Las Casas defends the Indians
A Dominican priest fights for indigenous rights
Bartolomé de las Casas arrives in the Caribbean in 1502 as a colonist and landowner with indigenous slaves. He is ordained a priest in 1507 — the first person ordained in the Americas — and spends years functioning as what the system requires him to be.
And then, in 1514, preparing a Pentecost sermon, he reads a passage in Sirach: The sacrifice of an offering unjustly acquired is a mockery. He cannot continue.
He frees his slaves. He begins speaking and writing about what the conquest is actually doing to the people of the Americas. He will spend the next fifty years — until his death at age ninety-two in 1566 — as the most persistent, most effective, most infuriating advocate for indigenous rights in the history of the Spanish empire.
His A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies documents the atrocities of the conquest with a specificity that is still difficult to read. He presents it to King Charles V. It produces the New Laws of 1542, which limit indigenous slavery and encomienda — though the laws are widely ignored in the colonies.
Las Casas does not win. The conquest continues. The indigenous populations continue to be decimated by disease, forced labor, and violence. But his voice is on the record, insisting in the language of the colonizers' own faith that what is being done contradicts the gospel the missionaries claim to bring.
The church that sponsored the conquest also produced the man who most clearly condemned it.
“The Indians are our brothers, and Christ has given his life for them. Why do we persecute them with such inhuman savagery when they want to embrace the faith?”
— Bartolomé de las Casas, c. 1540s AD
“Open your mouth for the mute, In the cause of all who are left desolate. Open your mouth, judge righteously, And serve justice to the poor and needy.”
Las Casas read a scripture passage and could not continue what he was doing.
This is what the word of God is supposed to do: interrupt. Convict. Make the acceptable unacceptable. Make the normal visible as the wrong it is.
He freed his slaves and spent the next fifty years paying the cost of having read carefully.
The word is still doing this. It is still interrupting comfortable arrangements and making people see what they have been participating in.
What would you have to change if you read the passage you have been avoiding?