Good News for a New World

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Bartolomé de Las Casas is an unsung hero who wanted to convert the pagan Native Americans to Christ as well as stop the sinful aspects of the European conquest of the New World.

Ever since the advent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the “noble savage” in the eighteenth century, there has been a tendency to idealize or even idolize those who inhabited the Americas prior to the arrival of the Europeans. In the wake of “woke,” this tendency has become almost obsessive.

Such idealization or idolization of the pre-European “natives” requires a willful blindness with respect to the systemic infanticide practiced by some of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in acts of sacrifice to their pagan gods. Since the “woke” also advocate similar systemic infanticide in today’s America, it is no surprise that they are willing to turn a blind eye to these decadent practices in the past.

For those who consider the killing of babies to be demonic, it is not possible to view the infanticide practiced by the Aztecs any differently than the infanticide practiced by the Canaanites or the Carthaginians. In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton condemns Carthage for its worship of the god Baal, which he associates with Moloch, the god of the Canaanites, and the practice of child sacrifice that surrounded such worship:

[T]he worshippers of Moloch were not gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished civilization, abounding in refinements and luxuries: they were probably far more civilized than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilized people really met together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing hundreds of their infants into a large furnace.

Comparing Chesterton’s description of the Carthaginian civilization with the civilization of the Aztecs, we can see that child sacrifice to demonic gods in both places is practiced not by primitive barbarians but by “members of a mature and polished civilization, abounding in refinements and luxuries.” It is not barbarism but decadence that leads to the demonic practices of a culture of death.

It was to this culture of death that the first Christian missionaries brought the good news, preaching the love of a God who sacrifices Himself for others and who vanquishes the demonic gods who demand the sacrifice of others to themselves. These pioneering missionaries, such as St. Junipero Serra, are now much maligned by those who feel nothing but malice toward the Gospel. In spite of such malice, the Church continues to sing the praises of many of its missionaries, including Junipero Serra, who was sung into Heaven with his canonization in 2015. And yet, some heroic missionaries to the Americas remain relatively unsung. It is to the heroism of one of these unsung heroes that we will now turn our attention.

Bartolomé de Las Casas was born in 1474, probably in the southern Spanish city of Seville. Having an adventurous spirit, he sailed for Hispaniola, in the West Indies, in 1502. In acknowledgment of his participation in various expeditions, he was given an encomienda, a royal land grant. A devout Catholic, he began to evangelize the native population as a lay catechist. Ordained a priest in either 1512 or 1513, he is perhaps the first person to receive Holy Orders in America.

Increasingly concerned about the treatment of the indigenous peoples, he preached a famous sermon on August 15, 1514, in which he condemned the treatment by the Europeans of the native populations of the Caribbean. In the following year, he returned to Spain to plead the cause of the indigenous peoples. He met with considerable initial success when Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, the archbishop of Toledo and future co-regent of Spain, took up his cause. With the archbishop’s support, Las Casas was named priest-procurator of the Indies and was appointed to a commission to investigate the plight of the native population. He sailed for America again in November 1516.

Returning to Spain the following year, he made an impassioned speech in defense of the indigenous peoples before the Spanish Parliament in Barcelona in December 1519. His eloquence persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was in attendance, to accept Las Casas’ project of founding “towns of free Indians.” The place selected for the first of these new towns was in the northern part of present-day Venezuela.

Las Casas returned once more to the Americas in 1520 to oversee this pioneering new vision, but it was beset with difficulties from the beginning. The failure to recruit a sufficient number of farmers, the opposition of the European settlers, and, finally, an attack by the Indians themselves combined to bring the pioneering adventure to an end in 1522.

Following this noble failure, Las Casas retreated into a life of deeper disciplined prayer, joining the Dominican Order in 1523. He continued to campaign for justice for the indigenous peoples of the Americas by wielding the power of his pen. It was from this time that he began writing the Historia de las Indias, an account of all that had happened in the Indies as he had seen or heard of it.

It was not, however, a chronicle per se but a prophetic interpretation of events in the light of their likely consequences. The purpose of the facts was to expose the “sin” of domination, oppression, and injustice that the pride of Europeans, intent on self-empowerment, was inflicting upon the newly discovered peoples of the New World and to prophesy that such pride would precede a fall. It was Las Casas’ intention to reveal to Spain the reason for the misfortune that would inevitably befall it when it became the object of God’s punishment.

In a later work, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, written in 1542, Las Casas placed the blame for the treatment of the indigenous peoples on the pride and avarice of the European conquerors who “have been moved by their wish for gold and their desire to enrich themselves in a very short time.” It was through their servitude to gold, the “precious bane” as Milton dubbed it, that Europeans sought domination over their conquered neighbors.

Under the patronage of the emperor, Charles V, who continued to support his efforts to gain justice for the indigenous peoples, Las Casas became an influential adviser both to the Council of the Indies and to the emperor himself on the problems relating to the Indies. At the age of 90, he completed two more works on the Spanish conquest in the Americas. Two years later, he died in the Dominican convent of Nuestra Señora de Atocha de Madrid, having continued to the very end his calls for justice for the conquered peoples of the New World.

His own prophetic judgment on the lust for power and gold that had corrupted so many of his fellow countrymen in their conquest of the Americas is as strident as it is sobering: “[I]f God determines to destroy Spain, it may be seen that it is because of the destruction that we have wrought in the Indies and His just reason for it may be clearly evident.”

Two things are clear from the life and witness of this remarkable missionary and defender of the poor. First, Bartolomé de Las Casas shows in the witness of his life the power of the Gospel made manifest in the love of God and neighbor. Second, he shows in the witness of his works that modern Europeans, drunk with pride and the desire for self-empowerment, can be as demonically decadent as the blood-lustful cultures that they had conquered. As Christ teaches to all who will listen, we cannot serve both God and Mammon.

Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (July 2024).

This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.

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The featured image is “Fray Bartolomé de las Casas” ( 1875) by Félix Parra, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.