When Pope Francis visited Chiapas, Mexico, in 2016 to demand rights for the indigenous people of Mexico, he was on familiar ground for champions of indigenous rights. Four hundred and seventy-two years earlier, in 1544, one of the great champions of promoting the rights of the American people, Bartholomew de Las Casas, became Bishop of Chiapas. Las Casas (1484-1566), a Dominican monk, spent decades trying to turn back the tide of genocide threatening the people of Mexico.
Las Casas is most famous for his Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he condemned the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America. The Spanish, beginning with the first voyages of Columbus, treated the indigenous people as inferior, subjecting them to brutality and enslavement in the encomienda system of labor, which was exacerbated by the many diseases brought among the indigenous people.
But before he became a champion of the Indians, Las Casas had been a part of the Spanish colonial system. A native of Seville, educated at the University of Salamanca, his father had sailed with Columbus on his second voyage in 1496, and brought home an Indian slave boy as a present to Bartholomew. Upon orders of Queen Isabella of Spain to free enslaved Indians in Spain, Las Casas freed the child and resolved to go to America to make his fortune. He accompanied Nicholas de Ovando on a voyage in 1502. Las Casas became a landowner exploiting the Indians for his own purposes. But slowly he changed.
When the Dominicans came to America in 1510, Las Casas resolved to take holy orders. When he arrived in Cuba in 1512, his reputation as a Christian working on behalf of Indian rights preceded him. For a time, he believed that the encomienda system was actually good for the indigenous people because it offered Spanish civilization and Christianization. But he changed this point of view and became an opponent of converting people at the point of a sword.
“Here I beheld such great cruelty as living man has never seen nor thought to see,” he wrote. “In three or four months, I being present, more than seven thousand children died of hunger, their fathers and mothers having been taken to the mines. Other dreadful things did I see.” (Quoted in Francis A. MacNutt, Bartholomew de Las Casas; His Life, Apostolate, and Writings, 331-2)
Las Casas found allies in the Vatican and the Spanish Crown. He made several trips to Spain to argue his point of view before King Ferdinand and his successor King Charles V. He was made Procurator-General of the Indies to work on behalf of the Indians. The administrators and soldiers of New Spain, however, stood against him. He was opposed as well by Spanish scholars and theologians, notably Gines de Sepulveda.
After Las Casas had been made Bishop of Chiapas, facing ongoing opposition among the Spanish to his humanitarian point of view, he sailed to Spain, and there confronted Sepulveda in a debate in 1550 watched by all of Spain. Las Casas argued against forced Christianization of the natives:
So enormous are the errors and scandalous propositions, contrary to all evangelical truth and to all Christianity that the Doctor Sepulveda has accumulated, set forth, and coloured with misguided zeal in the royal service, that no honest Christian would be surprised should we wish to combat him, not only with lengthy argument, but likewise as a mortal enemy of Christendom, an abettor of cruel tyrants, extirpator of the human race, and disseminator of fatal blindness throughout this realm of Spain. (Quoted in MacNutt, Las Casas; 289-90)
Las Casas became the unrelenting historian of Spanish atrocities, recording what happened in the Caribbean islands, in Mexico, in Central America, and in Florida. None of the noteworthy conquistadores escaped the vitriolic condemnation of his pen. He knew that neither would they escape God’s punishment. Las Casas’ meticulous historical recorded the crimes of Diego Velázquez in Cuba, Hernan Cortez in Mexico, Pedro de Alvarado in Guatemala, Ponce de Leon and Panfilo de Narvaez in Florda, and Hernan de Soto in the American Southeast, among others.
In the end, Las Casas fought a losing battle against human avarice and bloodlust. He and other missionaries, the Franciscans, Jesuits, and Dominicans, tried to ameliorate the rapine and death, but little could be done. God’s vengeance, however, was nigh. Las Casas prophesized:
The injuries and loss will be visited . . . on all Spain, because the tyranny wrought by their devastations, massacres, and slaughters is so monstrous, that the blind may see it, the deaf hear it, and the dumb recount it, while after our brief existence, the wise shall judge and condemn it. I invoke all the hierarchies and choirs of angels, all the saints of the Celestial Court, all the inhabitants of the globe and especially those who may live after me, to witness that I free my conscience of all that has been done; and that I have fully exposed all these woes to his Majesty; and that if he abandons the government of the Indies to the tyranny of the Spaniards, they will all be lost and depopulated—as we see Hispaniola, and other islands and three thousand leagues of the continent destitute of inhabitants. For these reasons, God will punish Spain and all her people with inevitable severity. So may it be! (Quoted in MacNutt, Las Casas, 291-92)
Such was Las Casas’ prediction of the fall of the Spanish Empire, which began soon after he uttered these words in 1550.
Fast forward to February of 2025. Pope Francis addressed the 7th Indigenous Peoples Forum at the UN, echoing the words and wisdom of Bartholomew de Las Casas from almost five hundred years ago. Pope Francis said:
The defense of the right to preserve one’s culture and identity requires the recognition of the value of their contribution to society, as well as the safeguarding of their existence and the natural resources essential for their livelihood.” The Pope further prayed that “appropriate measures are taken to ensure that the human family walks together in pursuit of the common good, leaving no one excluded or forgotten. (Vatican News)
The pope perfectly stated the sentiments of a man from a different time and place, who was not alone, albeit the loudest voice, in arguing simply that the Roman Catholic Spanish should bring Christian dignity, humility, fairness, and above all, love, to their dealings with the indigenous people of Latin America.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer
