White Theology and White Power Part V

In 2023, the Vatican formally addressed a phrase that has become central to Indigenous critiques of Christian colonialism: the Doctrine of Discovery. A joint statement from the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development rejected the doctrine as part of Catholic teaching and acknowledged that several fifteenth-century papal documents had been manipulated by political powers to justify immoral acts against Indigenous peoples, sometimes without adequate opposition from church authorities.[1]

That clarification matters. It also raises a historical question that belongs at the center of White Theology and White Power.

The papal documents associated with the Doctrine of Discovery were not written in the language of modern whiteness. Calling them straightforward expressions of white supremacy would collapse centuries of historical development. Their importance lies elsewhere. They mark a period in which European Christian authority was increasingly joined to European political power over non-European peoples.

The people empowered to sail, claim, evangelize, govern and possess were European Christians. The peoples whose sovereignty could be questioned, whose territories could become objects of European claim, and whose religious difference could diminish their standing before European authorities were increasingly African and Indigenous.

That was not yet white supremacy.

But it helped create some of the institutional relationships that white power would later inherit.

When Christian Authority Became European Authority

Three papal bulls are commonly placed at the center of the discussion: Dum Diversas of 1452, Romanus Pontifex of 1455 and Inter Caetera of 1493. They arose under different circumstances and should not be fused into a single colonial constitution drafted in advance of European expansion. Historians are right to insist on their distinctive diplomatic, military and ecclesiastical settings.[2]

Yet the documents shared a political and theological world.

Papal authority, Christian mission, European dynastic ambition and conflict with non-Christian peoples could be brought into the same moral framework.

Dum Diversas authorized the Portuguese crown, in the context of warfare against named non-Christian enemies, to conquer and subjugate them, including through perpetual servitude. Romanus Pontifex later confirmed broad Portuguese privileges along the African coast and located expansion within a language of Christian mission and papal authorization. Inter Caetera, issued after Columbus’s first voyage, granted the Spanish crown claims over lands not already under Christian rule while making evangelization a central stated purpose.[3]

Their categories were primarily religious and jurisdictional rather than modern racial ones: Christian and non-Christian, Christian sovereign and non-Christian ruler, mission and resistance, lands subject or not subject to Christian authority.

But that distinction reveals rather than resolves the problem.

European rulers already wanted land, trade routes, strategic advantage, wealth and labor. Papal theology did not create those interests. What religious authority could do was place some forms of expansion inside a moral universe in which European Christian domination could be understood as compatible with Christian responsibility.

The theological contribution was therefore more consequential than providing religious decoration after conquest had already been decided. It could help answer a prior question:........

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