The Vatican and the ‘doctrine of discovery’

José Francisco Cali Tzay, UN rapporteur for the rights of indigenous peoples, welcomed the Vatican’s decision on March 30 to rescind the so-called “doctrine of discovery” -formulated in several papal bulls from the 15th century and which for centuries protected the European colonization of territories not governed by Christians – as a milestone in the history of human rights, the ancient jus gentium of the theologians of the school of Salamanca.

The Vatican declaration maintains that this doctrine was never part of the Catholic faith and that the bulls –various dum (1452), romanus pontifex (1455) and Inter Caetera (1493) – were manipulated by the colonial powers.

According to Cali Tay, a Guatemalan of the Maya-Quiché ethnic group, the papal edicts opened wounds from the past. In towns with an oral tradition, the centuries that have passed since 1492 are only a short space of time, which explains the welcome with which the original towns, from Terra Nova to Araucanía, have received the Holy See’s announcement. Canadian Senator Michele Audette, an ethnic Inuit, said the doctrine had made native peoples “invisible”, condemning them to silence and oblivion.

The Portuguese Cardinal José Tolentino, prefect of one of the departments of the Curia that drafted the declaration, said on March 30, when he presented it, that it was part of the “architecture of reconciliation” and of the “culture of encounter”. between cultures, societies and confessions.

Among other things, its text recognizes that the doctrine helped to provide a legal basis for the dispossession of lands and territories. The bull of 1493 said that any terra nullius it could be “discovered” by Catholic sovereigns, who in turn had to instill the true faith in the “barbarian nations”. That of 1455 granted the King of Portugal, Afonso V, the power to capture and subjugate “Saracens and pagans”.

The shadow of the bulls

The echoes of those words lasted for centuries. In 1792, Thomas Jefferson declared that the United States would apply the doctrine despite its religious roots. In 1823, a Supreme Court ruling appealed to papal bulls to argue that native peoples only had a right of “occupation” not property over their lands, so it could be abolished.

In 2005, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited it in a ruling on a land dispute involving the Oneida people in New York state. Cardinal Michael Czerny, co-author of the statement, clarified that the original bulls were abrogated by the sublimus deus (1537) by Paul III, who defended the freedom and possessions of the natives of the Indies, even if they were not Christians. Its content, he said, was never magisterial, only of an “ad hoc political nature.”

The intention of the Church was to help overcome the colonial mentality. Not only is historical memory at stake. Cali Tzay recalled that the legacy of the doctrine continues to wreak havoc: high rates of poverty, suicide, alcoholism, and crime among his communities. The example of the Holy See, he says, should serve for other countries to also review their jurisprudence.

‘mea culpa’

On his trip to Canada in 2022 to apologize for the abuses inflicted in Catholic orphanages for decades on more than 150,000 children from native peoples, the Argentine pope could not help but see the signs asking him to rescind the doctrine. In 2005, in Bolivia, he already asked for forgiveness for the “serious sins” committed by the Catholic clergy in the name of God.

“Half a millennium was enough,” said Phil Fontaine, former head of the Assembly of First Nations from Canada: “It was time to put an end to a racist doctrine.” In Latin America, racism is usually covert but no less real for that. In Peru, the social unrest that occurred between December and January showed an unprecedented public demand for recognition of the ethnic identity of the Quechua and Aymara populations of the southern Andes.

Until the 1970s, the Yanomami, who inhabit an area the size of Portugal in the Brazilian state of Roraima, lived in near isolation in an untouched natural environment. Today its forests look devastated by the advance of the garimpeiros (illegal miners) that have invaded them, polluting their rivers with the mercury they use to extract gold. According to Survival International, disease and violence have killed 20% of the Yanomami in the last seven years.

After visiting Roraima recently, Lula said that what he had seen was more than a humanitarian crisis: “a premeditated genocide.” When he was a representative for Rio de Janeiro, former President Jair Bolsonaro lamented that the “Brazilian cavalry” had not been as successful as the US in exterminating the Indians.

In 1961, President Jânio Quadros recognized the first indigenous territory in the country: the Xingu reserve, which he entrusted to the Kayapó chief Raoni Metuktire, who still runs it at the age of 93. Dozens of languages, from Quechua to Potawatomi, are in danger. As Viorica Marian writes in The Washington Postlanguage influences “how we perceive and remember reality, the decisions we make and the emotions we feel”.

historical memories

The American viceroyalties inherited the Catholicism of the crusade of the conquerors and that of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the longest in history. The order founded by Ignatius of Loyola, unlike the mendicants, dominated music, art, rhetoric, philosophy and theology with Renaissance genius.

The royal patronage –the privileges that the popes granted to the kings of various European monarchies and that allowed them to elect the bishops– configured a state Catholicism. As Peter Wilson writes in Europe’s tragedy (2009), during the pontificate of Alexander VI (1431-1503), the papacy and the Hispanic monarchy had a symbiotic relationship. At the end of the 16th century, the Spanish made up a third of the Roman population.

roman chrysalis

In the viceroyalties, the Church decisively shaped the social imaginary. The Indians, according to the testimonies of missionaries and chroniclers, synthesized the idea of ​​a supreme god with that of their own creator god, who according to the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in his real comments (1609) “did with the Universe what the soul with the body”.

The indigenous people, converting massively to Catholicism, from the base of the social pyramid to the noble castes, turned angels, saints and virgins into pre-Hispanic gods. Divided by caste and ethnic borders – the republics of Indians and Spaniards – colonial society imagined heaven as a peaceful and immovable hierarchy. But history is anything but static.

In 1767, at the time of their expulsion from Spain, the Jesuit Company administered 120 large colleges in Hispanic America, nine in Portuguese, and large plantations with slaves. In New Spain, the Jesuits promoted the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the banner of the Creoles, Indians and mestizos who fought in 1810 against the royalist troops and became the flag of Zapata’s army again a century later. The first Mexican Congress named Bartolomé de las Casas as “the apostle of America.”

Between Madrid and Rome

After independence, the native clergy exchanged Madrid for Rome. All the first constitutions established Catholicism as the only official religion. Indigenous noble families whose privileges had been respected by the viceregal authorities supported the new republics and participated in politics, a period that did not last long.

In his memoirs, an incorrigible curious (2017), Xavier Albó (1934-2023), a Catalan anthropologist, linguist, and Jesuit who made Bolivia his adoptive homeland, wrote that “not seeing” indigenous peoples meant not seeing them as equals.

Luther’s heirs

Some Vaticanists believe that the Vatican’s denunciation of the doctrine of discovery is a defensive move to curb proselytizing by evangelical churches. Guatemala, where Protestants will outnumber Catholics by 2030, has already had three evangelical presidents.

In 1890 the Protestants numbered a few thousand. In 1978, there were already 11.9 million; in 1980, 21; in 1990, 46 and 60 in 2000. In 1995, 80% of Latin Americans said they were Catholic. Today only 56%. In 2022, 20% identified themselves as evangelical, compared to 10% in 2002. Since the 1960s, an almost homogeneously Protestant North America and a homogeneously Catholic Latin America have ceased to exist. In the south, the Roman Church has ceased to monopolize religious salvation: Extra ecclesia nulla salus.

The Vatican has known its rivals since the days of Luther and Calvin. Since 1914, investment and trade with the United States led to the arrival of Mennonites, Adventists, Methodists, and Protestant congregations, a tide that never stopped rising. On his trips to the region, John Paul II used to exhort Catholics to resist the influence of “sects,” which he likened to “ravenous wolves.”

One of the reasons for its success is its emotional neo-Pentecostalism and preaching of the so-called “prosperity gospel”. In Colombia, the macro-churches teach financial culture courses and give their parishioners, with the money from their tithes, banking services. One of his preachers, the Brazilian Deive Leonardo, has 13 million followers on Instagram, compared to nine for the pope.

Change of skin

As Tish Harrison Warren writes in The New York Times, Christianity is taking on an ever darker complexion of color. In 1910 80% of Christians lived in the Western world. In 2000, only 37%. African Christians have gone from 9% to 45% of the total. Today there are more than 685 million.

The new churches of the Global South have almost no historical ties to Western religious traditions. In fact, its growth occurred after the demise of the European colonial empires. In 1970 there were about 90 million evangelicals around the world. Today there are 342. The South Korean Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, for example, has 480,000 followers.

According to some projections, by 2030 China will have more Christians, mostly Protestants, than any other country. In the British Isles, Chinese churches double or triple in size every few years. The three largest Protestant churches in Paris are Afro-Caribbean evangelicals.

The leader of the largest in London, the Kingsway International Christian Center, is a Nigerian pastor, Matthew Ashimolowo. In the United States, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference brings together more than 40,000 congregations. In 2030, it will have 25,000 more.