Unholy Doctrines

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Under pressure from Indigenous groups, the Vatican formally repudiated the colonial-era “Doctrine of Discovery,” the edict backed by 15th-century papal decrees that justified the seizure of lands in Africa and the Americas by European colonialists, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

The Holy See announced that the decrees – also known as “papal bulls” – have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith, adding that they “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples.”

It noted that the colonial powers had “manipulated” the documents “to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesial authorities.”

The decrees in question are considered the foundation of the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a legal notion coined in an 1823 US Supreme Court case that has come to be viewed as indicating that Europeans gained ownership and dominion over land because they “discovered” it.

The landmark announcement came in response to decades of Indigenous requests that the Vatican formally retract the papal bulls that gave the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms the religious justification to expand their territories in Africa and the Americas in the name of spreading Christianity.

During a 2022 visit to Canada, Pope Francis formally apologized for the Catholic church’s role in the controversial residential school system that forced Native children out of their homes and also to abandon their culture.

The Argentinian-born Francis – the Vatican’s first Latin American pontiff – previously apologized to Bolivia’s Indigenous peoples in 2015 for the crimes of the colonial-era conquest of the Americas.