8 months after Pope Francis’ visit to Canada, the Catholic Church has released a statement on the Doctrine of Discovery.
Created as a way to justify the colonizing of Indigenous lands and people, the doctrine of discovery contained declarations by popes known as papal bulls.
However, in a statement made today, the church says that while the declarations do not reflect the equal rights of indigenous people those papal bulls are not an expression of the catholic faith.
They write that the documents were manipulated by competing colonial powers to religiously justify the crimes against indigenous people.
Pope Francis emphasized that indigenous people’s sufferings at the hands of colonial powers signals a need to abandon colonizing mentalities and walk side by side.
