WINNIPEG, MB—Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is trying to decide if they are going to ask the Vatican to get rid of the “Papal Bulls of Discovery” from the 15th-century which gave explorers in those times the right to conquer the New World and Indigenous Peoples in those lands.

Justice Murray Sinclair says they are considering making this request because of the impact that Residential Schools had on Aboriginal people and the part that the 1455 and 1493 Catholic decrees had played in all of this.

The Commission argues that these proclamations of the Roman Catholic Church made it legitimate to treat Aboriginal people as “less than human.” It is possible to trace Royal power and control in Canada back to those papal bulls and neither Canada nor the United States has said they were wrong and should be done away with.

There is a growing chorus of voices calling on the Roman Catholic Church to begin a new relationship with Indigenous Peoples of North America by treating them as equals.