what did bartolome de las casas spend 50 years trying to find
Christ did not come into the world to die for gold.
—Bartolomé de las Casas
Who is my neighbor? That question emerges as 1 of the critical questions of the Gospels. After all, equally Jesus confirms to an inquiring scribe, our eternal life rests on loving God and our neighbor equally ourselves. And so the scribe'due south question, "Who is my neighbor?" could non be more pertinent. Jesus answers by way of the parable of the Proficient Samaritan. In so doing, he cuts through whatever easy notion that our "neighbor" is only the person who lives next door or who lives in the aforementioned "neighborhood," who looks like u.s.a. or shares our values.
The story of Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), a Dominican friar and one of the first Europeans to set foot in this hemisphere, offers some other answer to the question. His story raises the further question: Who are those in our earth who "don't count," whose humanity does not measure upward, whose aspirations and needs are not our concern? How would we respond, how would nosotros organize our lives if we believed our salvation rested on the answer to that question?
The arrival of three small Castilian ships on the blue shores of the Bahamas in 1492 marked the showtime of an unprecedented standoff of cultures. For the Castilian explorers and their royal patrons, the "discovery" of "the new world" was like the opening of a treasure chest. But for the indigenous peoples, whom Columbus called Indians, it marked the onset of oblivion. For about of the invaders, this was not a serious consideration. In their view, the Indians were a primitive, bottom breed; equally Aristotle taught, some people were born to exist slaves and others to exist masters. While the church endorsed the conquest as an opportunity to extend the Gospel, there were few theologians of the time prepared to see the Indians as fully human and equal in the optics of God. Ane who did was the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who was then affected by what he had seen during the early decades of the conquest that he devoted his long life to raising an outcry and bearing witness before an indifferent earth.
Gilded Cruelty
To an extraordinary degree the life of las Casas was bound to the fate of the Indians. Every bit a male child of viii, he witnessed the render of Columbus to Seville after his kickoff voyage to the New World. With fascination the immature boy watched as the Admiral of the Ocean paraded through the streets, accompanied by seven Taino Indians (the surviving remnant of a larger number who began the voyage). As he recalled, they carried "very beautiful, cherry-tinged light-green parrots," also as jewels and gold "and many other things never before seen or heard of in Spain."
His father speedily signed upwards for Columbus'southward 2nd voyage, and in 1502 Bartolomé made his outset trip to Hispaniola (currently Republic of haiti and the Dominican Republic). Afterward later studies in Rome for the priesthood he returned to the New World, where he served every bit clergyman in the Spanish conquest of Cuba. Though a priest, he besides benefited from the conquest as the possessor of an encomienda, a plantation with Indian indentured laborers.
In these years, he witnessed scenes of diabolical cruelty, which he later on chronicled with exacting item. He described how the armored Spaniards would pacify a village by initiating massacres; how they would enslave their captives and punish whatever who rebelled past cutting off their hands; how they would export them to die earlier their time through overwork in the mines and plantations. His reports, based, as he oft noted, on "what I accept seen," included accounts of soldiers suddenly drawing their swords "to rip open the bellies" of men, women, children and one-time folk, "all of whom were seated, off guard and frightened," and so that "within two credos, not a man of all of them in that location remained alive."
Such scenes, replayed constantly in his memory, haunted las Casas for the rest of his life. They likewise began a process of conversion, as the Spanish priest gradually defected from the cause of his own countrymen and identified with those who were treated as nonpersons, of no account, of "less worth than the dung in the street."
In 1514, las Casas, 30, gave up his lands and the Indians in his possession and declared that he would refuse absolution to any Christian who would not do the same. Eventually, he joined the Dominican order and went on to become a passionate and prophetic defender of the indigenous peoples. For more than than fifty years he traveled back and forth between the New World and the court of Spain, attempting through his books, letters and preaching to betrayal the cruelties of the conquest, whose very legitimacy, and not merely excesses, he disavowed.
On ane occasion, a bishop became bored with the Dominican's account of the death of seven,000 children and interrupted him to inquire, "What is that to me and to the rex?" With fierce indignation, las Casas replied, "What is it to your lordship and to the king that those souls dice? Oh, keen and eternal God! Who is there to whom that is something?" To las Casas the Indians were swain human beings, subject to the same sadness, entitled to the same respect. With this insight it followed that every ounce of golden extracted by their labor was theft; every indignity imposed on them was a criminal offence; every death—whatever the circumstances—was an human action of murder.
Although the main attraction for the Spanish in the New Earth was gold, the conquest was ostensibly justified by evangelical motivations. The pope had authorized the subjugation of the Indian populations for the purpose of implanting the Gospel and securing their salvation. Las Casas claimed that the deeds of the conquistadors revealed their truthful organized religion: "In order to social club a very vicious and harsh tyranny that destroys so many villages and people, solely for the sake of satisfying the greed of men and giving them gold, the latter, who themselves do not know the faith, apply the pretext of instruction it to others and thereby deliver upwards the innocent in order to extract from their blood the wealth which these men regard as their god."
Scenes of the Crucified Christ
With shame, he recounted the story of an Indian prince in Cuba who was burned alive. As he was tied to a stake a Franciscan friar spoke to him of God and asked him whether he would like to become to heaven and in that location enjoy celebrity and eternal balance. When the prince asked whether Christians also went to heaven and was assured that this was and so, he replied without farther thought that he did not wish to go there, "but rather to hell so as not to be where Spaniards were." las Casas notes with bitter irony, "This is the renown and award that God and our faith have acquired by ways of the Christians who have gone to the Indies."
But las Casas' theological insights went far beyond a simple affirmation of the Indians' human dignity. In their sufferings, he argued, the Indians truly represented the crucified Christ. So he wrote, "I leave in the Indies Jesus Christ, our God, scourged and affected and beaten and crucified not once, merely thousands of times."
For las Casas there could be no salvation in Jesus Christ apart from social justice. Thus, the question was not whether the Indians were to exist "saved''; the more than serious question was the salvation of the Spanish who were persecuting Christ in his poor. Jesus had said that our eternal fate rests on our handling of those in need: "I was hungry and you fed me, naked and you clothed me.… Insofar equally you have done these things to the least of my brothers and sisters, you take washed them to me" (Mt 25:31-40). If the failure to do these things was enough to consign ane to hell, what about the situation of the New World, where Christ, in the guise of the Indians, could justly say, "I was clothed, and you lot stripped me naked, I was well fed, and you starved me.…"?
Las Casas did not oppose the goal of evangelization. Just this could never be achieved by force. "The one and only method of teaching men the true religion was established by Divine Providence for the whole world and for all times, that is, by persuading the understanding through reason and by gently alluring or exhorting the will." Needless to say, such views on religious freedom, the rights of censor and the relation between conservancy and social justice were far avant-garde for his time; indeed, they were scarcely matched in the Cosmic Church building until the Second Vatican Council. Fifty-fifty then, they were bitterly debated.
All the same, las Casas did win a hearing in Spain, where he was named Protector of the Indians. With the passion of an Old Testament prophet, he proclaimed: "The screams of and then much spilled human claret take now reached sky. The earth tin can no longer behave such steeping in human blood. The angels of peace and fifty-fifty God, I retrieve, must be weeping. Hell lone rejoices." Just his efforts made footling deviation.
In 1543, with court officials in Kingdom of spain eager to exist rid of him, las Casas was named a bishop. While he spurned the offer of the rich encounter of Cuzco in Peru, he accepted the impoverished region of Chiapas in southern Mexico. There he immediately alienated his flock by once over again refusing absolution to whatsoever Spaniard who would not gratis his Indian slaves. He was denounced to the Spanish court equally a "lunatic" and received numerous expiry threats. Somewhen he resigned his bishopric and returned to Spain, where he felt he could more than effectively prosecute his cause. He took part in an epic debate with one of the leading theologians of the solar day, defending the humanity of the Indians, their right to religious freedom, and challenging the legality of the conquest. He also fought to abolish the encomienda system and wrote voluminous histories of the conquest and "the Destruction of the Indies." Past this time, he charged, the once-vast indigenous population of Hispaniola had been reduced to 200 souls. Las Casas died in his monastic jail cell on July 18, 1566, at 82, confessing to his brethren his sorrow and shame that he was unable to practise more.
Las Casas' Legacy
5 hundred years later on the "discovery" of America, what are we to brand of this life, this witness? Conspicuously for his writings on man equality and his defense of religious liberty, las Casas deserves to be remembered every bit a political philosopher of high significance in the history of ideas. But in decisively challenging the identification of Christ with the cause of Christendom, he proposed a recalibration of the Gospel that continues to provoke a response. In 1968 the bishops of Latin America, meeting in Medellín, Colombia, examined the social structures of their continent—in many means, the ongoing legacy of the early conquest—and named this reality equally a state of affairs of sin and institutionalized violence. To preach the Gospel in this context necessarily involved entering the world of the poor and engaging in the struggle for justice.
In undertaking such a shift in perspective and allegiance, the bishops were renouncing their historic period-onetime identification with the rich and powerful, and their new stance provoked a furious reaction. Every bit Dom Hélder Câmara, a mettlesome Brazilian bishop cut from like cloth every bit las Casas, observed, "When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I enquire why in that location are so many poor and hungry, they call me a Communist." In subsequent years many priests, sisters and lay Catholics raised this same question, with fateful consequences. In the words of Oscar Romero, the prophetic archbishop of San Salvador: "I who is committed to the poor must risk the same fate as the poor. And in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, to be tortured, to be captive, and to be institute expressionless."
In the decades of the 1970s and '80s, the truth of those words would be played out in the lives of tens of thousands of Christian martyrs in Latin America. They included Archbishop Romero himself, a bishop like las Casas, whose conversion had been prompted by his meet with the "scourged Christ" of the poor. He was assassinated in 1980 while saying Mass in Republic of el salvador, and he became a symbol of a new church born of the religion and struggle of the poor. His death was a potent sign of the lingering contradictions implied in the original "evangelization" of the Americas—that 500 years after the arrival of Columbus, in a land named for the Savior, a bishop could exist assassinated by murderers who called themselves Christians, indeed faithful defenders of Christian values.
Las Casas lived in a fourth dimension of epochal change, in which new, unprecedented realities posed new questions. Were the Indians truly homo? Over time, that question has been definitively answered—at to the lowest degree in theory. Only in practice? Slavery in the U.s. was abolished merely 150 years ago, legalized segregation in our own lifetime. But to what extent practice we truly consider the lives of those designated the "other" equally equal to our own? In a global economic system that largely functions to siphon wealth and resource from the world'due south poorest to its wealthiest inhabitants, who can say whether it is God or gold that nosotros truly worship? As we steadily ravage the irreplaceable natural resource of the planet and recklessly undermine the fabric of sustainable life on world—all for the sake of short-term profit—who tin can say that nosotros have advanced across the rapacious conquistadors, whom las Casas depicted as "wolves, tigers, and hungry lions" feasting on the blood of their victims?
Long after the death of las Casas, his writings became the footing of the "Black Legend," a potent weapon in the service of Protestant anti-Catholicism and anti-Castilian propaganda. In calorie-free of the bloodstained history of the past century, information technology is harder to ascribe his testimony to some peculiar Iberian aberration from the land of the Inquisi-tion. In fact, his writings pose the deepest claiming to the role of the church building in our time. In the face of today's injustice and violence, in the face of all the threats to human survival, do Christians stand on the side of the victims or with those who turn a profit from their suffering? The Jesuit philosopher and theologian Ignacio Ellacuría of El Salvador, who along with Romero would later join the company of martyrs, spoke of the "crucified peoples of history." Like las Casas with his talk of the "scourged Christ of the Indies," Ellacuría compared the poor with Yahweh'southward Suffering Servant. In their disfigured features he discovered the ongoing presence and passion of Christ—suffering because of the sins of the world. In this light, he said, the task of the Christian was not simply to worship the cross or to contemplate the mystery of suffering, but "to take the crucified downwards from the cross"—to bring together them in compassion and effective solidarity.
Five centuries before the phrase was coined, las Casas' "preferential option for the poor" continues to problem the conscience of all who turn their gaze from the sufferings of the "other," whether in our midst or across the sea, while daring to ask, "What is that to me?"
Source: https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/las-casas-discovery
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