David McCallum, a Jesuit priest who has been working with Indigenous people in the United States. In Canada, the pope and other Vatican officials were “confronted by Indigenous leaders who insisted that the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ remains an issue of contention,” said the Rev. The Vatican said that the text, issued eight months after the pope’s “penitential journey to Canada,” reaffirmed the church’s “rejection of the colonizing mentality.” Suspected unmarked graves are still being found. The doctrine is “not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church,” it said, and the documents in question “have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.”ĭemands that the doctrine be discredited grew last summer when Pope Francis, the first pope from Latin America, visited Canada to apologize to Indigenous communities for the church’s role in the country’s notorious residential school system, where thousands of Indigenous children were physically and sexually abused, and in some cases, died. The Roman 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,’” a joint statement from the Vatican’s development and education offices said. The decision comes after decades of demands from Indigenous people to rescind the doctrine, which was used for centuries to “expropriate Indigenous lands and facilitate their transfer to colonizing or dominating nations,” according to one United Nations forum. The Vatican formally repudiated on Thursday the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a legal concept based on 15th-century papal documents that European colonial powers used to legitimize the seizure and exploitation of Indigenous lands in Africa and the Americas, among other places.
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