Church repudiates the Doctrine of Discovery

  AP photo/Peter Morrison               Tall Ships

 While most of the attention at the end of the General Convention has been on the passage of D025 and C056, convention resolution, D035, repudiating the doctrine written in 1496, during the reign of Henry XIII, is also important. According to the resolution, the doctrine declared that “Christian sovereigns and their representative explorers could assert dominion and title over non-Christian lands with the full blessing and sanction of the Church.”

 The impetus that resulted in the rush to colonize the Americas actually occurred in 1455 with the papal bull, “Romanus Pontifex,” by Pope Nicholas V, giving permission for Portugal’s King Alfonso V to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods . . . held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery."

Christianity on their side, European ships thus set out to discover the New World, each time claiming the new lands as their own, spreading disease, and eventually subjugating the surviving native populations.

But what does that have to do with this country? While huge amounts of colonization outside of Europe took place in the 15th and 16th centuries, very little of the New World was settled. There was plenty of land for the native populations and the new Europeans. There was so much to share, the tribes were even allowed to sell their land to the Europeans and continue to have sovereignty over what they retained.

During the 18th century, the British formed treaties with the Native Americans, and tribes traded freely with the colonies. By the 19th century, however, circumstances changed. The colonies had driven away the British and established their own government. The U.S. government wanted to expand and claim the land they had won.

The country that was once subject to a foreign power now had to find a way to make its own “discovery.” The Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall would adopt the same discovery doctrines once used to subjugate the Colonies and apply them to exploit parts of the new country’s population resulting in the first of a series of court cases that would change the rights and world of Native Americans.

Next: Johnson v. McIntosh, 1823.