Joint Statement of the Dicasteries for Culture and Education and for Promoting Integral Human Development on the Doctrine of Discovery

This is the Holy See's own official joint statement, issued by its Dicastery for Culture and Education and its Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development in March 2023, formally stating that the so called Doctrine of Discovery, the legal and political framework once used to justify colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples, is not and never was Catholic teaching. As the Vatican's own official statement on its own record, published through its press office, it is the correct and authoritative source for what the Church itself now states on this question. Its limit is that it is the Church's own current position statement rather than independent historical or legal analysis of how earlier papal documents were actually used to justify colonization on the ground, a question that needs an independent historian's or legal scholar's account alongside the Vatican's own present day repudiation.