Hm, how do you respond to the background of the Sublimis Deus at Wikipedia, pointing to Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex, which in turn are summarized as laying the foundation for enslavement of pagans?
I couldn't find the text of Dum Diversas, but Romanus Pontifex starts out by championing the salvation of all mankind. The stated intent is to encourage Catholic kings to fight and win a just war. Note how the Christian kings are supposed to "restrain and defeat" the "savage excesses" of the Saracens? The Church is not giving the Catholics a "license to kill" rather, they're declaring open season on Saracen opressors.
This is some dull text, but try reading the bolded parts...
Romanus PontifexThis we believe will more certainly come to pass, through the aid of the Lord, if
we bestow suitable favors and special graces
on those Catholic kings and princes, who, like athletes and intrepid champions of the Christian faith, as we know by the evidence of facts,
not only restrain the savage excesses of the Saracens and of other infidels, enemies of the Christian name,
but also for the defense and increase of the faith
vanquish them and their kingdoms and habitations, though situated in the remotest parts unknown to us,
and subject them to their own temporal dominion, sparing no labor and expense,
in order that those kings and princes, relieved of all obstacles, may be the more animated to the prosecution of so salutary and laudable a work.Perhaps this document was responsible for tricking the nice kings into being greedy and mean, but I suspect that any king who fought the Native Americans to defend Europe from the Saracens was intentionaly misreading the document for his own enrichment.
That said, I do agree that this sloppy declaration of Just War probably had bad ramifications, "giving the sharks a taste of blood" for example, but I don't know the subject matter well enough to offer more than my impressions. Still, am I better than wikipedia or what? :haw:
That said, I shouldn't have hinted that serious theologians entertained the idea that Native Americans lacked souls--some people claimed this, apparently, but who they were is unclear to me.
Yeah, I'm not sure where that comes from either. The worst abuses the Catholic Church ever comitted were in the American Inquisition, but those were
forced conversions -- hardly the sort of thing you'd expect of a Church that believes there's nothing to convert. :raise:
From what I can tell, the Church has never said a class of persons is soulless and any accusation to the contrary is just a retrodictive projection of modern fears.