Dum Diversas

Dum Diversas was issued by Nicholas V on 18 June 1452 and addressed to Afonso V of Portugal. Its operative clause gives the king full and free faculty to invade, search out, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens and pagans and other enemies of Christ wherever they may be, to reduce their persons to perpetual servitude, and to take their kingdoms, possessions and goods and convert them to his own use.

The immediate setting was a crusading one. Constantinople was under pressure and would fall the following year, and the papacy was trying to hold a coalition together against Ottoman expansion. Portugal's Atlantic voyages down the West African coast were presented, and paid for, as an extension of that effort. The bull draws no line between war against a Muslim power in the Mediterranean and the seizure of people on a coast where no war existed.

Read at the time as a war measure, the language became something else in practice. Portuguese ships had been taking captives from the Senegambian coast since the 1440s, and the traffic grew steadily after 1452. The bull supplied a formula that could be repeated: unbelief made a people liable to conquest, and conquest carried title to their persons and their property. Three years later Romanus Pontifex confirmed and widened it, and in 1493 Inter Caetera applied the same reasoning across the Atlantic. Together the three texts are what later lawyers and campaigners have summarised as the doctrine of discovery.

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.