Servant of God Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484-1566)

Birth and education in Seville

Bartolomé de Las Casas y Sosa is born on 11 November 1484 in Seville, son of Pedro de Las Casas, a merchant belonging to a family whose converso or simply old-Christian origins remain debated among historians^[19]. Long dated to 1474 by an erroneous historiographical tradition, his birth was fixed at 1484 thanks to archives discovered in the 1970s — it is this date, now unanimously accepted, that his own reference biography established by the Dominicans of Spain confirms^[20]. He studies canon law at the University of Salamanca, where he acquires a solid legal training that will structure, all his life, his way of arguing against colonial abuses^[21].

Colonist and encomendero on Hispaniola and Cuba (1502-1513)

In 1502, at eighteen, Las Casas sails for Hispaniola with his father, in the fleet of the new governor Nicolás de Ovando — one of the largest colonial expeditions sent since the discovery of 1492^[22]. There he becomes a landowner and the holder of an encomienda, that system which grants a Spanish colonist the forced labour of a group of Indians in exchange, theoretically, for their Christian instruction and protection^[23]. In 1513, he takes part as a chaplain in the conquest of Cuba led by Diego Velázquez and Pánfilo de Narváez, witnessing in particular the massacre of the cacique Hatuey, burned alive for resisting colonisation^[24]. As a reward for his services, he receives with his associate Pedro de la Rentería a prosperous encomienda near present-day Cienfuegos, rich in gold and native labour^[25].

Nothing in this career as a prosperous young colonist foreshadowed the break that was to follow. Las Casas himself would later return to this period with unsparing lucidity, accusing himself of having taken part, in apparent good conscience, in a system he would later call tyranny^[26].

The sermon that awakens consciences: Antonio de Montesinos (1511)

As early as 1510, the first Dominicans to arrive in Santo Domingo refuse confession to colonists holding Indian slaves, Las Casas included^[27]. The collective turning point comes on 21 December 1511, the 4th Sunday of Advent: Brother Antonio de Montesinos ascends the pulpit before the colonists and their authorities to denounce, in the name of his whole small community, the cruelty of the encomienda^[28]. That sermon — whose full history and connection with the Spanish evangelisation of America are developed in the article on the evangelisation of the Indians of America — lastingly reaches the conscience of the young clerk-colonist that Las Casas still is, without provoking any immediate conversion in him: he will go on exploiting his encomienda for three more years^[29].

The conversion of Pentecost Sunday (1514)

The year 1514 is the decisive year. Preparing a sermon for Pentecost for the colonists of Cuba, Las Casas meditates on a passage from Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) that strikes him full force:

"To offer sacrifice from the goods of the poor is to sacrifice the son in the sight of his father. The life of the needy depends on a little bread: whoever takes it from them is a murderer. To take away his subsistence is to kill one's neighbour; to shed blood is to deprive the labourer of his wages." — Sirach 34:24-27^[30]

He understands, with a clarity that will never leave him, that this text targets him personally: he who lives from the forced labour of Indians stripped of their goods and freedom cannot claim to offer God a pleasing worship^[31]. On 15 August 1514, the feast of the Assumption, he publicly announces his decision: he restores his Indians to the governor and declares that he can no longer, in conscience, exercise his priestly ministry while holding men in servitude^[32]. He preaches the same renunciation to the other colonists of Cuba, with little immediate success, and decides to bring the matter before the King of Spain himself^[33].

This conversion is nothing like a private spiritual retreat: it inaugurates half a century of public action. As Las Casas would later write, looking back on this rupture, his new vocation consists in making the defence of the Indians the very meaning of his priesthood^[34].

Universal protector of the Indians (1516)

In September 1515, supported by the Dominicans Pedro de Córdoba and Antonio de Montesinos, Las Casas sails for Spain to plead his cause directly^[35]. He obtains an audience with King Ferdinand on 24 December 1515, at Plasencia, but the sovereign dies a month later, on 25 January 1516^[36]. The regent, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, then takes the measure of the emergency: he sends three Hieronymite religious to govern Hispaniola and appoints Las Casas adviser to the mission as well as procurador y protector universal de los indios — procurator and universal protector of the Indians^[37]. It is the first institutional office of its kind in the history of Spanish colonisation: a man officially mandated to represent juridically the interests of the colonised against their own colonisers^[38].

The Memorial de Remedios and the peasant colonisation project

In 1516, Las Casas writes his Memorial de Remedios para las Indias, a plan of radical reform: abolish the encomienda and replace it with a colonisation of free Spanish peasants, trained in a sustainable agriculture respectful of local populations^[39]. It is also in this memorial — a fact that must be faced without minimising or exaggerating it — that he suggests, among other measures, authorising the importation of African slaves to relieve the Indians of the harshest forced labour^[40]. We will return below to this proposal and to the explicit repentance Las Casas himself would later express for it, for it is inseparable from the overall judgement history must pass on him.

The peasant project of 1517, carried with the Flemish chancellor Jean de la Sauvage, runs into considerable recruitment difficulties and collapses on the death of its protector^[41].

The failure of Cumaná (1520-1522)

For lack of willing peasants, Las Casas obtains in 1520 a reduced grant on the coast of Cumaná (present-day Venezuela), which he reaches in November with a small group financed by his brother-in-law^[42]. The attempt ends in disaster: the neighbouring Dominican convent of Chiribichi is destroyed by raids from Spanish slavers who exasperate the local populations, then, in early 1522, the Caribs massacre Las Casas's small colony, killing four of his men^[43]. This bitter failure, coming after eight years of peaceful reform efforts with no lasting result, marks an inner turning point: Las Casas understands that his struggle requires a more stable institutional framework than that of an isolated secular cleric.

Entry into the Dominicans (1522-1523)

In 1522, Las Casas enters as a novice the Dominican convent of Holy Cross in Santo Domingo; he pronounces his final vows the following year, at thirty-eight^[44]. This choice is no withdrawal from the struggle: it is a change of weapon. A member of the very order that had carried the sermon of Montesinos, he joins a religious family structurally committed to the juridical and theological defence of the Indians, with the intellectual means of the Dominican school of Salamanca. Around 1527, he begins writing his monumental Historia de las Indias, a work he will keep completing until the last months of his life^[45].

De unico vocationis modo: "one single way of calling all peoples"

As a preaching friar, Las Casas develops a missionary doctrine of remarkable rigour in his treatise De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram religionem ("On the unique way of calling all peoples to the true religion"), written around 1537^[46]. His central thesis, rich in biblical, patristic and juridical quotations, holds in one formula:

"There is but one way, established by divine providence for all men in the world and for all times, of teaching men the true religion: the way that persuades the intellect by reason and gently, sweetly draws the will." — Bartolomé de Las Casas, De unico vocationis modo, book I, chap. 2, c. 1537^[47]

This conviction — that faith imposed by force is not faith, and that only patient persuasion respects the freedom of the human soul — categorically rejects preventive war as a method of evangelisation. It places Las Casas, two centuries before the Enlightenment and four centuries before Vatican II, at the forefront of a Catholic theology of religious freedom founded not on doctrinal indifference but on respect for conscience^[48].

Vera Paz: converting without the sword in Guatemala (1537-1540)

In 1536, Las Casas is sent to Guatemala to take part in the debates between Dominicans and Franciscans on the method for converting the as yet unsubdued Indians^[49]. He chooses to apply his doctrine to the letter in a region hostile to the Spaniards, then called Tuzulutlán — "Land of War" —, after learning the K'iche' language^[50]. Through preaching, singing and the mediation of Christian Maya merchants, he obtains without recourse to force the voluntary conversion of several local chiefs, notably at Atitlán and Chichicastenango, progressively transforming the region into what will henceforth be called Verapaz — "True Peace"^[51]. The experiment, unique in the history of the Spanish conquest, concretely demonstrates that the thesis of the De unico vocationis modo is no armchair utopia but a working method.

Sublimis Deus (1537): Rome proclaims the humanity of the Indians

At the very moment Las Casas is working out his peaceful method in Guatemala, Pope Paul III promulgates on 2 June 1537 the bull Sublimis Deus, prompted by the complaints of religious denouncing unjust wars and the enslavement of the Indians by the colonists^[52]. The text decides without ambiguity:

"The Indians are truly men, capable not only of understanding the Catholic faith but, according to the information that has reached us, desirous of receiving it with ardour." — Pope Paul III, Sublimis Deus, 2 June 1537^[53]

The document affirms that the Indians, like every other nation coming to the knowledge of Christ, must be deprived neither of their freedom nor of the possession of their goods, and can in no case be reduced to servitude^[54]. This magisterial proclamation, which doctrinally seals the victory of the theses of Las Casas and his Dominican brothers over those of the theorists of the "natural servitude" of the Indians, will be developed in the dossier devoted to the evangelisation of the Indians of America.

Before Emperor Charles V

Recalled from Guatemala by Bishop Marroquín in 1538, Las Casas sails back to Spain in 1540 via Mexico, with a precise objective: to obtain from Emperor Charles V a legal reform putting an end, over the whole territory of the Indies, to the encomienda system^[55]. In 1542, he presents to the court a damning account of the atrocities committed over half a century — the text that will become, in 1552, the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias^[56].

The Leyes Nuevas of 20 November 1542

On 20 November 1542, in Barcelona, Charles V promulgates the Leyes Nuevas para la gobernación de las Indias y buen tratamiento y conservación de los Indios — the New Laws for the government of the Indies and the good treatment of the Indians^[57]. This text of forty articles proclaims the natural freedom of the American Indians, forbids any new enslavement, severely limits the encomienda and provides for its extinction on the death of its holder. The precise terms of this reform, its violent reception in Peru — where the armed revolt of Gonzalo Pizarro breaks out (1544-1548) — and its anchoring in the whole theology of the School of Salamanca are developed in the article on the evangelisation of the Indians of America. Suffice it here to retain the essential: this imperial reform, largely inspired by half a century of Las Casas's denunciations, constitutes one of the rare examples, in the history of colonial empires, of a power legislating against the immediate economic interests of its own colonists to protect conquered populations^[58].

The Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias

Published in Seville in 1552 within a collection of eight treatises (the Ocho Tratados), the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias is the most read, most translated and most polemical text in all of Las Casas's work^[59]. Written as an indictment to move the emperor and his entourage, it draws a dreadful balance sheet of the conquest:

"We shall hold it as a most certain and true account that, in those forty years, there died through the tyrannies and infernal works of the Christians, unjustly and tyrannically, more than twelve million souls — men, women and children; and in truth I believe, with no intent to deceive, that they are more than fifteen million." — Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, Seville, 1552^[60]

That figure — like all the demographic estimates in the text — is today considered by historians to be largely exaggerated and as failing to distinguish deaths by direct violence from deaths by epidemic, a point analysed in detail in the dossier on the evangelisation of the Indians of America^[61]. Yet the singular scope of this text must be measured: it is an internal self-criticism, written by a Spanish Catholic bishop, addressed to his own sovereign, published with the authorisation of the royal authorities, and whose underlying moral diagnosis — systematic exploitation, colonial greed, contempt for native dignity — remains, for its part, historically solid^[62]. Later diverted by Protestant propaganda hostile to Spain to feed the Black Legend, the Brevísima remains no less, in its original intention, an act of charity toward the victims and of fidelity to the truth, however hard it is for his own compatriots to hear.

Consecration and crossing (1544)

Despite his age — he is sixty — and his little taste for honours, Las Casas accepts the episcopate in order to have sufficient canonical authority to enforce the New Laws in the field^[63]. He is consecrated bishop of Chiapas on 30 March 1544 in the church of Saint Paul in Seville, then embarks in July with forty-four Dominicans to take possession of his diocese in Chiapas, in the south of present-day Mexico^[64][65].

The Confesionario: refusing absolution to slaveholders (1545)

From his arrival in January 1545, Las Casas publishes his famous Avisos y reglas para confesores — the Confesionario — in which he forbids his priests to grant absolution to any colonist holding Indians in encomienda until he has freed his slaves and restored stolen goods, including at the point of death^[66]. A pastoral letter dated 20 March 1545 spells out these requirements. In 1546, several Dominicans ask him for more systematic rules: he then writes the Doce reglas (Twelve Rules) which codify this rigorous sacramental discipline^[67].

Riots and isolation (1545-1546)

The strict application of the Confesionario triggers opposition of rare violence during Lent 1545: shots are even fired at the bishop^[68]. On 20 October 1545, the New Laws are partially repealed under pressure from the colonists of the New World, weakening Las Casas's moral authority at the very moment he is trying to enforce them^[69]. In January 1546, meeting with the other bishops of New Spain in Mexico City, he must moderate his position in the face of the growing isolation of his cause among the colonial clergy itself^[70].

The resignation (1550)

In December 1546, Las Casas leaves his diocese for good for Spain, where he arrives in November 1547^[71]. He will never return to the Indies. His resignation from the episcopate, effective in 1550, in no way marks a withdrawal from the struggle: freed from the pastoral constraints of a hostile diocese, he now devotes himself entirely to juridical and theological activism at court, where his most resounding confrontation awaits him.

In April 1550, Charles V takes a decision without precedent in colonial history: he suspends the conquests under way in America and convenes at Valladolid a junta of fourteen theologians and jurists charged with settling a question of principle — are the wars waged against the native peoples morally justified^[72]? No European empire, Protestant or Catholic, will ever organise a comparable debate on the moral legitimacy of its own expansion.

Facing Las Casas stands Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489-1573), humanist, translator of Aristotle and imperial chaplain, author of the treatise Democrates alter sive de justis belli causis apud Indos^[73]. The following table summarises the clash of the two theses:

How to read this table: the four rows correspond to the four main arguments advanced by Sepúlveda in his treatise and to the corresponding reply developed by Las Casas in his Apologia*, read in session for five consecutive days by the clerk Domingo de Soto^[74].*

On the substance of the debate, Las Casas sums up his position in a formula of absolute clarity:

"Everything done so far against the Indians in the New World has been contrary to justice, to Christian purity, to humanity, and to natural and divine law." — Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologia at Valladolid, 1550-1551^[75]

The debate closes with no formal verdict in May 1551. But the junta does not decide in favour of Sepúlveda: his treatise is refused the imprimatur and will not be published until 1892, three and a half centuries later^[76]. The New Laws are maintained in their essential principles, and Las Casas keeps his title of procurator and universal protector of the Indians. The whole of this controversy, its doctrinal extensions in Francisco de Vitoria and the School of Salamanca, and Las Casas's influence on the birth of modern international law, are treated exhaustively in the article on the evangelisation of the Indians of America.

The College of Saint Gregory in Valladolid

After Valladolid, Las Casas settles at the College of Saint Gregory in Valladolid, where he lives with his faithful assistant, Brother Rodrigo de Ladrada^[77]. There he tirelessly pursues the writing of his Historia de las Indias, which he completes in 1561, at seventy-seven^[78]. Aware of the explosive character of the text for the reputation of the Spanish Crown, he entrusts it to the College with an explicit clause forbidding its publication for forty years — a clause which, in reality, will delay effective publication until 1875, three hundred and fourteen years after its completion^[79]. In 1555, he receives a hostile letter from his Franciscan confrere Motolinía, who depicts him as ignorant and quarrelsome — a sign of the deep divisions his cause aroused even within the missionary clergy itself^[80].

The admission on African slavery

It is precisely in this Historia de las Indias that Las Casas returns, with a lucidity that honours him, to his own suggestion of 1516 in favour of importing African slaves. Speaking of himself in the third person, he writes:

"This advice, to grant licence to bring Black slaves into these lands, the Clerk [Las Casas] first gave, not noticing the injustice with which the Portuguese take them and make them slaves; which, afterwards, he was not content with, judging that they had been captured unjustly and tyrannically, for the same reason holds for them as for the Indians." — Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, book II, chap. 129^[81]

This explicit repentance, written by the author himself with no external pressure constraining him to it, deserves to be weighed with justice. It undoes neither the gravity of the initial error nor the real harm caused — African slavery in the Americas predated his suggestion in any case and would have continued without it^[82] — but it attests to a moral conscience that keeps progressing to the end of a life already devoted, for forty years, to the defence of the weakest. The dossier devoted to Black slavery and the Catholic Church fully develops this episode and its meaning for the history of the Christian conscience.

Death at Atocha (18 July 1566)

In 1565, Las Casas writes his will, bequeathing his rich library to the College of Saint Gregory^[83]. He dies on 18 July 1566, at eighty-one, at the Dominican convent of Our Lady of Atocha, in Madrid, where he is buried^[84]. He passes away without having seen the publication of his great historical work, with no certainty about the definitive outcome of his struggle, but after crossing the Atlantic ten times and spending more than half a century pleading, relentlessly, one and the same cause^[85].

The Black Legend and its hijacking

From the end of the 16th century, the Brevísima relación is translated and massively disseminated in Protestant Europe hostile to Spain — notably by the Flemish engraver Theodor de Bry, whose fantastical illustrations accompany Las Casas's text to nourish what historiography calls the anti-Spanish Black Legend^[86]. This hijacking, paradoxical to the utmost, transforms a text of internal Catholic self-criticism into a propaganda weapon used by colonial powers — English and Dutch — which themselves will never produce the equivalent of a Valladolid controversy on the legitimacy of their own conquest^[87]. Spanish nationalist historians of the 19th and 20th centuries will react in the opposite direction, depicting Las Casas as a paranoid, monomaniac fabulist^[88] — a judgement that modern historical demography, confirming an Amerindian demographic collapse of the order of 80 to 90% (due mostly to epidemics, but also to violence), has largely corrected without thereby validating the raw figures advanced by Las Casas^[89].

The judgement of the Church

The Catholic Encyclopedia, written at the very beginning of the 20th century, thus summarises the judgement then passed on Las Casas by part of Catholic historiography:

"Las Casas was a man of great purity of life and of noble aspirations, but his conviction that his own views were flawless made him intolerant of those of others." — Catholic Encyclopedia, article "Bartholomew de Las Casas", 1907^[90]

The same article notes that Las Casas idealised his Indian protégés without really studying them, and that his voluminous work left hardly any useful contribution to ethnology.

This judgement, cautious and sometimes severe, illustrates the difficulty part of the Catholic world long had in situating itself toward a figure who disturbed both the upholders of an unnuanced apologetic reading of Spanish colonisation and those who, conversely, instrumentalised Las Casas against the Church herself. The opening of his cause for canonisation, a century later, marks a decisive turning point in this reception.

The opening in Seville (2002)

On Wednesday 2 October 2002, in the parish church of Santa María Magdalena in Seville — built on the former Dominican convent of San Pablo —, Archbishop Carlos Amigo presides over the liturgy officially inaugurating the cause for canonisation of Bartolomé de Las Casas^[91]. This solemn opening constitutes the climax of the commemorations of the fifth centenary of the Dominican's first voyage to the Indies (13 February 1502)^[92]. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints assigns to the archdiocese of Seville the competence to conduct the procedure; Father Innocenzo Venchi, in Rome, becomes its postulator, with Father Fernando Aporta, in Seville, as vice-postulator^[93]. Since that date, the title of "Servant of God" must precede his name in every official document of the Church^[94].

The reactivation by the Order of Preachers (2019)

After years of difficult documentary research — much of the gathered material not satisfying the canonical conditions set by the instruction Sanctorum Mater (2007) —, the cause gains new momentum at the General Chapter of the Dominicans, meeting in Vietnam in the summer of 2019: the delegates formally ask the Order's postulator and the provincial of Hispania to reactivate and support the cause for beatification of their brother^[95]. On 1 October 2019, Brother Alfonso Esponera Cerdán is appointed vice-postulator; a coordination meeting is held in Seville on the following 20 October^[96]. Important documents have since been recovered, but other materials remain to be located to complete the dossier^[97].

Here are the main official stages of the cause:

How to read this table: no cause was opened after Las Casas's death in 1566 — the first opening dates to 2 October 2002, four and a half centuries later, on the occasion of the fifth centenary of his first voyage to the Indies; the reactivation requested in 2019 concerns this 2002 cause, whose documentary dossier is still under examination^[98][99].

Why such a cause, and why so late?

The question deserves to be asked honestly: why did the Church wait 436 years after Las Casas's death to open his cause? The answer lies in several converging factors. First, the historiographical controversy itself: Las Casas, instrumentalised by the Protestant Black Legend then contested by part of Spanish nationalist historiography, long remained too divisive a figure for a cause for canonisation to be serenely envisaged^[100]. Then, the documentary difficulty inherent in a life so old and so scattered between Spain, the Antilles, Mexico and Guatemala, which makes the historical inquiry exceptionally heavy for modern postulators^[101]. Finally, it took until the fifth centenary of his first voyage offered, in 2002, a symbolic occasion strong enough to bring the dossier before the competent authority.

What the cause examines is not the relevance of his political and juridical struggles — a question already largely settled by history, which proved Las Casas right against Sepúlveda —, but the holiness of his life, that is, the heroic exercise of the Christian virtues: his fidelity to a radical conversion maintained for fifty-two years without ever wavering, his voluntary renunciation of the fortune and comfort of a prosperous colonist, his courage in the face of death threats and riots, his capacity to acknowledge his own errors publicly, and his concrete charity toward populations most of his contemporaries regarded as without dignity.

The historical importance of Bartolomé de Las Casas far exceeds his person. He embodies, with Antonio de Montesinos and Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic tradition of internal moral self-criticism that few empires, before or after 16th-century Spain, have produced in the face of their own expansion^[102]. The Vitorian doctrine of the natural law of peoples, the magisterial recognition of the rational humanity of the Indians by Sublimis Deus, and the unique precedent of the Valladolid controversy together constitute one of the most solid milestones of what would become, centuries later, the universal language of human rights^[103]. The whole School of Salamanca — Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Melchor Cano — would extend this theological and juridical work of which Las Casas was, in the field as at court, the most tenacious goad.

His figure remains demanding precisely because it refuses all simplification: neither the flawless saint of a complacent hagiography, nor the fanatic denounced by his detractors, nor the man instrumentalised by an anti-Spanish propaganda that never shared his real project. He was a genuinely converted Christian, capable of acknowledging his own errors to the end of his life, and whose obstinacy — fifty-two years, ten crossings of the Atlantic, a major theological controversy won against the imperial apparatus — remains, whatever the canonical outcome of his cause, one of the best-documented testimonies of what a Christian conscience truly worked by the Gospel can produce.

• Explore The Evangelisation of the Indians of America (16th century): the complete dossier on Antonio de Montesinos, Francisco de Vitoria, the Valladolid controversy and the bull Sublimis Deus.
• Explore Black Slavery and the Catholic Church: the history of the African trade, the repentance of Las Casas and the later Catholic struggles against slavery.
• Discover History of Catholic Missions in America: the overall picture of the evangelisation of the New World, from Guadalupe to the reductions of Paraguay.
• Discover Venerable Pierre Toussaint (1766-1853): another face of Christian dignity opposed to colonial dehumanisation, in the North America of the following century.
• Retain the essential: the Servant of God Bartolomé de Las Casas, a former colonist converted in 1514, devoted fifty-two years and ten crossings of the Atlantic to the juridical and theological defence of the Indians of America, up to confronting in person, at Valladolid, the thesis of their natural inferiority. Recognised as a Servant of God since 2002, his cause for canonisation, relaunched by the Dominican Order in 2019, remains today under study.