Yesterday, in a carefully staged Vatican audience, Pope Francis issued an apology for the Catholic Church's historic role in the transatlantic slave trade. It was a moment freighted with symbolism, and promptly hailed by British officials as a 'historic move' that could strengthen Commonwealth ties. But on the streets of London, Manchester and Bristol, the reaction was more complex.
In the crowded market of Wood Green, where the scent of plantain and jollof rice mingles with the exhaust fumes of buses, I met Angela, a 47-year-old nurse whose great-grandfather was brought to Jamaica in chains. 'An apology is words,' she said, adjusting her NHS lanyard. 'What about the wealth?
What about the statues?' Her scepticism is understandable. The Pope's statement, while unprecedented in its directness, comes nearly two centuries after Britain abolished the slave trade.
It lands in a nation still grappling with the legacies of empire, from the Windrush scandal to the toppling of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol. The government's enthusiasm for the apology as a diplomatic tool feels, to many, like a convenient narrative: that a papal mea culpa can somehow tidy up the messy, ongoing business of racial inequality. Yet, for others, the apology matters deeply.
In a Catholic school in Liverpool, Sister Margaret told me her students had been discussing it all morning. 'For the young ones, especially the black children, it gives them a sense that the Church sees their history,' she said. 'It opens a door.
' That door, however, leads not to a neat resolution but to a long, uncomfortable conversation about restitution, reparations and what it means to be truly sorry. The Commonwealth, that post-imperial club of 56 nations, is itself a living archive of that history. Many of its members were shaped by the slave trade and colonial exploitation.
An apology from the Vatican may ease some tensions, but it will not erase the economic disparities or the lingering cultural wounds. In Brixton, where the black British experience is etched into every street corner, a young man named Kwame put it bluntly: 'Tell the Pope to send a cheque.' The social psychology of apology is fragile.
It requires not only words but actions. As Britain looks to redefine its global role post-Brexit, the Pope's gesture is a reminder that the past is never truly past. It lives in the gaps in our school curricula, in the disparities in our hospitals, in the names we give our roads.
What the Pope said yesterday was important. But what happens next, in the classrooms, the churches and the corridors of power, will determine whether it becomes a footnote or a turning point.
