(OSV News) -- Indigenous Catholics, along with U.S. and Canadian bishops, are welcoming the Vatican's repudiation of a legal and political doctrine by which European colonial powers and North American governments historically seized lands from Indigenous peoples -- while stressing there is more work to be done in healing Catholic-Indigenous relations.
'It's a step in the right direction (and) … a powerful statement,' Deacon Don Blackbird, a member of the Omaha Tribe and principal of St. Augus