Pontiff Recalls Horror of Slave Depot in Senegal

Pope John Paul II, speaking on a notorious slave island, prayed Saturday for forgiveness for the “horrible aberration” of slavery that Christian white men committed in their pillage of Africa.

“From this African sanctuary of black pain, we implore forgiveness from heaven,” the Pope said on an emotional visit to the island from which tens of thousands of slaves were shipped to the New World until the early 19th Century.

He denounced “the horrible aberration of those who reduced to slavery the brothers and sisters the Gospel had destined for freedom.”

The Pope spoke in somber tones during a visit to the “House of Slaves,” a faded pink colonial building where slaves were herded and selected while awaiting ships bound for America.

Now a museum, the two-story house looking out on the Atlantic has rooms where the slaves were sorted according to age and sex, shackled and kept for up to three months in dark, cramped cells while waiting to be shipped.

They were force-fed if they weighed below the required 132 pounds and then passed through the “door of no return” onto the ships that were part of a trade run mostly by Christian Europeans.

Goree Island has become a place of pilgrimage for black Americans since 1977, when the bestseller “Roots” by the late Alex Haley sparked new interest in slave history.

The Pope leaves Senegal today for Gambia, the second leg of an eight-day West African tour that will also take him to Guinea.