The Evangelization of the American Indians (16th Century)

An account that began in 1492 without describing the societies encountered or their religious practices would omit a decisive piece of the case. It erases what the Spaniards found on arrival and what was, in several regions, one of the bloodiest religious systems documented in world history after the Iron Age. This reality justifies the conquest in nothing — Vitoria and Las Casas, the first defenders of the Indians, will say so forcefully (cf. infra) — but it forbids the Rousseauist reading, dominant since the 18th century, of an innocent Arcadia shattered by violent Christians.

The Mexica-Aztec Empire: A State Theologically Founded on Human Sacrifice

The Mexica empire, whose capital Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City) counted between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants when Cortés arrived in 1519, rested on a cosmology that made human blood the indispensable fuel for maintaining the order of the world^[3]. The gods, in the Mexica account of the creation of the Fifth Sun at Teotihuacan, had sacrificed their own blood to set the sun in motion; men owed them in return a perpetual payment, the nextlahualli, without which the sun would stop^[4]. This doctrine is not a late apologetic reconstruction: it is found in the pre-conquest codices (Codex Borgia, Codex Vaticanus B) and in the words directly recorded by Sahagún from the elders in the 1550s-1570s.

Paraphrase of the Mexica doctrine as the elders expounded it to Sahagún: men are said to have been created to give the Sun the blood of the sacrificed to drink and to feed it their hearts — without this food, the star would stop. — Doctrine of the nextlahualli ("the debt to be paid"), from the discourses of the elders recorded by Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, Book VI^[5]

Modern estimates of the annual number of victims diverge — cautious historians place them between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands — but no serious specialist denies the systematic practice:

The dedication of the Templo Mayor under Ahuizotl in 1487 is an extreme and chronologically precise case: according to the Nahua annals, the ceremony is said to have lasted four days and involved between 10,000 and 80,400 sacrificed^[11]. The high figures are almost certainly amplified; but no contemporary scholar denies that it was a mass ceremony, organized to terrorize the subjected peoples and impress the ambassadors who came to attend the event.

The Tzompantli of Tenochtitlan: The Archaeological Proof

For decades, certain anthropologists — out of an understandable reaction against the colonial use of sacrificial accounts — maintained that the conquistadors had exaggerated, even invented, the massive scale of Mexica sacrifice. This revisionist thesis collapsed the day Mexican archaeologists brought it out of the earth.

The excavations of the Templo Mayor, conducted since 1978 by Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and then by Leonardo López Luján, recovered, beneath the historic center of Mexico City, ritual deposits containing skeletons of children sacrificed to the rain god Tlaloc, their remains mingled with shells and water ornaments^[12]. In 2015, archaeologists identified, immediately west of the Templo Mayor, the base of the Huey Tzompantli, the great skull rack described by the conquistadors. In 2020, the INAH announced it had uncovered there 603 human skulls built into a cylindrical tower more than five meters in diameter, among them men, women and children^[13]. The discovery attests the reality of the rack described by the conquistadors, without thereby validating their counts.

The famous count of "one hundred thousand skulls" belongs to another place and another moment of the account: the square of the town of Zocotlan, on the road to Tlaxcala (1519), not the Huey Tzompantli of Tenochtitlan:

"I remember that, on a square where there were some shrines, there were so many piles of skulls of the dead, arranged in such order that they could be counted, that it seemed to me there were more than a hundred thousand — and I say again: more than a hundred thousand. On another side of the square, there were as many piles of bones as could not be counted." — Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, ch. LXII (Zocotlan episode, before Tlaxcala; written c. 1568)^[14]

This figure is rhetorical — the author himself insists: "I say again" — and it is located at Zocotlan: the Tenochtitlan excavations (603 skulls uncovered in 2020) attest the existence of the rack without validating this count made elsewhere.

Child Sacrifices for Tlaloc

This point must be named explicitly, for it lies at the heart of the honest contextualization demanded by any serious treatment of the subject. In the cult of the rain god Tlaloc, very young children — generally between a few months and seven years old, bought from their parents or captured — were the most prized victims: their tears were supposed to call down the rain. The priests deliberately organized their torment so that the children would weep abundantly before being put to death. Offering deposit 48 of the Templo Mayor, excavated in 1980-1981, contained 42 skeletons of children identified as sacrificial victims, dated to around 1454^[15].

"In those days, many children were bought to be offered to Tlaloc, and also to Chalchiuhtlicue; they were sacrificed on the mountains; and if they wept while being carried to be sacrificed, people rejoiced, saying that the rain would be abundant." — Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, bk. II, ch. 1, c. 1577^[16]

It is from this reality that, in the first missionary generation, horrified calls came to put an end to the sacrificial cult — calls that Las Casas refused to turn into a legal title of conquest, and that Vitoria would admit only in the narrow, conditioned case of the protection of innocents (De Indis, III, § 15, fifth legitimate title; see § Vitoria and § Valladolid).

The Flowery Wars: An Institutional System of Harvesting

The Xochiyaoyotl, or "flowery wars", are no apologetic myth: they were ritualized battles, institutionalized by the Mexica empire with its neighbors — Tlaxcalans, Texcocans, Huexotzincas — whose explicit goal was not territorial conquest but the capture of living prisoners destined for sacrifice^[17]. Tlaxcalan warriors were captured, led to Tenochtitlan, sometimes kept for months, then publicly sacrificed atop the great pyramid — their hearts cut out alive and offered to the sun. Bernal Díaz, who saw the system working from the inside, describes what he observed climbing to the top of the Templo Mayor with Cortés:

"It had on the walls so many crusts of blood, and the floor all bathed in blood, as there was no such stench in the slaughterhouses of Castile. And there, five hearts of those sacrificed that day had been presented to him." — Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera, ch. XCII (ascent of the Templo Mayor with Cortés; written c. 1568)^[18]

The Other Cultural Areas: Mayas, Incas, Mochicas

Human sacrifice is no Mexica exclusive. Modern excavations have uncovered:

• Among the Mayas of Yucatán: the famous sacred cenote of Chichen Itzá, dredged by Edward Thompson from 1904 to 1910 and then by the Mexican expeditions of 1960 and 1967-1968, yielded more than 200 human skeletons, most of them children and adolescents thrown alive into the well as offerings to the god Chac^[19].
• Among the Mochicas of Peru (AD 200-700): the site of Huaca de la Luna at Trujillo revealed layers of systematic sacrifice of defeated warriors, with painted scenes attesting the practice^[20].
• Among the Incas: the practice of capacocha — ritual sacrifice of children, led on foot to the Andean summits after absorbing maize beer and coca leaves — is today documented by the frozen mummies exhumed at Llullaillaco (1999, three children aged 6 to 15), at Ampato (1995, "the ice maiden"), and in some twenty other Andean sites^[21]. The modes of killing vary by site and body: sedative effect of alcohol and coca, exposure to the cold of the summits, and as the case may be strangulation or cranial trauma — the immediate causes often remaining uncertain (see Wilson et al.).

Contextualizing Without Justifying

This historical reality does not serve, and never served, to whitewash the conquest. Francisco de Vitoria as well as Bartolomé de Las Casas — the two great Catholic voices against colonial abuses — will say so with a sharpness that Sepúlveda, despite all his efforts, will fail to crack: the real barbarity of sacrificial practices does not give the Spaniards the legal title to seize the lands, riches and lives of another people. Punishing a sin against the natural law as such falls to the legitimate authority of each people over itself, not to a universal right of conquest (see § Vitoria). Vitoria admits, however, in the third part of De Indis (§ 15), a narrowly conditioned case — the protection of innocents unjustly put to death, fifth legitimate title — which Las Casas, for his part, refuses to let found a war of conquest: such is their exact disagreement.

But ignoring this context makes any honest historical analysis impossible. The image of an idyllic America shattered by cross and sword is a romantic construction of 18th-century Europe, not a historical description. When Cortés lands at Veracruz, entire peoples — Tlaxcalans, Totonacs, Texcocans — rally massively to him precisely because they have endured for generations the Mexica domination and its sacrificial levies^[22]. For these peoples, the fall of Tenochtitlan was first a liberation.

Christopher Columbus: Between Evangelizing Intentions and Abuses

Christopher Columbus (c. 1451-1506) is today presented as the archetype of the cynical conqueror. The portrait is one-sided. The Genoese navigator, deeply marked by Franciscan spirituality, saw his enterprise — he writes it explicitly in his Libro de las Profecías — as a step toward the reconquest of Jerusalem and the evangelization of the nations announced by Isaiah^[23]. The Capitulaciones de Santa Fe signed with the Catholic Monarchs on 17 April 1492 concern the titles and concessions granted to Columbus (admiralty, viceroyalty, tenth of the profits): their full transcription mentions no mission of evangelization. The missionary intention is expressed explicitly, on the other hand, from the following year, in the bull Inter caetera of Alexander VI (4 May 1493), which orders the Catholic Monarchs to send to the discovered lands men "worthy, fearing God, learned and experienced" to instruct the inhabitants in the Catholic faith^[24]. On the ground in Hispaniola, however, his colonial administration goes wrong: levies of tribute, punishments, establishment of the encomienda in its primitive form. He will be arrested and brought back in chains to Cádiz in 1500 by Francisco de Bobadilla, at the Crown's request, precisely for bad governance^[25].

The Columbus case already illustrates the structuring tension found throughout the 16th century: the Crown of Spain, strongly influenced by the mendicant orders and by the pontifical magisterium, legislates to protect the natives; the settlers on the spot, driven by their economic interest, circumvent and resist. Repeatedly — not without resistance or retreats (Charles V's protest against Pastorale Officium, partial suspension of the Leyes Nuevas, Landa's fault: cf. infra) — protective reform came from above, under the impetus of the Church: a Crown legislating under pressure from the mendicant orders and the pontifical magisterium, against the economic interests of the settlers on the spot, baptized yet acting against the teaching received.

The Fall of Tenochtitlan (1521): A Mostly Amerindian War

The usual account — a few hundred Spaniards toppling an empire — is a gross strategic simplification. When Cortés besieges Tenochtitlan from April to August 1521, he commands a coalition of 80,000 to 200,000 Tlaxcalan, Texcocan, Huexotzinca and other indigenous allied warriors, joined by fewer than 1,000 Spaniards^[26]. Archaeology and the indigenous sources (notably the 16th-century Lienzo de Tlaxcala) confirm that the overwhelming majority of the anti-Mexica fighters were Amerindian — and that they were fighting an imperial empire they hated. The fall of Tenochtitlan, from the Tlaxcalan point of view, is an Amerindian victory over a regional domination, to which Cortés brought coordination, cavalry and gunpowder.

The Decisive Demographic Factor: Epidemics

The catastrophic fall of native populations — between 70 and 90% in less than a century in some regions — is one of the fastest demographic collapses documented in human history. Its principal cause, however, is not massacre: it is the diseases of the Old World against which American populations lacked the immunity acquired over millennia in Eurasia.

Smallpox lands in Hispaniola in 1518-1519. It strikes Mexico before the fall of Tenochtitlan: Cuitláhuac, brother and successor of Moctezuma, dies of smallpox in 1520, after eighty days of reign, opening the way to the anti-Mexica coalition^[27]. It ravages the Inca empire even before Pizarro's arrival in 1531: it is smallpox that kills Huayna Capac and triggers the civil war between Atahualpa and Huáscar, from which Pizarro will profit. Then come measles (1531, 1538), the cocoliztli of 1545-1548 — an epidemic of massive lethality, long attributed without reserve to typhus, a hypothesis debated today: paleogenomic analyses (Vågene et al., 2018) identified Salmonella enterica (Paratyphi C) in remains from the Teposcolula-Yucundaa site, a proposed candidate without closing the debate^[28] —, influenza and diphtheria.

The historian Suzanne Austin Alchon maintains that epidemics were the prime factor in the catastrophic decline of native populations, while stressing that colonial practices — wars, slavery, forced displacements — aggravated mortality and undermined institutions^[29].

This reality does not minimize the real violence: it simply shifts the statistical center of gravity. The figures sometimes cited — "100 million dead by Christian violence" — are fiction. Las Casas himself, in the Brevísima, does not always distinguish deaths by epidemic from deaths by violence: his great moral usefulness as a witness for the prosecution against abuses does not erase his methodological weaknesses.

The Encomienda: System, Drift and Ecclesial Resistance

The system of the encomienda, inherited from the Reconquista and transposed to the Americas by the first governors, entrusted to a settler (the encomendero) a group of Indians who owed him labor and tribute in exchange — theoretically — for military protection and Christian instruction^[30]. The theory was feudal; the practice quickly became de facto slavery. The encomenderos often overexploited their Indians, levied beyond the legal rates, refused any real instruction, and fiercely opposed every attempt at reform.

It is precisely the encomienda that the Dominicans denounced as early as 1511 (Montesinos), that Las Casas wanted to abolish for fifty years, that the Leyes Nuevas of 1542 tried to dismantle — triggering the armed revolt of the encomenderos of Peru led by Gonzalo Pizarro (1544-1548), and forcing Charles V to retreat partially.

A structuring distinction to retain for what follows: this system, condemned by the magisterium and by most Salamanca theologians, was maintained by the economic interests of the settlers, baptized yet acting against the teaching of the Church. Confusing the two levels — the Church as magisterial institution and the individual Catholics who contravene its teaching — is one of the most widespread sources of error in the anti-Catholic critique of colonization.

This is the fact most systematically concealed in anti-Catholic critiques of evangelization. The denunciation of colonial abuses was born at the very heart of the Church itself, before the ideals of the Enlightenment existed, before the formula "human rights" had been invented, before the Protestant powers that would spread the Black Legend had undertaken their own colonization — whose contemporary measures, despite their disparate definitions, sketch north of the continent a contrast beyond all common measure with the south (see comparative table, infra). Chronology does not lie: Montesinos preaches in 1511, Sublimis Deus appears in 1537, Vitoria teaches in 1539, Valladolid meets in 1550 — nearly a century before Jamestown (1607), two centuries before Voltaire, nearly three centuries before the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

The Montesinos Sermon (21 December 1511, 4th Sunday of Advent)

On 21 December 1511, 4th Sunday of Advent, at Santo Domingo (Hispaniola), the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos climbs into the pulpit before the settlers and their authorities. He was designated by his small Dominican community — arrived on the island the previous year — to deliver the word they had drafted together. The text of the sermon is known to us through Las Casas's Historia de las Indias, which preserved its essentials:

"This voice tells you that you are all in mortal sin; that you live and will die in it because of the cruelty and tyranny you exercise upon these innocent peoples. Tell me: by what right, by what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? By what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these peoples who lived peacefully in their lands? [...] These Indians, are they not men? Have they not rational souls? Must you not love them as yourselves?" — Antonio de Montesinos, homily of 21 December 1511 (4th Sunday of Advent), at Santo Domingo, quoted by Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, bk. III, ch. 3-4^[31]

The effect was seismic. The terrified settlers demanded that the Dominican provincial disavow his brother. He refused. The Crown received complaints; Montesinos was summoned to Spain — where, before Ferdinand II in person, he publicly defended his preaching. The Crown's reaction was not to silence him: it convened a junta of theologians at Burgos in 1512.

This sermon, only nineteen years after Columbus's first crossing — nearly a century before the founding of Jamestown (1607), the first permanent English colony — is regarded by legal historians as the first public act of the modern defense of human rights^[32].

The Laws of Burgos (1512): First Protective Legislation in Colonial History

Under the direct effect of Montesinos's sermon and the Dominican complaints, Ferdinand II convenes at Burgos a junta of theologians and jurists. They promulgate, on 27 December 1512, the Leyes de Burgos — the first known legislation, according to the historiography cited, legally regulating the treatment of colonized natives (a sourced thesis, not closed evidence)^[33]. The 35-article text imposes:

• a limit on working time;
• an obligation to provide food and clothing to employed Indians;
• a ban on the labor of pregnant women and children under fourteen;
• an obligation of religious instruction and baptism;
• a ban on whipping or insulting Indians.

Las Casas, in his later struggle, will find these laws plainly insufficient — they maintain the encomienda — but their very existence, twenty years after the "discovery" (1492-1512), is presented by the cited historiography as without equivalent in ancient, medieval or modern colonizations: an argued thesis, not closed evidence^[34][35].

The Conversion of Las Casas (1514): Apostle of the Indians

Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566) is one of the most important figures in the moral history of the 16th century. Son of a companion of Columbus, ordained priest in 1510, he arrives in the Indies as a young encomendero settled in Cuba. For twelve years he lives off the labor of the Indians entrusted to him — he accuses himself of it with brutal lucidity. Then, in spring 1514, while preparing a sermon for Pentecost, he meditates on Sir 34:18-22 — an episode of inner conversion he himself recounts in his Historia de las Indias:

"To offer sacrifice of the goods of the poor, is to immolate the son before the eyes of the father. The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; he that defraudeth them thereof is a man of blood." — Sirach 34:20-22 (Jerusalem Bible)

The passage seizes him. Las Casas understands that what he is doing in Cuba is precisely what the sage denounces. The public break follows, distinct from the inner shock: on 15 August 1514, on the feast of the Assumption, he pronounces his renunciation and gives his Indians back to the governor, declaring he can no longer exercise the cure of souls while holding men in servitude. He later joins the Dominican order (1522) and becomes, until his death in 1566, the most tenacious and best-documented accuser of colonial violence^[36].

His work is immense. Three texts stand out:

• the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (drafted in 1542, published in 1552 at Seville), a concentrated indictment, translated throughout Europe;
• the Historia de las Indias, a great three-book chronicle, written over thirty years;
• the De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram religionem ("On the unique mode of calling all nations to the true religion", c. 1537), a methodological treatise on mission.

"The reason why the Christians destroyed so great and infinite a number of souls was only their final desire for gold, their will to grow rich in little time, to rise to high stations unsuited to their condition, through covetousness and ambition; and the most pestilential thing one can have in the world." — Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, Seville, 1552^[37]

The De unico vocationis modo develops a theology of mission that opposes the conquering logic point by point. The unique method for leading peoples to the true faith is rational persuasion and gentleness:

"There is a single mode, ordered by divine Providence, of teaching men the true religion: the one that convinces the intellect by reasons and gently draws the will. It is common to all men in the world, without any discrimination of sect, error or corruption of morals." — Bartolomé de Las Casas, De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram religionem, c. 1537^[38]

Historiographical limits. Las Casas exaggerated the figures: the Brevísima speaks of "more than twelve million" Indians killed by the Spaniards, which is incompatible with modern demographic estimates — and which includes, without distinguishing them, deaths by epidemic. This exaggeration fed the Leyenda Negra examined below. But the underlying moral diagnosis — exploitation, contempt, colonial avarice — remains historically solid. And it has, above all, a decisive status: it is an internal Spanish Catholic critique, formulated by a Dominican turned bishop, read by the pope and the emperor, and constituting a real step in the history of natural law.

Sublimis Deus, Pastorale Officium, Altitudo (1537): Paul III Speaks

Upon the arrival of urgent letters from the Dominican missionaries of Mexico — in particular from the first bishop of Tlaxcala, Julián Garcés, who writes the pope the epistle De habilitate et capacitate gentium — Paul III takes within days, in late May and early June 1537, three pontifical acts which together form the first pontifical anti-slavery corpus of the modern colonial era^[39]:

1. Pastorale Officium, brief of 29 May 1537, addressed to Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera, Archbishop of Toledo. It excommunicates latae sententiae whoever reduces the Indians to slavery or deprives them of their goods.
2. Sublimis Deus (sometimes edited under the variants Sublimis Dei or Veritas Ipsa), bull of 2 June 1537, the major doctrinal text on the full humanity of the Indians.
3. Altitudo divini consilii, constitution of 1 June 1537, on the marriages and baptisms of the Indians.

The text of Sublimis Deus is unambiguous:

"The Indians themselves, and all other peoples who may later be discovered by Christians, must in no way be deprived of their liberty and the possession of their goods, even if they are outside the faith of Jesus Christ; they can and must freely and licitly enjoy their liberty and the possession of their goods; they must in no way be reduced to slavery. And any action to the contrary is null and of no effect." — Paul III, bull Sublimis Deus, Rome, 2 June 1537^[40]

This text is momentous for three distinct, cumulative reasons.

First reason — metaphysical. It affirms that the Indians are "true men" (veri homines), endowed with reason and capable of receiving the faith. It is a direct, explicit pontifical refutation of the thesis then circulating in certain colonial circles, which Sepúlveda will take up again at Valladolid: that the Indians are "slaves by nature" (in the Aristotelian sense). The Magisterium decides: no.

Second reason — juridical. The bull forbids depriving non-Christians of liberty and confiscating their goods, even for non-Christians. It is one of the founding acts of the Catholic law of religious liberty and natural property.

Third reason — chronological. The text appears in 1537: twenty-six years before the birth of William Shakespeare, more than two hundred and fifty years before the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and three centuries before Protestant nation-states abolished the slavery they had themselves industrialized.

Resistance was violent. Emperor Charles V — yet a sincere Catholic — protested to the pope against the automatic excommunication provided by Pastorale Officium, which he judged to encroach on his temporal prerogatives. Under imperial pressure, Paul III had to repeal the penal part of Pastorale Officium in 1538 (letter Non indecens videtur to Cardinal Tavera, June 1538)^[41] — but without retracting the doctrine of Sublimis Deus, which remains intact and binding. On the ground, enforcement was very uneven; the encomenderos circumvented as much as they could. But the magisterial principle was laid down, and it will serve as the normative framework for the next four centuries, up to Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII and beyond.

The School of Salamanca: Vitoria, Soto, Cano

In the lecture halls of the University of Salamanca, the most prestigious in Spain, the Dominicans simultaneously work out the theory. This is what is now called the School of Salamanca, whose major figures are Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483-1546), Domingo de Soto (1494-1560), Melchor Cano (1509-1560) and Bartolomé de Carranza (1503-1576)^[42]. This school is today recognized by historians of international law — Catholic and non-Catholic alike — as the cradle of the modern law of nations.

Francisco de Vitoria and the Relectio de Indis (January 1539)

In January 1539, Vitoria solemnly delivers, before the assembled university, his Relectio de Indis recenter inventis ("special lecture on the recently discovered Indians") — a founding text. There he examines in turn, with the rigor of late scholasticism, the legal titles invoked to justify Spanish domination. He rejects most of them:

Vitoria positively affirms, on the other hand, that the Indians possess true property, true political authorities, full rationality. Their status as unbelievers in no way diminishes their natural rights:

"The barbarians, before the arrival of the Spaniards, were truly masters of their goods, both public and private. And this is something that could be taken from them neither on account of their unbelieving condition, nor because they were amatentes (lacking in mind) or senseless. For they were neither." — Francisco de Vitoria, Relectio de Indis recenter inventis, first part, conclusion^[44]

The text goes further: Vitoria founds a natural right to the communication and movement of men (ius communicationis), which paradoxically opens certain legitimate titles of intervention — but on conditions so strict (defense of persecuted innocents, self-defense against real aggression) that they bear no relation to what actually happened in America.

Vitoria's influence on the later development of international law is documented and recognized. Hugo Grotius (the Dutch Protestant, regarded as father of modern international law) cites him; Samuel Pufendorf, Emerich de Vattel, later the German historical school, James Brown Scott and North American interwar historiography confirmed his lineage.

Domingo de Soto, Melchor Cano, Bartolomé de Carranza

Vitoria's work is not isolated. Domingo de Soto writes De justitia et jure (1556) which formulates, along the same lines, the natural rights of the natives. Melchor Cano, in De locis theologicis, founds theology as a science of the critique of sources. Bartolomé de Carranza, future Archbishop of Toledo (who will later be unjustly persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition on Cano's denunciation), takes part in the Valladolid junta (1550-1551) on Las Casas's side. The School of Salamanca, as a whole, is on the side of the Indians.

The Leyes Nuevas (1542): Imperial Reform Under Catholic Pressure

Under the direct influence of Las Casas and the mendicant orders, Charles V promulgates on 20 November 1542 at Barcelona the Leyes Nuevas para la gobernación de las Indias y buen tratamiento y conservación de los Indios ("New Laws for the government of the Indies and the good treatment and preservation of the Indians")^[45]. The 40-article text proclaims:

• the natural liberty of the Amerindians and the obligation to free immediately slaves unjustly held;
• the prohibition of any new enslavement, on whatever pretext;
• the severe limitation of the encomienda;
• the ban on hereditary transmission of encomiendas, which were to revert to the Crown on their holder's death;
• sanctions against settlers mistreating Indians;
• the creation of audiencias (Lima, Guatemala) charged with enforcement.

Resistance was violent. In Peru, the promulgation of the Leyes Nuevas triggered the armed revolt of the encomenderos led by Gonzalo Pizarro, younger brother of the conquistador (1544-1548). The viceroy Blasco Núñez Vela, sent to enforce the laws, was beheaded by the rebels at the battle of Añaquito in January 1546. Pedro de la Gasca, an ecclesiastic named president of the Audiencia of Lima, had to be sent to restore royal authority and have Pizarro executed (April 1548). Charles V, under pressure, suspended certain articles — notably the non-hereditary transmission of the encomienda. But the principle of native liberty was maintained.

The episode is historically decisive. It simultaneously reveals the reality of Catholic principles applied by royal power under ecclesial influence, and the strength of the economic interests that resisted them — interests carried by baptized settlers acting in contradiction with their Church's teaching.

In April 1550, Charles V takes a decision presented by the historiography of the debate (Hanke; Bataillon and Saint-Lu) as without documented precedent in colonial history: he suspends the conquests underway in America and convenes, in two sessions at Valladolid (August-September 1550, then April 1551), a junta of fourteen theologians and jurists to determine whether the wars of conquest against the indigenous peoples are morally justified^[46].

No colonial power — neither the England of the conquest of New England in the 17th century, nor Holland, nor the United States of the westward march in the 19th century — ever submitted its own ongoing colonial enterprise to a comparable public theological examination as Valladolid. Such at least is the documented thesis of the historiography of the debate (Hanke; Bataillon and Saint-Lu): this singularity must be named as an argued thesis, not as closed evidence^[47]. As for the deportation of the Acadians (1755), it was decided and executed by the British authorities — Governor Charles Lawrence, order of 28 July 1755 — not by the Catholic France from which these populations came.

Sepúlveda's Arguments

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489-1573), humanist, translator of Aristotle, chaplain to Charles V, presents four main arguments in his treatise Democrates secundus, sive de justis belli causis:

1. The natural servitude argument. Drawn from Aristotle's Politics (Book I): certain peoples display a native inferiority that destines them to be governed by others. The Indians, by their level of civilization, their idolatry and their human sacrifices, would fall in this category.
2. The crimes-against-nature argument. Human sacrifices and idolatry are crimes so grave against the natural law that they justify external punitive intervention.
3. The protection-of-innocents argument. It is legitimate to intervene militarily to save innocent victims (notably children sacrificed to Tlaloc).
4. The preparation-for-the-Gospel argument. Conquest prepares the ground for Christian preaching by pacifying peoples.

These arguments are not grotesque. The fourth — conquest as preparation for the Gospel — is the weakest: it presupposes that a faith imposed by arms prepares faith, which Las Casas will refute by showing that it slanders it. The third is morally real: child sacrifices are objective crimes, and Vitoria had admitted, under strict conditions, a limited right to protect innocents (De Indis, III, § 15, fifth legitimate title). It is Las Casas's reply that reveals authentic Catholic rigor.

Las Casas's Rejoinder

Las Casas, hastening from Mexico, writes a Latin Apologia, a long plea of which Domingo de Soto — a member of the junta, not its clerk — wrote the summary (Sumario) for the autumn 1550 deliberations: a rare intellectual exercise in the history of political theologies. The Latin manuscript, kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (nouv. acq. lat. 12926), was edited by Ángel Losada (Apología, 1975)^[48].

On Aristotelian natural servitude:

• Aristotle distinguishes two senses: legal servitude (following just war) and natural servitude (native incapacity to govern oneself).
• Natural servitude does not apply to peoples possessing laws, organized governments, arts, writings, sophisticated religions. Yet the Mexicas and Incas possess them.
• Conclusion: the Aristotelian doctrine does not apply to the Indians.

On crimes against nature and the protection of innocents:

• Human sacrifices are objectively abominable. No one disputes it.
• But the just protection of innocents cannot be carried out through a war that would kill, for a few thousand sacrificed, hundreds of thousands of innocent natives.
• The moral calculus shows the war of conquest to be infinitely more murderous than the evil it claims to redress.
• Conclusion: military conquest is not the fitting mode of combat against human sacrifice. Only patient preaching is.

On preparation for the Gospel:

• An imposed faith is not faith.
• Conclusion: conquest, far from preparing the Gospel, slanders it among peoples not yet reached.

In substance, the thesis defended by Las Casas at Valladolid: everything done against the Indians of the New World is contrary to justice, to Christian purity, to humanity, to natural and divine law. — Position of Bartolomé de Las Casas at Valladolid, 1550-1551, summarized from the historians of the debate^[49]

The Outcome

The debate ends without a formal verdict. But the junta does not decide in Sepúlveda's favor: his Democrates secundus is refused an imprimatur and will not be published until 1892, three and a half centuries later. The conquests remain suspended for several years. The Leyes Nuevas are maintained in their essential principles. Las Casas — named in 1516, by Cardinal Cisneros, "procurador o protector universal de todos los indios de las Indias", with one hundred gold pesos of annual wages, according to the account of the act given by Las Casas himself in his Historia de las Indias^[50] — sees his struggle vindicated, well before Valladolid.

But above all, the event itself is, according to the historians of the debate (Hanke; Bataillon and Saint-Lu), without documented precedent in the history of empires: an imperial power at the summit of its strength, occupying half a continent, suspends its military operations and organizes a public theological debate on the moral legitimacy of its own conquest. According to the historians of the debate (Hanke; Bataillon and Saint-Lu), no other European colonial power ever submitted its own ongoing conquest to a public theological examination of this scale^[51]. And Catholic posterity, taken as a whole, is on Las Casas's side, not Sepúlveda's. The Leyes Nuevas hold. The 1681 Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias, monument of Spanish colonial law, integrates the Las Casas and Vitoria principles.

The dominant narrative presents the missionaries as agents of cultural ethnocide. The historical reality is radically more complex — and, in large part, exactly the reverse. Without the 16th-century Franciscan, Dominican and Jesuit missionaries, the native culture of America would today be largely unknown to us.

The Twelve Franciscan Apostles of Mexico (1524)

On 13 May 1524, twelve Franciscan friars land at Veracruz, symbolically chosen with reference to the twelve apostles. Their superior is Martín de Valencia. According to Motolinía's testimony, on their arrival, Cortés and his captains kneel before the friars and kiss the ground at their feet. The scene stupefies the Indians: they do not understand that the conquerors prostrate themselves before barefoot men dressed in rags^[52].

These Franciscans immediately set about learning the local languages — Nahuatl, Totonac, Matlatzinca, Otomi, Huastec — and preaching in the native idiom. Andrés de Olmos (1485-1571) writes the first grammar of the Nahuatl language (Arte de la lengua mexicana, 1547), a pioneering work that will save Nahuatl grammar from oblivion. Pedro de Gante (c. 1479-1572), a Fleming held by tradition to be a possible natural son of Emperor Maximilian I — thus of Habsburg blood and related to Charles V — refuses priestly ordination the better to live with the Indians, and founds at San José de los Naturales (Mexico), as early as 1527, a school for native children teaching them reading, writing, Latin, liturgical music, visual arts and manual trades. By the end of his life, it will have welcomed more than 1,000 pupils^[53].

The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (1536): First European College of Higher Education in the Americas

Solemnly inaugurated on 6 January 1536 by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza and Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco is, according to historiography (Steck; Kobayashi; Mathes), the first European college of higher education in the Americas^[54]. The universities proper — the first being Santo Domingo (1538) — follow: then Mexico and San Marcos of Lima (1551) — more than a century before Harvard (1636)^[55]. College in 1536, university in 1538: there is no contradiction between the two primacies. Run by the Franciscans, it welcomes sons of the Nahua nobility (aged 10 to 12) and teaches them Latin — grammar, rhetoric and logic^[56]. Latin and Nahuatl are the two official languages of the campus.

This college will produce the first generation of Christian Indian intellectuals: Antonio Valeriano (probable redactor of the Nican Mopohua), Hernando de Ribas, Martín Jacobita, Diego Adriano — all accomplished Latinists. They will become Sahagún's indispensable collaborators for his ethnographic enterprise, and will translate into Nahuatl liturgical, philosophical and patristic texts. The imported alphabet thus becomes the instrument of written preservation of native cultures — a magnificent paradox the standard anti-Catholic critique never mentions.

Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590): The Ethnographer Who Saved Aztec Culture

Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan arrived in Mexico in 1529, devotes his labor of several decades to a project with no equivalent at the time in any colonization: systematically questioning the elders, in their own language, and collecting the myths, hymns, medical knowledge, craft techniques, rites, proverbs, beliefs and history of the Mexica empire before the conquest. He trains a team of four Indian Latinists from the Colegio de Tlatelolco, conducts his inquiries in several towns (Tepepulco around 1558, Tlatelolco around 1564, Mexico around 1570 — nearly thirty years of inquiry and writing), and composes the work on pages with two text columns — Nahuatl on the right, the Spanish translation or gloss on the left —, with illustrations and annotations.

The result is the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, completed in 1577 in the form of the Florentine Codex (twelve books, more than 2,400 illustrations) — today kept at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. It is the greatest ethnographic encyclopedia of the pre-Columbian world ever produced^[57]. Without it, we would know infinitely less about Aztec civilization than we do.

The paradox is crystal-clear: it is a Catholic missionary who produced, in the native language, the principal source of knowledge of the religion he sought to supplant. This paradox repeats itself with Diego Durán (1537-1588), a Dominican whose Historia de las Indias de Nueva España is another major source; with Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, a Franciscan whose Historia de los indios (c. 1541) remains fundamental; with José de Acosta (1540-1600), a Jesuit whose Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) is one of the first European treatises of comparative anthropology.

The Diego de Landa Case: The Grave Fault and Its Context

The faults must be named too. The Franciscan Diego de Landa (1524-1579), then provincial of Yucatán, stands as a counterexample. On 12 July 1562, at Mani (Yucatán), he orders an auto-da-fé that destroys 27 Maya codices and some 5,000 Maya ritual objects^[58]. It is an irreparable loss to Maya written memory — the great majority of this literature had been destroyed; only four codices remain to us today (Dresden, Madrid, Paris, Grolier).

The episode is shameful. It must nevertheless be contextualized in three steps.

First, Landa was recalled to Spain and investigated by the Council of the Indies. He was subjected to an inquiry for exercising inquisitorial jurisdiction without authorization — he was not bishop but Franciscan provincial at the time — notably at the instigation of the Bishop of Yucatán Francisco de Toral, one of his accusers^[59]. It is not the Church that ordered the destruction of the codices: it is an individual who exceeded his powers and was recalled for it. Landa was consecrated Bishop of Yucatán only after this trial, succeeding Toral.

Second, Landa himself subsequently wrote, in Spain during his inquiry, his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (c. 1566) — which is today one of the principal sources of our knowledge of Maya civilization. More still: it is through the phonetic equivalents Landa gives there for the Maya calendar that Yuri Knorozov was able, in 1952, to begin the decipherment of Maya writing. The arsonist became, despite himself, the preserver.

Third, this painful episode is incomparable to the regime established by the English colonies of North America, which produced neither a Landa nor a Sahagún, nor even an educational system comparable to Tlatelolco. The Amerindian languages there were extinguished more radically, without any missionary setting out to transcribe them on Sahagún's scale. The Maya codices burned at Mani are a grave fault; the silent disappearance of nearly all the pre-Columbian languages of northeastern North America is an infinitely wider fault, without Landa or spectacular auto-da-fé.

The evangelization of Mexico cannot be explained only by missionary structures. It is marked, as early as 1531 — only ten years after the fall of Tenochtitlan — by a supernatural event that immediately and durably reorients the relation between Indians and Christians. It is the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the hill of Tepeyac, to the Nahua Indian Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474-1548). Ignispedia devotes a dedicated dossier to this event — Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531) — but its place in the history of the evangelization of the Indians is such that it cannot be absent here.

The Event and the Nahuatl Account

On 9 December 1531, on his way to catechism, Juan Diego hears a voice calling him to the top of Tepeyac hill — a site once dedicated to the Nahua mother goddess Tonantzin. A luminous woman speaks to him in Nahuatl, in the terms of affection proper to that language. She presents herself as the Mother of the "true God through whom one lives" and asks him to have a church built there. The bishop, the Franciscan Juan de Zumárraga, asks for a sign. On 12 December, the Virgin gives this sign: roses of Castile bloom out of season on the frozen hill, and when Juan Diego unfolds his tilma before Zumárraga to let the roses fall, the image of the Virgin appears imprinted on the agave fiber.

The reference account is the Nican Mopohua ("Here are the things that happened"), a Nahuatl text probably written by Antonio Valeriano — one of the Latinists trained at the Colegio de Tlatelolco — around 1545-1555, from direct testimonies^[60]. It is a masterpiece of Christian Nahuatl literature. The Virgin's words, as transcribed there:

"My dearest little son, I am the perfect and ever Virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the most true God through whom one lives, the Creator of persons, the Master of nearness and immediacy, the Lord of Heaven, the Lord of Earth." — Nican Mopohua, Antonio Valeriano (attr.), c. 1545-1555, stanza 26^[61]

This sentence contains a remarkable theological trait. The title "Master of nearness and immediacy" (in Tloque in Nahuaque) was, in pre-Christian Nahua spirituality, a title of Ipalnemohuani, the invisible supreme divinity — above the visible Mexica pantheon. The Virgin presents herself as the Mother of that very One. She does not ask a humiliated people to abandon their language, categories or history to worship a foreign god: she tells them that the one God they sensed as "near and far" is precisely Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son — true God through whom one lives —, and that she is his Mother according to humanity: Mother of God because Mother of the Son, not mother of the Father (cf. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 95 and 98). Nothing in the Nican Mopohua makes Mary the mother of the Father: the confusion came from our wording, here corrected.

The Nahua Symbols of the Tilma

The image itself, as still kept at the Basilica of Mexico, speaks in Nahua code: the stars of the mantle evoke the celestial mantle, the sun behind the Virgin evokes the solar god Huitzilopochtli (on whom she stands — a sign of superiority), the moon beneath her feet evokes Coyolxauhqui, the black ribbon knotted around her waist is the maternal sign of pregnancy (cinta de embarazo) in Nahua culture — and, according to a pious non-magisterial hypothesis proposed by Mario Rojas Sánchez (1983), the arrangement of the stars would correspond to the position of the sky above Mexico on 12 December 1531 in the morning^[62].

This is what John Paul II will call, at Juan Diego's canonization in 2002, inculturation:

"The message of Christ, through his Mother, took up the central elements of the native culture, purified them and gave them their definitive meaning of salvation." — John Paul II, homily for the canonization of Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City, 31 July 2002^[63]

The Historical Effect: The Great Movement of Conversions

The alleged historical effect is massive, but the quantified testimony must be distinguished from interpretation. Motolinía, an eyewitness, estimates — in his Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (c. 1541) — that the Franciscans baptized more than four million Indians between 1524 and 1536, and that a single priest could baptize up to 14,000 in one day^[64]: a period beginning seven years before Guadalupe (1531), which therefore does not demonstrate, by itself, an immediately measurable effect of the apparition. The figures are to be taken with due caution — Motolinía is an apologist, and the catechetical quality of these mass baptisms was sometimes precarious. But the fact of a massive movement of conversions in the 1520s-1540s is confirmed by the chroniclers, and the Catholic reading sees in it the decisive impetus of Guadalupe: testimony, period and interpretation are here three distinct things.

The evangelization of the Indians produced not only baptized faithful: from the very first generation it produced canonized saints from the soil of America itself — proof that the Catholic faith was not superficially overlaid, but interiorized to the point of bearing the highest fruits.

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (1474-1548) — First Native of the Americas Canonized

Juan Diego, the seer of Guadalupe, is — in order of canonization — the first native of the Americas raised to the altars by the universal Church (the child martyrs of Tlaxcala, dead in 1527-1529, were not canonized until 2017). Canonized by John Paul II on 31 July 2002 in the Basilica of Mexico, before an Amerindian people who had claimed his place in the universal martyrology for centuries. His figure — a poor Indian of Anáhuac, a macehualli (man of the people), to whom the Virgin entrusted a message for a bishop — became the symbol of native dignity recognized by the Church.

Saint Toribio de Mogrovejo (1538-1606) — Pastor-Archbishop of Peru

Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo y Robledo, a lay jurist turned Archbishop of Lima, arrived in Peru in 1581 (Paita, 24 May) and travelled his immense archdiocese on foot for twenty-five years to visit the native communities of the Andes — learning Quechua, celebrating three provincial councils: Lima 1582-1583 (a single Third Council sitting over two years), 1591 and 1601. The Third Council produced the trilingual Spanish-Quechua-Aymara catechism (Doctrina christiana, 1584)^[65]. Patron of the Latin American episcopate, he was canonized by Benedict XIII in 1726.

Saint Rose of Lima (1586-1617) — First Saint of the New World

Isabel Flores de Oliva, born in Lima, a Dominican of the Third Order, an ecstatic mystic, lived a life of radical penance and service to the native and black sick of Lima. First saint of the New World to be canonized, by Clement X in 1671, she is patroness of the Americas and the Philippines.

Saint Martin de Porres (1579-1639) — The Humble Mulatto of Lima

Martín de Porres, natural son of a Spanish knight and a Panamanian freedwoman of African origin, a Dominican religious in Lima, was a charitable physician to the poor — to whom tradition attributes supernatural gifts, including bilocations —, friend of Saint John Macias and Saint Rose of Lima. His beatification in 1837 and canonization in 1962 by John XXIII testify that Hispanic-American holiness, from the 16th-17th century onward, embraced every skin color and every social origin — a precocity without documented equivalent at that date in the English colonies of North America.

Saint Peter Claver (1580-1654) — Apostle of the Black Slaves

The Catalan Jesuit Pedro Claver, a missionary at Cartagena de Indias (present-day Colombia), devoted thirty-eight years to welcoming, bathing, caring for, instructing and baptizing — according to the usual estimate handed down by Jesuit tradition — more than 300,000 black slaves landed on the Cartagena quays^[66]. He vowed to devote himself to them as "slave of the black slaves forever" — Petrus Claver, aethiopum semper servus. Official patron of the missions to Africans since Leo XIII (1896). On this aspect, see Black Slavery and the Catholic Church.

Saint Mariana of Jesus (1618-1645) — The Recluse of Quito

Mariana de Jesús y Paredes, "lily of Quito", a lay consecrated virgin in Ecuador, died at 27 offering her life for Quito struck by earthquakes and epidemics. The first Ecuadorian saint, canonized in 1950 by Pius XII.

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680) — Mohawk Virgin

Although belonging rather to the French evangelization of Canada, Kateri Tekakwitha must be named here: a Mohawk-Algonquin virgin baptized at 20, dead at 24, the first Native American woman of North America canonized by Benedict XVI on 21 October 2012. Her canonization marked Rome's recognition of possible holiness among the native peoples of North America — a continent where the Protestant missionary effort, real (witness John Eliot's Algonquian Bible, 1663, the first Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere), remained without common measure with the Spanish missionary apparatus: a delimited comparison, not a total erasure of mission^[67].

The dominant image of Hispanic-American evangelization — "fanatical Spain, omnipresent Inquisition, massacred Indians" — is not a historical construction: it is a political and confessional construction whose genesis historiography has today perfectly reconstructed. It bears a name: the leyenda negra, the Black Legend.

Theorized by Julián Juderías (1914)

The term was coined by the Madrid historian Julián Juderías in La leyenda negra y la verdad histórica (Madrid, 1914)^[68]. There he shows how, from the 16th century onward, a stereotyped image of Spain was built in the rest of Europe: barbarous, inquisitorial, obscurantist Spain, enemy of progress, genocidal in America. This image, Juderías writes, is a weapon of war of the rival powers against Madrid: the revolted United Provinces (1568-1648), Elizabethan and Stuart England, Gallican and revolutionary France, the Enlightenment of the 17th-18th centuries.

The Decisive Role of Protestant Propaganda: Theodor de Bry

The most effective propaganda weapon was the translation and diffusion in Northern Europe of Las Casas's Brevísima relación. The text, written by a Dominican to pressure Charles V in favor of the Indians, was diverted to serve exactly the opposite of its intention: it became the documentary framework of an anti-Spanish campaign.

The Flemish Protestant engraver Theodor de Bry (1528-1598), a refugee in Frankfurt, launched from 1590 the Grands Voyages, continued after his death by his sons and continuators until 1634: several volumes illustrated with phantasmagorical engravings of Spanish cruelties: children thrown into pyres, mothers devoured by dogs, mutilated women^[69]. The accompanying text is drawn from Las Casas, but the images are largely invented — and their diffusion was massive in Protestant Europe and among the Dutch who were then conducting their own colonial conquest in Asia and America.

Protestant Conscience Itself: Pierre Chaunu

The French historian Pierre Chaunu — a Protestant and one of the greatest demographers of colonial history — notes the paradox: in his view, the accusation levelled against 16th-century Spain served as a screen for the violence proper to Anglo-Saxon America, masking the 19th-century North American extermination^[70].

The Decisive Comparison: Spanish and English Colonizations

The simplest historiographical test consists in comparing term by term the 16th-century Spanish Catholic colonization and the 17th-19th-century English Protestant colonization — comparing texts with texts and enforcement with enforcement, without merely opposing Spanish laws to British violence:

As the historian Joseph Pérez showed in his synthesis on the Black Legend, the internal and public critique of colonization — a Las Casas, a Vitoria, a Sublimis Deus bull — is first a Spanish Catholic production, without equivalent in the English, French or Dutch colonial enterprises^[74].

This comparison does not dispense the Catholic Church from examining its conscience over real faults. But it forbids the moralizing reading that would make Catholicism the single or principal agent of the Amerindian disaster, and the Protestant West the righteous conscience that denounced it. The exact historical reverse is what happened.

This section takes up one by one the strong objections a skeptical, atheist or anti-Catholic reader addresses to Hispanic-American evangelization. In accordance with Ignispedia's apologetic rule, each objection is first steelmanned (presented in its strongest version) before being discussed. The summary marker of the right-hand column — a century of legislation, theology and magisterium in favor of the Indians — must stay before the reader's eyes throughout: it recalls that the objections about to be examined arose within the Catholic conscience itself before being instrumentalized by others.

Objection 1 — "The Church Imposed Christianity by Violence"

What must be honestly recognized. In several regions and at several periods, social, political and economic pressures accompanied conversions, notably in the twenty years following military conquest. The presence of the Crown's troops, the collapse of native political structures, fear of sanctions, the lure of colonial power — all this influenced certain mass baptisms. To deny all coercion would be dishonest.

What must be specified. Catholic doctrine is explicit, however, and from the start, that forced conversion is not Christian conversion. Las Casas writes it as early as 1537 in De unico vocationis modo; Paul III proclaims it in 1537 in Sublimis Deus; Vitoria upholds it in 1539 in the Relectio de Indis. The missionaries who theorized mission were unanimous: faith is a free assent of the intellect to divine reasons, and all coercion degrades it into simulation. This opposition between doctrine and contrary acts does not settle, by itself, historical responsibilities: those of agents and institutions are judged case by case — authors, decisions and resistances precisely identified (see Landa, Charles V's retreats, supra) —, without imputing to the Church as such acts committed against its teaching.

Anthropological argument. Native peoples are not passive victims without interiority. Nahuas, Mayas, Quechuas, Guaranis received, adapted, reinterpreted, transmitted Christianity by integrating it into their symbolic universe. The birth of mestizo and native Latin-American Catholicism — today one of the liveliest expressions of the universal Church — does not reduce to coercion. Hundreds of millions of Mexican, Peruvian, Bolivian, Guatemalan, Brazilian faithful continue to celebrate a faith their ancestors chose to interiorize beyond all initial violence.

Historical comparison. Where Protestant Christianity took the place of comparable missionary structures — English and Dutch colonies of North America — there are no Las Casas, no Sublimis Deus, no Valladolid, no Tlatelolco, no Sahagún. The result of this absence can be measured: the near-total extermination of the native populations of northeastern North America. If violence were to be imputed to Christianity as such, the reverse should be observed.

Objection 2 — "The Church Justified the Enslavement of the Indians"

What must be recognized. Catholics — settlers, encomenderos, certain local clerics — did effectively justify forms of enslavement. The fact is documented. Certain theologians admitted slavery as a consequence of just war, in the classical doctrine inherited from Aristotle and Saint Augustine. This continuity was the object, in the so-called "difficult" bulls Dum Diversas (Nicholas V, 1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), of formulations that modern criticism tends to interpret as a general authorization of slavery — a contestable and contested interpretation^[75]. See the full dossier Black Slavery and the Catholic Church.

What must be specified. The official line of the pontifical magisterium and Dominican theology runs in exactly the opposite direction, and clearly and early:

• Eugene IV, Sicut Dudum (13 January 1435) already condemns the enslavement of the Guanches of the Canaries — an often-forgotten fact.
• Paul III, Sublimis Deus (2 June 1537) is explicit on banning the enslavement of the Indians.
• Urban VIII, Commissum Nobis (22 April 1639) renews for Paraguay and Brazil the ban on enslaving Indians, under pain of excommunication.
• Benedict XIV, Immensa Pastorum (20 December 1741) renews the ban again.
• Gregory XVI, In Supremo Apostolatus (3 December 1839) finally condemns the Atlantic trade in Blacks.

The historical problem is precisely the gap between Christian principles and their enforcement in an empire where economic interests violently resisted reform — a tension found in every empire in history, but radically different from a formal ecclesial approval of slavery.

Objection 3 — "The Missionaries Destroyed Native Culture"

What must be recognized. Destructions took place: Diego de Landa burns 27 Maya codices in 1562; temples are razed; rites are banned, sometimes harshly. These destructions are historically real and partly inexcusable.

What the objection systematically forgets. The same era, in the same religious orders, simultaneously sees rise:

• Bernardino de Sahagún and his 12-volume encyclopedia that preserved Aztec culture;
• Andrés de Olmos and his grammars of Nahuatl, Totonac and Huastec;
• Toribio de Motolinía and his Historia de los indios (1541);
• Diego Durán and his Historia de las Indias de Nueva España;
• Bartolomé de Las Casas and his Apologética Historia Sumaria, a monument of comparative ethnography;
• José de Acosta and the first European comparative anthropology (Historia natural y moral, 1590);
• The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, where Indian Latinists preserve their culture in writing;
• The Nican Mopohua, written in Nahuatl by a Christian Indian.

The historical paradox is crystal-clear: the most systematic conservation of pre-Columbian Amerindian memory was accomplished by Catholic missionaries. Today's anthropologists who study Aztec, Maya, Andean cultures know these civilizations largely thanks to texts produced by those same missionaries accused of having destroyed cultures.

Objection 4 — "Human Sacrifices Do Not Justify the Conquest"

That is true. And it is precisely what, from the 16th century onward, Vitoria and Las Casas said. The real barbarity of sacrificial practices does not give the Spaniards a legal title of conquest. Natural law does not permit substituting one violence (conquest) for another (ritual sacrifice) at the price of still more innocent victims. It is one of the finest moments of 16th-century Catholic thought: a refusal, by theologians, to use an easy, popular argument to justify the economic interests of their compatriots.

But the objection must be complete. It cannot legitimately serve to present pre-Columbian America as an innocent paradise shattered by Christians. The Mexica sacrificial cosmology was real, documented, structural. The Tlaxcalan, Totonac, Huexotzinca peoples and many others rallied massively to Cortés against the Mexicas because they had endured their domination and sacrificial levies for decades, including of children. For these peoples, the fall of Tenochtitlan was first a liberation — even though the Spanish colonization that followed brought its own forms of oppression.

Objection 5 — "The Church Was Accomplice to the Conquistadors"

Structurally, tensions between the missionary Church and the colonial Crown were permanent. Montesinos was denounced by the settlers in 1511. Las Casas had to flee intimidation attempts and was the object of violent resentment among the encomenderos. Vitoria was troubled by the Council of the Indies. Bartolomé de Carranza was detained by the Spanish Inquisition for seventeen years. Landa was recalled to Spain and investigated by the Council of the Indies. Pedro Claver was mocked and harassed. The missionaries who defended the Indians did not enjoy the benevolence of the colonial system — they fought it from within.

The distinction between the institutional Church (popes, regular orders, Salamanca theologians, provincial councils) and individual Catholics (settlers, encomenderos, sometimes baptized officials) acting in contradiction with its teaching is necessary and historically justified. It applies here with particular clarity: the institutional strength of the Church was on the side of the Indians. The economic strength of the settlers — often baptized, sometimes practicing — was against them. This opposition is not a rhetorical excuse invented a posteriori; it is the very fabric of Spanish colonial history.

Objection 6 — "The Death Tolls Prove Deliberate Genocide"

What must be recognized. The demographic collapse of America's native population between 1492 and 1600 is one of the fastest collapses documented in human history. Modern estimates — for instance the high one, today revised downward by most demographers, of Henry Dobyns (1966) at 112 million pre-1492 Amerindians, or the more cautious one of Borah and Cook at 25 million in central Mexico alone — converge on a fall of around 70 to 90%. The figure is tragic. It is real.

What must be specified. The principal causal factor of this collapse, according to the current historiographical consensus, is not intentional massacre: it is the diseases against which populations had no immunity, accelerated by socio-economic upheavals (forced displacements, forced labor, malnutrition linked to the breakdown of native agricultural systems). This point is nothing apologetic: it is the object of works by historians, anthropologists, demographers, paleogeneticists (see works of Suzanne Alchon, Robert McCaa, Alfred Crosby, Noble David Cook).

The conceptual distinction is decisive. A massive biological collapse is not the moral equivalent of a deliberate genocide. Genocide supposes an intention to destroy. Yet in the Spanish case, the intention at the highest level — papal, royal, Dominican — was the reverse: to protect the native population, which constituted, from the Crown's point of view, its principal human and fiscal resource. Deliberate exterminations were local and the deed of individual settlers, condemned by royal law and the magisterium. Comparing Hispanic-American evangelization to the Shoah or the Stalinist purges — a comparison sometimes made in contemporary indigenist circles — is a massive category error: it confuses tragic biological collapse with deliberate will to exterminate.

Objection 7 — "The Requerimiento Proves Catholic Cynicism"

The Requerimiento (1513) is a text the conquistadors were supposed to read to the Indians before any combat. Drafted by the jurist Juan López de Palacios Rubios on Ferdinand II's orders, it summoned the natives to recognize the authority of the pope, the king of Spain, and the Christian faith — under pain of just war.

The objection: the text is cynical because it was read in Spanish to Indians who did not understand it, sometimes even out of earshot; because it theologically imposed what Vitoria would refuse; and because it furnished a legal alibi to the conquistadors' military enterprises.

What must be recognized. The objection is largely well-founded. The Requerimiento is one of the most contestable texts of Spanish colonial practice. Las Casas himself ridicules it in his Historia de las Indias (bk. III, ch. 57) — where he recounts that Palacios Rubios himself, when Las Casas confidentially asked him whether he believed in the legal value of his text, "burst out laughing". Sepúlveda made use of it at Valladolid, but Vitoria, in the Relectio de Indis, explicitly dismantled its presuppositions.

What must be specified. The Requerimiento is no act of the magisterium. It is an imperial legal instrument, drafted by a lay jurist, contested from within the Church itself from its promulgation, and doctrinally refuted by Vitoria (Relectio de Indis) and Sublimis Deus. This doctrinal refutation does not amount, by itself, to a formal legal abrogation: as the sources consulted for this article stand, no act abrogating the Requerimiento has been found — an absence of trace formulated here as such^[76]. The legal framework of new enterprises was in any case subsequently redefined by Philip II's Ordenanzas de Descubrimiento (13 July 1573), which substitute "pacificación" for "conquista". Making the Requerimiento the centerpiece of the critique of Hispanic-American evangelization is as unserious as making some non-magisterial English colonial ordinance the centerpiece of a critique of Protestantism would be.

Five centuries after the events studied in this article, the observable balance sheet is there. Latin America is today one of the most important zones of vitality of world Catholicism. Brazil alone counted some 123 million Catholics in the 2010 national census (IBGE)^[77] — more than any other country in the world. Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Bolivia, the Philippines (evangelized in the same period) remain overwhelmingly Catholic. It is from this soil that the universal Church drew, from 2013, its first pope, Francis, an Argentine Jesuit — a historical coincidence that is none.

These Catholicisms bear a visible, living native imprint. The feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe (12 December) gathers several million pilgrims each year in Mexico City: for the 2022 edition, Mexico City counted 12.5 million pilgrims over the days around 12 December (communiqué of 13 December 2022, a record). The shrine is commonly presented as receiving some 20 million visitors a year and as the most-visited Marian shrine in the world — a usual order of magnitude and ranking, distinct from the feast count^[78]. The Christianized Mexican Day of the Dead is a pre-Columbian creation integrated into the liturgical feast of the faithful departed. Andean Quechua-Aymara liturgical music, Maya and Nahua devotions integrated into local Catholic liturgy — all testify to a real inculturation, not a European overlay on subjected populations.

This inculturation was solemnly recognized by the Latin American continental conferences from Medellín (1968), Puebla (1979), Santo Domingo (1992) and Aparecida (2007, under the direction of Cardinal Bergoglio). Saint John Paul II, at Santo Domingo on 12 October 1992 for the fifth centenary of evangelization, held together thanksgiving for the "precious gift of faith" received by the continent and recognition of the shadows that accompanied the work of evangelization, including the sufferings inflicted by sons of the Church^[79]: a word of repentance and continuity inseparably.

And at Juan Diego's canonization, the same pope added:

"Today it is necessary to support all natives in their legitimate aspirations, respecting and defending the authentic values of each ethnic group." — John Paul II, homily for the canonization of Juan Diego, Mexico City, 31 July 2002^[80]

These words do not conceal historical wounds. They express the continuity of a Church which, since Montesinos's sermon in 1511, counted in its ranks powerful voices for the dignity of native peoples, and which today accompanies their struggles for land, language, culture, social justice, against the great extractive companies and deforestation. The Synod for the Amazon (October 2019), convened by Pope Francis, is its most visible contemporary trace.

• Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531) — the apparition to Juan Diego, the historical and scientific dossier of the tilma.
• Catholic Missions in America — overview: New Spain, Paraguay reductions, Jesuit martyrs of Canada, Californian missions.
• The Church in Latin America — from the Conquest to Aparecida, contemporary vitality and challenges.
• Black Slavery and the Catholic Church — condemnatory bulls, theologians, Catholic abolitionism.
• Outside the Church There Is No Salvation — mission, liberty and salvation of nations not yet reached by preaching.
• History Argues in Favor of Catholicism — continuity and crises in Church history.