May. 25, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

ByHelaine R. I am

No one should be surprised that a reality show star-turned-social media influencer can do well in a political race. We just need to look to the White House to know that. They have a knack for speaking uncomfortable truths in a way that gets maximum attention.

What is forever the shock at who is doing that. So, let me get this out of the way at the outset: No, I don’t support Spencer Pratt’s quest for mayor of Los Angeles. I have even donated to one of his opponents, Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman. But I am surprised to discover that I owe Pratt – yes, the same Spencer Pratt best known as the villainous, troublemaking cad on the MTV’s The Hills – a debt of gratitude for interjecting a much-needed dose of reality into the city’s mayoral race.

A registered Republican in a largely Democratic city, Pratt is shaking up what looked to be a sleepy mayoral election. He has jumped to second place in the polls by using social media (including supporter-generated AI content) to channel voter rage at not just the city’s striking deterioration, but the political establishment’s seemingly complacent attitude toward it. He’s particularly highlighted the failures that led to the devastating Pacific Palisades wildfire – in which Pratt, his family, and thousands of other city residents lost their homes – and the city’s intractable issues with homelessness and tent encampments. Think of it as the electoral equivalent of saying “the emperor has no clothes,” updated for the social media age.

He’s far from alone in his fury. Many residents believe the City of Angels has become a hellishly difficult place to live. Housing prices – both to buy or rent — are high. The streaming bubble has burstand Hollywood is in a protracted recession. Shoots increasingly likely to take place in locales offering more generous tax credits and easier, cheaper permitting. The roads are increasingly dotted with potholesas the cash-strapped city has ceased most repaving projects. Even the city’s animal shelters are mired in crises and scandal. Corruption and incompetence are endemic, with $2.4 billion in homeless funds simply unaccounted for. No surprise, a large majority of voters say the city is headed in the wrong direction.

Yes, it’s quite likely Pratt’s not up for the job. When asked, he said he would rely on an unnamed expert “team” to advise him. TMZ scooped that though Pratt cut a campaign ad claiming he is residing in a trailer, he’s actually been living in a swanky Bel Air hotel. And according to TMZ and Deadline, production on a reality show about his campaign is underway, with Pratt’s full participation. A “reality show” mayor is not the solution to the city’s problems.

But the performance of the city’s political class hardly inspires confidence. Incumbent Karen Bass infamously skipped town before the outbreak of the Pacific Palisades wildfire on a less-than-necessary diplomatic mission to Ghana, and failed to return early even after Hurricane Katrina-like wind warnings were issued. Bass says that film and TV productions are up from their lows and homelessness is down from the highs. But these very incremental gains are clearly thin gruel to many voters.

The other main challenger, DSA-affiliated Raman, often speaks eloquently on the need to tackle the city’s housing and business bureaucratic bottlenecks, And her assessment of Pratt as a “mini Trump” is hyperbolic but understandable, given the thinness of some of his suggested fixes and the nastiness undergirding many of his attacks. Yet her suggestion that the city should up its outreach and better coax people living on the streets to accept help sounds more like a doubling down on the unpopular and largely ineffective status quo.

Pratt is calling much of this out: “Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles,” he says, and promises he will make the city “camera-ready again.” Instead of rationalizing the city’s homeless crisis, he calls for “no more encampments” and says he will have “zero tolerance” for public drug use.  As for Raman’s plan?  “These people don’t want a bed. They want fentanyl or super-meth.” (He also suggested if she actually approached a homeless addict, she could “get stabbed in the neck.” Charming.)  At a mayoral debate earlier this month, Pratt made mincemeat of Raman, forcing many pundits to reckon more seriously with his campaign.

The jungle primary is in less than two weeks, with the top two finishers competing in November. Polls have Bass in the lead — but with only about 30 percent of the vote. This, you probably don’t need me to tell you, is a dreadful showing for an incumbent – and one that bespeaks problems in November.

As of now, few analysts believe Pratt – currently polling in second place – can prevail in a general election. Los Angeles is always a Democratic stronghold,  ICE raids weigh heavily in voters’ minds, and Trump is so unpopular here that his recent support for Pratt are more likely to hurt the reality star than help him. Yet while Raman currently stands a better chance in a one-on-one against Bass, polls put her in third place, behind Pratt.

But, in the meantime, Pratt’s done Los Angeles a favor. The Hills was, in its own way, a love letter to Los Angeles. Forcing the city’s political establishment to acknowledge voter concerns and at least begin to address them is also an act of love. Even when it’s done by an operator like Spencer Pratt.

May. 25, 2026, 9:36 AM EDT

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIVmade a historic apology on Monday for the role the Holy See played in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.”

Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.”

History’s first U.S.-born pope, whose family historyincludes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.

The sweeping manifesto is about safeguarding humanity in an era of increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Leo raised the trans-Atlantic slave trade in relation to what he called the new forms of slavery and colonialism that the digital revolution is fueling, such as the unregulated labor practices in procuring rare minerals needed for AI chips.

Anthea Butler, senior fellow at the Koch History Center, Oxford University, said Leo needed to acknowledge and atone for the Catholic Church’s complicity in historic slavery if he wanted to credibly “speak to the current issues of technological enslavement.”

“For descendants of enslaved persons, this is once again a much needed apology from the pope,” said Butler, who is Black.

Black American Catholics, activists and scholars have long called for the Holy See to atone for its role in the colonial-era trade in human beings, beyond more generic apologies for the involvement of individual Christians.

“It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord,” Leo wrote. “For this, in the name of the church, I sincerely ask for pardon.”

Centuries of legitimizing slavery for European colonizers

The Vatican has insisted that it always upheld the dignity of all human beings as children of God. But a series of 15th-century directives from the Vaticanauthorized Portuguese sovereigns to conquer Africa and the Americas and enslave non-Christians.

In 1452, for example, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which gave the Portuguese king and his successors the right “to invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” and take all possessions — including land — of “Saracens, and pagans, and other infidels, and enemies of the name of Christ” anywhere.

The bull also gave the Portuguese permission “to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

That bull and another issued three years later, Romanus Pontifex, formed the basis of the Doctrine of Discoverythe theory that legitimized the colonial-era seizure of land in Africa and the Americas.

Nicholas V’s permissions to the Portuguese were confirmed or renewed by Pope Callixtus III in 1456, Pope Sixtus IV in 1481 and Pope Leo X in 1514, according to the Rev. Christopher J. Kellerman, a Jesuit priest and author of “All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church.”

Spanish kings received the rights for the Americas.

In 2023, the Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discoverybut it never formally rescinded, abrogated or rejected the bulls themselves. The Vatican insists that a later bull, Sublimis Deus in 1537, reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, and weren’t to be enslaved.

Holy See late to condemn slavery, Leo says

In his encyclical, Leo recalled that his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was the first pope to explicitly condemn slavery in 1888, long after many countries had abolished it. Before that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, even church institutions had slaves.

In acknowledging the Holy See’s role and the 15th-century papal bulls, Leo wrote in his encyclical: “Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of ‘infidels.’”

Leo said that it wasn’t possible to judge the morality of the decisions with today’s standards.

“Yet neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery,” he said.

The pope said that the church has long affirmed the dignity of every human being as the basis of its doctrine, “even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized.”

“This constitutes a wound in Christian memory, one from which we cannot consider ourselves detached,” he said.

Leo said that the church must firmly condemn all forms of trafficking related to the digital technological revolution “if we want to avoid the need to ask for pardon again in the future for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith.”

Leo’s own family history and past apologies

Kellerman, the scholar, welcomed Leo’s apology but said more needs to be done to further acknowledge and atone for how the Catholic Church legitimized and expanded slavery.

“Pope Leo has strengthened the moral credibility of the church with this admission and apology today,” he told The Associated Press. “Hopefully a future document will explain in more detail the church’s involvement with slaveholding. As a scholar I have some quibbles with the wording, but this is a truly remarkable moment.”

During a 1985 visit to Cameroon, St. John Paul II asked forgiveness of Africans for the slave trade on behalf of Christians who participated in it. In a 1992 visit to Goree Island, Senegal, which was the largest slave-trading center in West Africa, he denounced the injustice of slavery and called it a “tragedy of a civilization that called itself Christian.”

According to genealogical research published by Henry Louis Gates Jr., 17 of Leo’s American ancestors were Black, listed in census records as mulatto, Black, Creole or a free person of color. His family tree includes slaveholders and enslaved people, Gates wrote in The New York Times.

During a visit to Angola last month, Leo prayed at a Catholic shrine at the site of an important hub of the African slave tradeduring Portugal’s colonial rule. While at the Sanctuary of Mama Muxima, Leo recalled the “sorrow and great suffering” Angolans endured for centuries, but he didn’t refer specifically to slavery.