A series of 15th- and 16th-century papal edicts continues to shape policies that include land usage and mineral extraction across the globe and undergird notions of white supremacy and religious ...

“I was the witness of sufferings which I have not the power to portray,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America after seeing Choctaw nationals cross the Mississippi River into Arkansas on ...

What’s at the crux of the Doctrine of Discovery? For hundreds of years Indigenous peoples have suffered the effects of the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, a principle of international law and based ...

What are the responsibilities of the Catholic Church when considering the historical realities of settler colonialism in what we now call the Americas? This question lies at the heart of recent ...

In a brief protest at a papal Mass in Canada, Indigenous women unfurled a banner that said, "Rescind the Doctrine." The protest July 28 was a momentary but graphic reminder of how, when ...

Indigenous people hold a banner calling on Pope Francis to "rescind the doctrine," an apparent reference to the so-called Doctrine of Discovery, a collection of old papal teachings that encouraged ...

ROME – Though it was, in a sense, 530 years in the making, required two separate departments of the Roman Curia to address, and came a full eight months after demands burst into full public view ...

During the period that Saint John Paul II was pope from the late 1970s through 2005, he apologized and asked forgiveness for the history of Christian slave-holding and for the injustices inflicted by ...

Nearly 500 years after papal decrees were used to rationalize Europe's colonial conquests, the Vatican repudiated those decrees on Thursday, saying the "Doctrine of Discovery" that was used to justify ...

Dave Pasinski, of Fayetteville, has graduate degrees in moral theology and divinity. Some may wonder about the fuss over 500-year-old documents comprising the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery” and why ...

Indigenous people in the U.S. and Canada had mixed reactions to the Vatican's repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of 15th-century papal bulls that legitimized colonial exploitation, but ...

Sarain Fox, right, and Chelsea Brunelle of the Batchewana First Nation demonstrate outside the mass presided over by Pope Francis at the National Shrine of Saint Anne de Beaupre, Thursday, July 28, ...