VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican on Thursday responded to demands from natives, formally rejecting the “doctrine of discovery,” the theories propounded by “pontifical bulls” dating 15 some property law today.
A Vatican statement said the 15th-century papal bulls or decrees “do not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples” and were never considered an expression of the Catholic faith.
The documents were “manipulated” by colonial powers for political purposes “to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples, which at times were carried out without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities”.
The statement from the Vatican’s development and education authorities said it was right to “acknowledge these mistakes,” to acknowledge the horrific impact of colonial-era assimilation policies on indigenous peoples, and to ask for forgiveness.
The statement came in response to decades of native demands for the Vatican to officially rescind the papal bulls that gave the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms religious support for expanding their territories in Africa and the Americas to spread Christianity.
These decrees underpin the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a legal concept coined in an 1823 US Supreme Court decision, which is now understood to mean that ownership and sovereignty over land passed to Europeans for having “discovered” it.
It was only cited in a 2005 Supreme Court decision involving the Oneida Indian Nation, authored by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
During Pope Francis’ 2022 visit to Canada, during which he apologized to indigenous peoples for the residential school system that forcibly removed native children from their homes, he was met with calls for a formal rejection of papal bulls.
Two indigenous women unfurled a banner at the altar of the national shrine of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré on July 29 that read: “Recant the teaching” in bright red and black letters. The demonstrators were escorted and the mass passed without incident, although the women later marched the banner out of the basilica and draped it on the railing.
In the statement, the Vatican said: “The Magisterium of the Church unequivocally upholds the respect due to every human being. The Catholic Church therefore rejects concepts that do not recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including the so-called legal and political “discovery doctrine”.
The Vatican offered no evidence that the three 15th-century papal bulls (Dum Diversas 1452, Romanus Pontifex 1455, and Inter Caetera 1493) had themselves been formally repealed, rescinded, or rejected, as Vatican officials have often said have. But it quoted a later bull, Sublimis Deus of 1537, which affirmed that indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their liberty or property and should not be enslaved.
It was significant that the rejection of the “doctrine of discovery” occurred during the pontificate of the first Latin American pope in history. The Argentinian Francis, who had already apologized to the natives in Bolivia for the crimes of the colonial conquest of America before traveling to Canada in 2015. It was issued while he was in hospital with a respiratory infection on Thursday.
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Vatican’s cultural office, said the statement was a reflection of the Vatican’s dialogue with indigenous peoples.
“This note is part of what we might call the architecture of reconciliation and also the product of the art of reconciliation, the process of people committing to listen to one another, to speak to one another and to increase mutual understanding,” said he in a statement.