The Vatican has acknowledged in a statement from its culture and human development departments that papal documents from the 15th century were used by colonial powers to give legitimacy to their actions, which included slavery.
In the statement, the Vatican said: “In no uncertain terms, the church’s magisterium upholds the respect due to every human being. The Catholic Church therefore 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.’”
It said it was right to “recognize these errors,” acknowledge the terrible effects of colonial-era assimilation policies on Indigenous peoples and ask for their forgiveness.
The statement was a response to decades of Indigenous demands for the Vatican to formally rescind the "papal bulls" [doctrinal decrees] that provided the Portuguese and Spanish kingdoms the religious backing to expand their territories in Africa and the Americas for the sake of spreading Christianity.
"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," the departments said.
The Vatican said the decrees "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."
Argentine-born Pope Francis, the first pontiff from the Americas, has made several outreach gestures towards indigenous people.
In 2007, Francis' predecessor, Benedict XVI, published a book that condemned rich countries for having mercilessly "plundered and sacked" Africa and other poor regions, and for exporting to them the "cynicism of a world without God".
Those decrees also underpin the “Doctrine of Discovery,” a legal concept coined in a 1823 U.S. Supreme Court decision that has come to be understood as meaning that ownership and sovereignty over land passed to Europeans because they “discovered” it.
It was used in the United States for White settlers to take lands belonging to Native Americans, then forcing them onto "reservations."
This report was sourced from Associated Press and Reuters.