Pope Leo XIV is spending this Saturday in a small Peruvian town with a painful history. He is expected to lead a prayer meeting in Zaña, in northern Peru, a place UNESCO recognized in 2017 as a “site of memory of slavery and African cultural heritage,” the Associated Press reports. The visit is shining a light on Afro-Peruvians, the descendants of enslaved Africans brought to Peru centuries ago.
The stop comes near the end of a 12-day apostolic journey to South America. Earlier in the week, the pope returned to Chiclayo, the diocese he led as bishop before his election, where the Vatican estimated a million people lined his motorcade route. We reported on that homecoming in Pope Leo Returns to Peru, His ‘Homeland’.
A history many people never learned
After the Spanish conquest, an estimated 100,000 enslaved Africans were brought to Peru, according to the AP. They worked on sugar plantations and in silver mines, and some became craftsmen in the cities. At one point, enslaved people and their descendants made up more than 40% of Lima’s population. More than 170 years after emancipation, Black Peruvians remain a small share of the country’s roughly 35 million people and still struggle to get ahead.
In Zaña, the pope will pray at a sanctuary dedicated to St. Turibius of Mogrovejo, the 16th-century archbishop of Lima who defended the rights of Indigenous and enslaved people. The AP notes that Leo often prayed there when he was bishop of nearby Chiclayo, and that in his first encyclical he apologized for the role past popes played in legitimizing slavery.
When the pope arrived in Peru, he was greeted by the Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca, who became Peru’s first Black Cabinet minister. “We are an Afro-Peruvian people who have learned to forgive,” she told the AP.
What the Bible says about one human family
Long before any empire divided people by color or birth, Scripture taught that every person bears the mark of the same Creator. Speaking to the philosophers of Athens, the apostle Paul put it plainly:
“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;” — Acts 17:26 (KJV)
That verse does not erase the wounds of history. It does tell us how God sees them. Slavery treated people made in His image as property. The gospel says they were always sons and daughters, of one blood with everyone who claimed to own them.
Baca’s words about forgiveness are worth sitting with, too. Forgiveness in the Bible is never pretending that wrong was not wrong. It is choosing, with God’s help, not to let the wrong have the last word. Our recent reflection on Ephesians 4:32 and kindness explores that same call to be “tenderhearted, forgiving one another.”
Why it matters for families
- Learn the history together. Many children, and many adults, have never heard that hundreds of thousands of Africans were enslaved in Latin America. Look up Afro-Peruvian music or food together this weekend as a starting point.
- Read Acts 17 as a family. Ask: what does it mean that God made every nation “of one blood”? How should that change the way we treat people who look different from us?
- Talk about forgiveness honestly. Forgiving someone does not mean what they did was okay. It means we trust God with justice.
Read more: A Very Present Help: Psalm 46 for a Week of Sudden Loss
How does your church teach about the one human family in Acts 17? Share in the comments.
Sources: AP via Yahoo News, “Pope’s visit to hub of Afro-Peruvian community casts spotlight on African slave trade to Peru” (November 2026); AP via KTVO, “AP News Summary at 3:08 a.m. EST” (November 14, 2026); AP via The Bakersfield Californian, “AP News Summary” (November 14, 2026); Acts 17:26, King James Version
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