For more than 400 years, Black African men, women, and children suffered the worst forms of enslavement and humiliation during the transatlantic slave trade at the hands of Catholics and Western Christianity. Back then, as today, no one believed in the deep involvement of the Church and the papacy in the Black African Holocaust. Despite recent claims from the papal office in Rome that the popes condemned all forms of slavery, including the enslavement of Black Africans, newer studies within this field of research point to the opposite. The Church and the popes played central roles in this greatest crime against Black Africans since the beginning of written documentation. Utilizing numerous papal bulls from the secret archives of the Vatican and a variety of royal documents from the Portuguese National Archive in Lisbon, this volume aims for a critical and analytical examination of this aspect of the transatlantic slave trade, which has been obscured by Western historians and scholars for so many years.