Pope Francis is nothing if not consistent. He never seems to miss an opportunity to garland the Left’s latest preoccupations and fantasies with the aura of sanctity and pretend that they’re the simple Christian faith that all believers must accept. It consequently came as no surprise Thursday when the Vatican, according to the Associated Press, “responded to Indigenous demands and formally repudiated the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’” a long-forgotten relic of the fifteenth century that has somehow come to the attention of the woke and duly enraged them.
If you went through Catholic school and are still scratching your head about what on earth the “Doctrine of Discovery” could be, join the club. Turns out it’s a six-hundred-year-old idea that was never actually part of the Catholic faith and would have remained forgotten forever were it not for contemporary claims that it was behind colonialism and even has a continued influence in some modern-day property law. Colonialism! Heavens to Betsy! You can see why the woke Vatican had to remind us that this doctrine existed, so as to repudiate it.
Specifically, the Vatican repudiated three fifteenth-century papal bulls, as official papal statements used to be called: Pope Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas (1452), the same pope’s Romanus Pontifex (1455), and Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera (1493). AP explains that these “legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands and form the basis of some property laws today.”
In a statement on Thursday, the Vatican declared that “the ‘doctrine of discovery’ is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church,” just in case anyone actually believed that it was. The Vatican statement continued: “Historical research clearly demonstrates that the papal documents in question, written in a specific historical period and linked to political questions, have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.”
So why bother to go to the trouble to repudiate them nearly six hundred years later? Because they outrage the woke, of course: “At the same time, the Church acknowledges that these papal bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples. The Church is also aware that the contents of these documents were manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities.”
Very well, but the Vatican statement also notes that “numerous and repeated statements by the Church and the Popes uphold the rights of indigenous peoples. For example, in the 1537 Bull Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III wrote, ‘We define and declare [ … ] that [, .. ] the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the Christian faith; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.’” The indigenous groups that are angry at the Vatican for the other papal bulls were silent about Sublimis Deus.
Meanwhile, Jules Gomes of ChurchMilitant.com pointed out to me that no media reports on this entire affair mention that the repudiated papal bulls are actually far more concerned with opposing the Islamic jihad onslaught against Christian lands than they are about “indigenous peoples.” These bulls, as I explained to ChurchMilitant.com, with their statements about how important it is to resist the efforts of Islam to conquer and subjugate Christians, embarrass Pope Francis and today’s woke Vatican.
The pope is wholeheartedly committed to the fond and false notion that “dialogue” with Islamic entities will blunt, and possibly even extinguish altogether, the jihad imperative. The recent histories of Nigeria, Iraq, and elsewhere show how false and damaging that idea really is. But the public repudiation of these long-forgotten documents is likely intended to buttress the pope’s efforts to engage Islamic groups in Muslim-Christian dialogue, which results only in the issuance of soothing falsehoods and will not prevent a single Christian from Muslim persecution. The official revocation of these bulls is likely as much the result of pressure from indigenous groups as from the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayeb. The “dialogue” between al-Tayeb and Francis only resumed after al-Tayeb broke it off during the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, when Francis agreed not to criticize Islam or speak out against Muslim persecution of Christians. Al-Tayeb, meanwhile, made no similar concessions. The “dialogue” is entirely one-sided.
At least the Roman Catholic Church is now on record against colonialism. We should be grateful that the Vatican just repudiated these old documents, rather than rewriting them after the manner of the recent revisions of the works of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie, to bring them into line with contemporary woke sensibilities. But of course, this grand game isn’t over. If, sometime in the near future, you read Pope Nicholas V or Alexander VI rattling on about trans rights, you’ll know what happened.
