Participants at Pope Francis’s Mass in Canada on Thursday unfurled a banner asking him to formally rescind edicts from the 15th century in which the papacy justified taking indigenous land.
Pope Francis was holding mass at the Basilica of Ste-Anne-de-Beaupre east of Quebec City when two ladies brought the large banner to the front of the church and unfurled it. It was not clear if the pope, who was behind the banner, was able to see what it said, reports Reuters.
The Doctrine of Discovery was used by a number of leaders of the Catholic Church and many monarchs from the Mid-15th century up to the mid-20th century, This doctrine was used to seize lands inhabited by indigenous peoples under the guise of “discovering new land.”
Countries, including Canada, used the doctrine to justify colonizing lands considered to be uninhabited that were in fact home to Indigenous Peoples, according to CTV News Canada.
The Doctrine of Discovery and the colonization of new lands
The doctrine was a matter of public international law beginning around 1452 in what historians call the “Age of Discovery.” The edicts issued by the Catholic church were called Papal bulls.
The Papal bulls were used to empower Portugal and Spain to colonize, plunder and enslave West Africa and the Americas. Other colonial powers soon followed suit, and the doctrine became the basis for slavery and European claims over Indigenous land and people, according to CBC Canada.
At that time, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, which authorized Portugal to conquer non-Christians and consign them to “perpetual servitude”. His successors issued several bulls confirming or expanding the Portuguese right to subjugate non-European peoples in newly explored territories.
In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the Bulls of Donation justifying Spain’s claims to the lands visited by Christopher Columbus in his expeditions of 1492 and later.
The kingdoms of France and England also used the Doctrine of Discovery to justify their claims on the New World, while refusing to recognize a Spanish-Portuguese duopoly in colonial affairs.
When colonial disputes arose between Christian nations, especially when two nations claimed to have discovered the same territory, the Pope would be consulted and requested to arbitrate the dispute.
Judy Wilson, chief of the Neskonlith Indian Band and the secretary-treasurer of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, says Canada’s Indigenous people are still feeling the effects of the Doctrine of Discovery.
Chief Wilson cites the residential school trauma, the Indian Act, the Sixties Scoop, the reserve system, and the clean water crisis in Indigenous communities, and she says there are a lot more.
“Even if [we have] the bare minimum of apology over residential schools … it doesn’t go far enough in changing that legislation and policies, and changing the paradigm between state, government and our people and the Crown, and all the parties involved. So we have to have that to be able to have the truth before reconciliation, so we can get on with the work,” Wilson said.
