After
he was made Dominican Vicar of Guatemala, he attended the Mexican Ecclesiastical
Conference of 1536 where he worked with Bishop Zumárraga and Bishop Julián Garcés of
Tlaxcala to draw up petitions on behalf of the Indians to be forwarded to Pope Paul III. Out of these innovative ideas came the landmark
papal bull, Sublimis Deus, often called the
Magna Carta of Indians rights. This promulgation of 1537 proclaimed that the Indians were
truly human and capable of receiving the faith and that they were not to be deprived of
their liberty or property, even though they may be outside of the faith. This document proved a powerful weapon in the hands
of the pro-Indian forces, although it was never formally published in the Spanish
dominions. That same year, Las Casas traveled from Mexico City
to his vicariate of Guatemala to initiate a “peaceful conversion” experiment of
his own. He and his friars, accompanied by
Indian merchants, penetrated an unconquered region know as tierra de guerra by the Spaniards because of this
territory’s hostile Indians. Las Casas promptly renamed the area tierra de vera paz.
This missionary effort proved very successful and is a model of his
evangelization ideas in practice.
In 1540 Las Casas
returned to Spain and joined other churchmen and laymen to lobby Charles V for protection
for the Amerindians. His nearly forty years of experience in the Americas made him an
informative and convincing source for the king to trust.
As a result of this lobbying effort, the New Laws of 1542 were enacted, a
striking combination of political reality and humanitarian idealism, that abolished
slavery and the encomienda system. This effort
ranked as the supreme achievement of his career. But even before the New Laws were promulgated, his
enemies moved to get him away from court, insisting that it was his duty to accept a
bishopric and help enforce the new ordinances. Las Casas resisted this proposal, especially the
wealthiest see of Cuzco, but finally he accepted the impoverished diocese of Chiapa –
it contained his own tierra de guerra
experiment, now called the tierra de vera paz. His friends impressed on him that, by accepting the
miter, he would automatically be free from the vow of obedience and could use the
ecclesiastical arm to enforce the New Laws. Finally persuaded, Las Casas was consecrated
bishop in the Church of San Pablo in Seville on March 31, 1544. Even before starting for his distant diocese, Las
Casas undertook his first duty as bishop by securing the liberation of Indians held as
slaves in Seville itself. His action aroused
much enmity against him, but he was indifferent: the text of the New Laws was explicit,
leaving no opening for false implementation.
Las Casas was back in
the New World in 1545, this time as bishop of Chiapa
and with the largest missionary contingent ever assembled: forty-five Dominican friars,
and a lay staff of five. It took the newly consecrated prelate almost a year
to travel the five thousand miles to his faraway diocesan seat of Cuidad Real, due to a lack of funds, logistical
problems, physical dangers, a boycott from colonists and conflict with Spanish
authorities, all of them foretastes of worse to come. His brief and stormy tenure as a resident bishop
was an undertaking of little more than a year, which nearly cost him his life. No doubt some of this was because of his own
inflexibility, but a great deal stemmed from the blind hatred he encountered from the
start in his cathedral town. His life threatened and his efforts to enforce the
New Laws thwarted by the local government officials, he went heavy hearted to the
gathering of bishops in Mexico City. There he
convinced secular authorities to respect ecclesiastical immunity and along with support
from church officials produced a series of strong pro-Indian statements. He even persuaded
the Viceroy to convoke a separate meeting of friars who denounced Indian slavery.
Armed with these
forceful resolutions, Bishop Las Casas prepared for his final return trip to Spain. He appointed a Vicar General for his diocese with a
select group of friars to hear confessions according to the twelve rules that he sent
under strictest secrecy in his Avisos y Reglas Para
Confesores. Las Casas’ Confesionario was designed to enforce all the New
Laws. The confessor was to deny absolution to
anyone who profited from Indian life and land. Moreover,
since these rules asserted the illegality of the encomienda
system and the conquest – a defiance of royal authority, because it was the king who
had granted them -- he was questioning royal authority.
This amounted to his questioning the divine rights of kings. He would surely have been charged with treason,
punishable by death if the rules had leaked out. This
is true because it
In anticipation of this accusation Las
Casas wrote a letter to the Regent, Crown Prince Philip, who was in charge of the Spanish
dominions in the Emperor’s absence, arguing for ecclesiastical exemption from the
coercive power of secular princes. Even with his preemptive defensive letter to
Philip, his manual became known and raised a political as well as an ecclesiastical storm. After attending the meeting of bishops and church
leaders in Mexico City, he returned to Spain in 1547. He would never see the New World
again and later resigned his bishopric. By
this time in his life, it seems that he understood that his true place was at court, and
that there he alone could serve as the much-needed “universal procurator” of his
beloved Indians. The beleaguered Bishop probably did not foresee
that he would first have to serve as procurator in his own cause.
Back
in Spain in 1547, Las Casas encountered accusations concerning his now public Confesionario. His defense against charges of
high treason from his detractors, for his confessors manual, reached its climax when he
debated the humanist Juan Ginés Sepúlveda. In his counterattack Las Casas
challenged Sepúlveda’s Democrates Secundus,
a tract that justified waging war in the process of the conquest in order to “christianize”
the peoples of the Americas. Las Casas debated Sepúlveda at the Junta de Valladolid
of 1550-1551 where the judges of the exchange were a panel of fourteen distinguished
religious and laity, of whom four were fellow Dominicans. Sepúlveda appeared the
first day and gave a three-hour summary of the doctrine of his Democrates Secundus to the Junta. For the
next five days, Las Casas offered his rebuttal, Argumentum
Apologiae, countering that, even if some of the Indians were guilty of human sacrifice
and cannibalism, it could be explained as a rational step in the development of religious
thought.[15]
Although no verdict was handed down, the royal cédulas of the Council of the Indies continued to
apply the thesis of Las Casas.[16] Even so, as a result of Las Casas’ refutation
of his opponent, he was successful not only in stopping the publication of Sepúlveda’s
work, but also in making a stronger case than ever for his peaceful and just means of
evangelization. Following this time of debate, he rewrote and published the
previously confiscated Confesionario along with
other missionary tracks and had them distributed in the Americas.
Notes
