Holy Week, Holy Repair, Holy Abolition
The Vatican rescinded the Doctrine of Discovery but not the death dealing world it built
Far below the headlines of a settler-colonial state indicting one of its former leaders, below even the news that a global system of capitalist extraction had so altered the environments in which it is embedded that deep ocean currents were upending and would soon accelerate the warming climate that spelled disaster to the societies who manifested it, down in the religious new sections, a story quietly unfolded about the roots of our “polycrisis.”
As Holy Week begins, and we embark on this journey of meditation on God’s identification through Jesus with the colonized and executed of history, there may be no more important story for us to reckon with if we wish to be joined in communion with the crucified.
New York Times — Vatican Repudiates ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ Used as Justification for Colonization
Indigenous communities have long called on the Vatican rescind the concept, which had been used over the centuries to seize land from people in the Americas, Africa and elsewhere.
In 2022 — after mass graves kept getting exposed at Catholic run residential schools to which indigenous peoples in the US and Canada were forced and where they were stripped of their native languages, belief systems, hair styles, and tribal relationships in the time-tested spirit of colonial missionaries to convert them to Christianity and, as is so often deemed synonymous, Western culture — Pope Francis undertook an apology tour to face the crimes of his Church.
For all my appreciation of him, Francis is rarely without his embarrassing gaffs. Donning a traditional head dress will be remembered as one of them. Francis is also a political man. No one rises to such power otherwise. So for many, myself included, the path he’s chosen for navigating the political side of one the world’s largest institution remains regressively slow and too often contradictory. Still, this first ever pope from Latin American continues to say and do unprecedented things.
In his apology speech in Canada, he spoke to the assembled tribal leaders,
I recall the meetings we had in Rome four months ago. At that time, I was given two pairs of moccasins as a sign of the suffering endured by Indigenous children, particularly those who, unfortunately, never came back from the residential schools. I was asked to return the moccasins when I came to Canada, and I will do so at the end of these few words, in which I would like to reflect on this symbol, which over the past few months has kept alive my sense of sorrow, indignation and shame.
Soon after, he attempted to name the problem and apologize.
I am sorry. I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the Church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.
The response of many Indigenous people was to teach the Church about the depth of its own culpability and the need to keep going.
As Francis arrived to preside over mass at a cathedral in Quebec, two women greeted him with a message painted in red and black.
The first papal bull comprising the legal statutes known as the Doctrine of Discovery was Dums Diversas (“While Different”), delivered by Pope Nicholas V on June 18, 1452. It gave the Catholic king of Portugal, Alfonso V, a terrifying bill of rights on disturbing grounds. The king received papal authorization:
to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens (Muslims) and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and posses by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and good, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.1
By 1452, this statement was already retroactive, giving credence to actions Portugal had been busy undertaking for a decade. While slavery had been an unbroken feature of European society since Rome,2 the proper inauguration of the Atlantic slave trade is typically dated to 1444 when Prince Henry the Navigator brought some 235 human beings back to Portugal as property from the coasts of Africa. (A reminder to intellectuals that ideas are caused by the history of political economies as often or more than they are the cause of it, though the two clearly stand in mutually reinforcing relationship). Still, Dums Diversas marks a turning point, the beginning of a period in which Europe began to grow ever more rapacious in her desire for the goods and bodies and soils of others. It would take forty years of cultural and material build-up before the urge to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue” would point Spanish ships helmed and financed by Italians across the Atlantic, unleashing an energy for violence that has yet to expend itself. The Doctrine of Discovery thus undergirded the next five centuries of colonial violence by Europeans around the world, both ideologically and in a formal legal sense.
It was an idea that got in the water. Francis Bacon channelled the spirit of the Doctrine when he intensified the biblical notion of dominion, claiming “‘nature’ was ‘there’ to be dominated by Man.”3 Likewise, just before sailing with merchants of the Massachusetts Bay Company, Puritan minister John Cotton offered a sermon extolling the logics of the Doctrine to shore up the confidence of his fellow colonizers: “In a vacant soyle hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is.”4
This string of papal bulls was named “the Doctrine of Discovery” in the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh wherein they were used as legal precedent for the U.S. government’s dismal of tribal claims, right to dismiss valid treaties, and take possession of another wave of colonized land. It was referenced as recently as 2005 by the Supreme Court in a decision written by the hero of liberal women everywhere, the Notorious RBG herself.
We live in the world the Doctrine of Discovery built.
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, prefect of the Vatican’s culture office, made a comment as the joint statement “on Integral Development and the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’” went live last Thursday. He claimed, “this Note is part of what we might call the architecture of reconciliation and also the product of the art of reconciliation, the process whereby people commit to listening to each other, to speaking to each other and to growth in mutual understanding.”
The “architecture” and “art of reconciliation” is soaring language. In the statement itself, there is a nod at something even beyond reconciliation, when the authors claim in the final stanza, “the Church’s solidarity with indigenous peoples has given rise to the Holy See’s strong support for the principles contained in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.” (emphasis mine)
I want to celebrate that a reversal epochally overdue has been made. The Catholic Church was asked to rescind the Doctrine, correctly identified as a source and catalyst of historical and persisting evil, and rescind the Doctrine they did. Credit.
And yet when your recension is cluttered with pleas to remember how “in the course of history” so many Popes, “bishops, priests, women and men religious and lay faithful” have been, they seem to say, above reproach in their stance with Indigenous peoples; when you labor to claim the Doctrine “is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church” nor has it ever “been considered expressions of the Catholic faith” and that it was largely a matter of “political manipulation” by other political powers that produced the atrocities you condoned (and from which you took plenty of pounds of flesh) — Indigenous peoples driven to but never beyond the brink of genocidal eradication may be forgiven for keeping their arms crossed with a look of unsatisfied skepticism.
The Vatican’s attempt to pretend an ideological fire wall exists between its theological doctrines and legal rulings is intellectually and ethically inadmissible. It’s not breaking news that the Catholic Church, for something like fifteen decades now, is both a political and religious institution. It simply cannot carry on the conceit that when the political arm takes an action it is not a communication of Catholic theology, whether formerly or implicitly preached. The idea that papal bulls were not part of the “teaching of the church” is a claim only the most incurious of bureaucrats could make with a straight face. At best the bulls could be described as post-theological. By “post-” I mean “after,” as in the sort of actions one takes on the basis of theology, which, once performed with enough regularity, eventually become formally institutionalized. The supersessionist missionary fervor of Christians, who continually tripped over themselves conflating God’s sovereignty with their own, is what led them to believe an encounter with an unknown other could be described as a “discovery.” It was how they were able to imagine Europe at what Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez described as “the hubris of the zero point” — the epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic center of the world. The theology of the church, friends, was how they could rationalize creating so much death.5
Still, a shoddily structured apology seeking to make its own forgiveness is not my primary concern here.
At the roots, the church does not yet appear ready to comprehend the true tasks before it, the tasks gifted to it by the Passion of the very one it presumes to serve: true solidarity with the crucified of history toward decolonization and abolition.
Just last week
, an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, awarded Pope Francis "Dingus of the Year." While he named inaction on repealing the Doctrine as one of his distinguishing mark's, and it is delightful to see that very action was taken the next day (Chris, since you clearly have sway, keep asking for things!), this final point gets to the real work required here:He will remain a dingus until he directs the Church to do something meaningful like, as my Métis artist relative Christi Belcourt suggested at the time, fully fund immersive Indigenous language schools across North America for the next 100 years, minimum. Maybe then I will consider exdingusicating him.
If Cardinal de Mendonça wishes to speak of an “architecture of reconciliation,” then he must begin to recognize that reconciliation cannot happen within a house designed to enthrone one resident and imprison the other. It is like asking two cells of the body to coexist side by side in mutual health and harmony when one of those cells is an aggressive malignant cancer.
In the video below, J. Kameron Carter (one of my three favorite living U.S. theologians), addresses Duke Divinity’s Institute for Reconciliation. Allow me to pull a quote from his remarks, but I encourage you to watch the whole video a couple times so his argument sinks in (it’s only 2:22 long).
To summarize his stance on the inadequacy of any “architecture and art of reconciliation” which means only, as the Vatican’s statement said, a matter of getting to a point where once alienated groups can “walk with them side by side, in mutual respect and dialogue,” he says the following.
“The only way to restore the stolen value — the labor capacity, the land capacity that was stolen — is the overcoming of the society that that theft built. That is the project, perhaps, of reconciliation….The object of reconciliation studies might have to be the decolonization of the world that was built through theft of land and labor. Now if ‘the Kingdom of God has come’ means something like that, Christianity has a gospel to preach.”
For Carter, as for La Trey, this means the real task is a matter of reparations and reparations of a particular kind. Not a redistribution of resources used to integrate a formerly excluded group into the system as is. Rather, if repair is to be preformed in the manner of the incarnated, crucified, and (though I am jumping ahead of the calendar here) resurrected Christ met in Jesus of Nazareth, then we with power and resources are called to a form of reparations used to build an entirely new social order — set in the language of scripture, this means participating in the birth of a new creation which must involve a new oikonomía. That is the work!
It is worth asking, from an organizing standpoint, does the Vatican’s current posture open windows through which that kind of work can enter? Perhaps.
First, I see an opening where the authors write “their [Indigenous peoples’] sufferings constitute a powerful summons to abandon the colonizing mentality.” (emphasis mine Can the abandonment of a colonizing mentality be linked to a decolonization of the church itself? Can the church participate, as many liberation theologians, priests, and lay members have in Latin America and elsewhere, in the decolonization of land, labor, cultural forms, languages, polities, and economies? It is easy to adopt language without affecting its meaning. But certainly good things are happening at the grassroots. Work like that of Nuns & Nones through their Land Justice Project is demonstrating that some Catholic religious orders are beginning to understand “decolonization is not a metaphor” and are proving it by repatriating stolen land on which monasteries and convents have been built to the land’s original inhabitants. That is the work.
The second opportunity for going deeper that’s opened with the statement recending the Doctrine is a sentence that seems to be a reference to Francis’s 2020 Encyclical Fratelli Tutti (“All Brothers”): On Fraternity and Social Friendship. It begins, “In fidelity to the mandate received from Christ, the Catholic Church strives to promote universal fraternity and respect for the dignity of every human being.” In Tutti, Francis began to lay a theological and practical path toward retracting the hierarchical relationship Christians (and Christian Europe) used has positioned itself toward other cultures and religions. We have been not only stunted, but murderous in our capacity to perceive the Other. That has to change and it may require transformations at the root of how Christianity imagines itself to do so. This too is a crack worth prying open wider.
For Christians, there can be no reconciliation to the empire that crucified our God. There can only be the subversion of that empire and the building of a community of hope, joy, and solidarity within the gaps.
As we meditate this week on the life of Jesus, whose solidarity with the poor and colonized placed him on a collision course with execution by Roman colonizers and their collaborators, may we grieve with those whose identity and resistance places them on the same path today.
May we weep over the world order designed to produce death for Indigenous peoples, and so many others, an order which we who claim to follow Christ built.
May we come to identify so dearly with the passion of Jesus that we no longer find ourselves identifying with death dealing systems.
May we no longer come to the world’s defense, but rather find ourselves identifying with those Jesus said he identified with in history: the poor, the imprisoned, the hungry, the naked, the colonized and exploited.
And may this inner freedom set us free to repair harm in such a way that the sources harm are abolished, forever and ever, amen.
Follow Indigenous Folx
I would be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to point you toward a least a few indigenous writers and leaders worth listening to with more attention than we give even this best of popes.
writes the wonderful and recently published a revolutionary new book, Living Resistance.I already mentioned
and his newsletter. Probably my favorite person to contemplatively read right now.Shoutouts also to
by and The Red Nation.To learn more about decolonization, follow Decolonize Everything Pod,
( is a great twitter follow), and please please go read the founding paper by Anibal Quijano, "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America."Finally, if you’re in Massachusetts and you aren’t already, become a supporter of MA Indigenous Legislative Agenda!
Other Stuff
Speaking of abolitionist dreams and new creations, my friends at the Center for Economic Democracy just released an incredible curriculum (speaking of popular education!) called Economics for Emancipation: A Course on Capitalism, Solidarity, and How We Get Free. I’ve skimmed it and it looks so good. I’m seriously considering hosting a group to go through it together once the new baby starts having a proper bedtime. Let me know if you’d be interested!
I’ll never claim to have expertise I don’t have. I’m no political economist. So let’s just call this Substack “econo-curious.” One of my convictions is that if you care about justice and are actually interested in solutions, you need to take an interest in how the current economy works. That said, I’ve been reading lots of takes on the Silicon Valley Bank default and what’s going on in the financial sector right now. I suggest starting with this Slate piece by Edward Ongweso Jr. on the self-imposed crisis venture capitalists created for themselves, followed by
’s perspective on why tech isn't tech anymore. Finally, the always independent thinking heterodox economist has a series on the why/how (the best of which is here) and what could be done (but won’t be because greed/ideology).Finally, in the midst of this holiest of weeks, take in Dr. Sandra Dalton Smith on the 7 types of rest our whole humanity needs. Then soak with Prentis Hemphill’s interviews with adrienne maree brown on visioning alternative futures and Lama Rod Owens on how we hold rage toward healing.
quoted in Unsettling Truths by Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, 15.
Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 10-13.
There’s better things I could cite here, obviously, but my masters thesis would pretty halfway decent on this. For better citations, see thesis page 56 ;-)
You: What? That’s also quoted in your thesis on page 22? It must be so good! Me: Well, it’s a little dated now, but I really tried hard, and since I struggled and failed to turn it into a book for five years, I might as well tell you about it here…
Willie Jennings’s The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race — all of it.
Nathan, thank you for the shout-out, and the kind words!