True Left

Letters to the Editor: Pope Francis, please denounce the 'Doctrine of Discovery'
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The tragic boarding school issue is but a symptom of something more insidious. One of the articles you published on the pope's apology mentioned the Doctrine of Discovery and its papal origin. It was a legal concept that legitimized and advanced the European colonization of much of the world.

In 1455, Pope Nicholas V granted Portugal's King Alfonso V and other European colonizers the right to "invade, search out, capture, vanquish … and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery." The driving force was largely not religious; it was, rather, driven by more secular appetites cloaked in religious intent.

This concept was adopted into U.S. law by our own Supreme Court in 1823 in Johnson vs. McIntosh. This nefarious doctrine should be acknowledged and repudiated, but instead it remains a skeleton in our nation's closet.