Vaticans Rebuke False Catholic Church Doctrine

The Vatican’s development and education office has announced that it rejected the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a 15th-century concept used to justify European Christian colonialists’ seizure of Indigenous lands in Africa and the Americas.

The statement which was said on Thursday explained that the theory was not part of the Catholic Church’s teachings and had been “manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples.”

The papal bulls were used to justify the European conquest of Africa and the Americas, and their effects are still felt by Indigenous people today. Indigenous leaders and community advocates had been urging the Catholic Church to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery for decades. The announcement was welcomed by Indigenous leaders, even though it continued to distance itself from acknowledging actual culpability.

The Vatican did not offer evidence that the papal bulls had themselves been formally abrogated, rescinded or rejected, but cited a subsequent papal bull in 1537 that reaffirmed that Indigenous peoples should not be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property and were not to be enslaved.