The Doctrine of Discovery; a theological can of worms?

Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Though it was, in a sense, 530 years in the making, required two separate departments of the Roman Curia to address, and came a full eight months after demands burst into full public view during a high-profile papal trip to the New World, Thursday’s repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery by the Vatican may turn out to have been the easy part.

To be clear, what the Vatican formally disowned yesterday is a legal and political concept, not a theological tenet.

“The legal concept of ‘discovery’ was debated by colonial powers from the sixteenth century onward and found particular expression in the nineteenth century jurisprudence of courts in several countries, according to which the discovery of lands by settlers granted an exclusive right to extinguish, either by purchase or conquest, the title to or possession of those lands by indigenous peoples,” Thursday’s statement said.

“The ‘doctrine of discovery’ is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church,” said the statement, jointly issued by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

“The Catholic Church … repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of Indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery,’” it said.

Such a formal repudiation had been a key demand of Indigenous groups when Pope Francis visited Canada last July.

The joint statement acknowledged that a handful of 15th century papal bulls, including Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter Caetera (1493), were invoked to justify the doctrine, but insists they “have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.”

Part of the design for the joint statement was to craft it as an historical and politico-social declaration, without any theological import – it’s telling, in that regard, that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith was not among its signatories.

Yet no matter how hard the Vatican may try, it seems unlikely that the theological underpinnings of what came to be known as the “Doctrine of Discovery” can be avoided indefinitely. Indeed, the issuance of Thursday’s statement seems likely to embolden forces seeking a theological reevaluation too.

Philip P. Arnold, a professor of religious studies at Syracuse University and the director of an Iroquois cultural centre, told the New York Times that yesterday’s repudiation was only a “first step.”

The Vatican needs to address the “worldview” underlying the Doctrine of Discovery, Arnold said, including the idea that Christianity is superior to other religions.

And therein lies the rub.

When Pope Alexander VI granted King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I sovereignty over a broad swath of the “New World” in Inter Caetera, he may well have been issuing a political decree that was not, in itself, de fide.

Yet there’s no denying that the underlying justification was theological, rooted in the inherently missionary nature of Christianity. Continue reading