priest, said he would ask the pope to tell bishops to be "more committed to the poor and to social justice."