It's outrageous... It's the 21st century, and the colonial era is not over yet? The Vatican announced that Pope Nicholas V's 1455 edict (Dum Diversas) encouraging colonial expansion had been officially rejected.
This edict granted the King of Portugal the right to "invade, search, capture, conquer and subdue all Saracens and infidels." In 1493, after the official opening of the new sea route, Pope Alexander VI established the papal meridian for Spain and Portugal through this edict, thus beginning the history of foreign colonization of European countries.
The content of the edict has also been repeatedly incorporated into judicial decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court to legitimize the assimilation and occupation of indigenous lands. Even in 2005, when the Onida Indians of New York tried to reclaim their ancestral land, the Supreme Court rejected it with the content of the edict.
Current Pope Francis visited Canada's Indigenous communities in July 2022, where Métis and Inuit demanded an apology in person for the Aboriginal residential school.
Since the passage of the Indian Act in Canada in 1876, Canadian Aboriginal children have been forcibly sent to residential schools for assimilation education. These schools have Catholic backgrounds, and child abuse is frequent, resulting in the illness or death of a large number of Indigenous children, which has led to a sharp decline in the indigenous population. This system was not completed until 1997, when the last Aboriginal residential school closed.
Since 2021, Canadian civil society has found more than 2,000 unmarked graves and human tissue remains on the sites of 13 boarding schools, allowing people to witness this bloody history.
A spokesman for Pope Francis said it was a just move for the pope to acknowledge historical mistakes, recognize the terrible effects of the assimilation policy and the suffering endured by indigenous peoples, and ask for forgiveness.
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