Dave Pasinski, of Fayetteville, has graduate degrees in moral theology and divinity.
Some may wonder about the fuss over 500-year-old documents comprising the so-called Doctrine of Discovery and why the Vaticans repudiation warrants such attention. I believe it does because of the contemporary relevance similar to the ongoing effects that slavery and Jim Crow discrimination has had.
Your excellent editorial sets the right tone: praising Bishop Douglas Lucia and the Vatican for the repudiation of the insidious doctrine but also challenging repentance for other actions (Popes rejection of Doctrine of Discovery opens path to reconciliation, April 23, 2023).
To put this in context, this Doctrine of (Christian) Discovery was a product of the papal bulls issued from a late medieval mindset grappling with populations new to them, rooted in a rapidly changing Christendom on the cusp of Renaissance and its dissolution.
This so-called doctrine was exploited by emerging nation-states. While a complex topic, there are three points: the role of papal bulls in historical context, aspects of what is doctrine, and the misappropriation of this history in our jurisprudence. Fundamentally, it was an insidious union of a political presupposition with a myopic and immoral religious premise of Christian superiority promoted by the Catholic Church.
First, there are many types of ecclesiastical teachings decrees, conciliar statements, apostolic constitutions, encyclicals, proclamations from various dicasteries (departments), bulls and others. Bulls called that because they bore a papal bulla (seal) were a common form of proclamation from the 11th century through the 19th century. Some 300 were issued, although only about eight in the last 100 years. They range from mundane and obscure to destructive and grandiose. Some were contradicted and repudiated, and many were conflated to have greater influence than they deserved.
During the so-called Age of Discovery, western Christendom most feared violent Islamic expansion toward Constantinople and in coping with the Portuguese exploitation of the African coast. Pope Nicholas V issued the infamous Dum Diversas in 1452 giving Portugal the supposed right to territories not ruled by Christians and the ability to enslave inhabitants. This perversion was his trade-off for King Afonso V agreeing to mount a crusade one that never happened against Sultan Mehmet IIs designs on Constantinople and Muslim domination of African slave trade. (Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, a pivotal event in world history.)
Subsequent bulls expanded that notion and a later Spanish Pope, Alexander VII, issued Inter Cetera (1493) after the voyage of Columbus which now included Spain on the deal. Such were the political machinations of the papacy.
Although Pope Paul III in the bull Sublimis Deus (1537) repudiated this exploitation, the damage was done and conquistadors and others largely disregarded it. Luthers reformation (c. 1517) and later reform by Henry VIII (c. 1535) and John Calvin (c. 1536) rejected papal teachings and a new theological atmosphere emerged for how Europeans would treat the Americas.
Ironically, these infamous documents were later cited by all of the exploiting nations especially England, whose jurisprudence eventually prevailed as part of a Doctrine of Discovery even though it issued from a papal source the Church of England no longer recognized.
Secondly, the bulls were not doctrinal in the traditional creedal sense of the word, but rather political statements based on the now well-recognized, unjust and dehumanizing Eurocentric views about Indigenous peoples. That is, they were not beliefs that had to be affirmed, but rather arrogant presumptions of power by the largest international institution of the era, the pre-Reformation Church, reflecting the common worldview of most European Christians. Two examples may help explain this.
Many Catholics believe in the claimed apparitions of the Blessed Mother. Although common beliefs that some may call doctrine, they are not an essential element within the Creed and one may be a faithful Catholic without accepting their credibility.
Perhaps a better contextualization is in the spirit of the Monroe doctrine or the Truman doctrine or Reagan doctrine. American presidents and citizens need not adhere to any of these although they have not been formally repudiated. In short, doctrine is being used in this broad sense to describe those papal bulls that tragically formed the marriage of theological bias and political policy. This does not justify them but only attempts to put them in context.
Finally, in United States law, people like Onondaga Nation lawyer Joe Heath have provided a tremendous context and history of how this influenced our jurisprudence. The consequential Supreme Court decision written by Chief Justice John Marshall in the case of Johnson v. MIntosh (1823) essentially denied the rights of aboriginal land claims and became the national basis for exploitation. The liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited it in the 2005 case denying the Oneida Nations land claims based on this prior precedent.
It is impossible to overstate the suffering that resulted from the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples through the principles of the Doctrine of Discovery. It formed the basis for European then American persecution, the cultural degradation through religious schools and continued exploitation. Although there were some notable personal exceptions, these papal documents were foundational in church history and are rightfully repudiated.
Now it seems necessary for our legal system to redress the power of exploiters and to demand justice for Indigenous peoples that is long overdue.
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