What the Church Has Since Said

The Catholic Church has returned to these texts repeatedly, and the returning has been slow and partial. In 1537 Paul III issued Sublimis Deus, which declared the peoples of the Americas to be true men not to be deprived of liberty or property, but the accompanying brief that attached penalties was annulled the following year at the request of the Spanish crown. In 1839 Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade in In Supremo Apostolatus, more than three centuries after Dum Diversas and after most of the Atlantic traffic had already run its course.

On 30 March 2023 the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development issued a joint statement addressed directly to Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex and Inter Caetera. It said that these documents belong to a specific historical period and were tied to political questions, that they have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith, and that the Church repudiates the concepts that fail to recognise the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has come to be called the doctrine of discovery. It also observed that the content of the bulls was overtaken by later papal acts and by treaty.

That statement is a repudiation of a legal concept rather than the annulment of a legal instrument, and it says so in its own words. What it settles is the Church's own position. What it leaves untouched is the standing of the doctrine in the courts of the states that adopted it, which is a separate question in a separate forum.