The Vatican has abrogated three papal bulls, claiming that the documents are offensive to indigenous peoples and “have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.”
The bulls Dum Diversas (1452), Romanus Pontifex (1455) and Inter Caetera (1493) contain the basis for the “doctrine of discovery,” which “is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church,” the Vatican has announced.
“The Church acknowledges that these papal bulls did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples,” the dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development said in a joint statement published on April 6.
The Vatican dicasteries quoted Pope Francis’ words endorsing the repeal of the bulls: “Never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others.”
Since the 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,’” the Vatican statement categorically declared. The bulls’ contents “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,” the statement added.
But top Islamic scholars told Church Militant that the Vatican had annulled the bulls not so much because of their purported relationship to colonialism and slavery but because the documents were offensive to Islam and an obstacle to ongoing dialogue.
“The revocation of these bulls is likely the result of Francis’ ongoing ‘dialogue’ with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayeb,” Robert Spencer, Islamic scholar and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades), told Church Militant.
“That ‘dialogue’ only resumed, after al-Tayeb broke it off during the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI, when Francis agreed not to criticize Islam or speak out against Muslim persecution of Christians. Al-Tayeb, meanwhile, made no similar concessions. The ‘dialogue’ is entirely one-sided,” Spencer noted.
“The public repudiation of these long-forgotten documents is intended to buttress the pope’s efforts to engage Islamic groups in this dialogue, which results only in the issuance of soothing falsehoods and will not prevent a single Christian from Muslim persecution,” Spencer added.
“By spinning and condemning these bulls as ‘xenophobic’ calls to justify slavery, it seems that the Vatican is really, as usual, trying to appease Islam, in keeping with Pope Francis’s and Grand Imam al-Tayeb’s ‘rapprochement’ – which continues to be one way,” Islamic historian Raymond Ibrahim told Church Militant.
“The above-referenced bulls were primarily focused on neutralizing Muslim powers that were otherwise creating mass havoc from one end of Christendom to the other,” Ibrahim argued.
Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War Between Islam and the West, explained: Dum Diversas was issued the same year (1452) that Sultan Muhammad II laid siege to Constantinople, leading to its brutal fall in 1453. At the same time, Muslims from North Africa were terrorizing the Iberian Peninsula and the broader Mediterranean through constant and devastating slave raids. Thus, whether in Christendom’s furthest east (Constantinople) or west (Iberia), Muslims were massacring and enslaving countless Christians.
Ibrahim said that the bulls “were designed to inspire Europeans to rise up and defend Christendom against Muslims – to ‘restrain the savage excesses of the Saracens and of other infidels, enemies of the Christian name,’ to quote from the Romanus Pontifex.”
“Because some of these bulls deal with Christians invading and seeking to conquer North Africa, modern-day Islamophiles have sought to present these as wars of conquest and colonization,” the historian and expert in the Crusades noted.