Confesionario: Avisos y Reglas Para
Confesores | by Bartolomé de Las Casas | A Translation and Introduction to Its
Historical Context and Legal Teaching | A thesis by David Thomas Orique, O.P. |
1. Location of Las Casas’ Confesionario:
Avisos y Reglas Para Confesores in his life.
Las Casas’ Confesionario, his last great effort as Bishop of
Chiapas, was first written in 1547 and reflected his forty-five years of experience in the
Indies. Writing about the personal maturity
reflected in Las Casas’ tract, Dominican friar Antonio Gutiérrez asserts the
following: “The doctrine contained in this tract was the fruit of lengthy labor that
had its origin in his prolonged experience with the spiritual needs of Spaniards living in
the Indies.” This seasoned tract, which grew from Las Casas’
years of experience and then sparked a fiery controversy, needs to be examined twice,
since it appears at two different moments of his life and on both sides of the Atlantic. Between the period of 1547 and 1552 two versions
arrived on the scene: the first was a manuscript which gave private confession
instructions to a select group of priests in his diocese of Chiapas; the second was one of
eight tractsprinted
for a wider public with official approval in Seville between July of 1552 and January of
1553 -- among them was his famous Brevísima
Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias.
The original 1547
manuscript of twelve rules was sent secretly by Las Casas to the priests of his diocese
after he decided to go back to the Spanish court. When
these private rules became known, they became a source of outrage among his opponents. This outcry against his Confesionario reached the ears of the viceroy who
ordered every copy to be collected. Helen Rand-Parish and Harold E. Weidman speak of
this period in their book, Las Casas en México:
“The copies of the manuscripts of the Doce
Reglas Para Confesores were confiscated in the Indies and earned its author the charge
of high treason in Spain.” This accusation was driven by their misguided
patriotism and malformed Christian consciences of his enemies. By
writing and distributing this clandestine Confesionario
in his diocese, Las Casas had made up his mind to be accused of high treason. Before
returning to Spain he called a notary and drafted two documents under his episcopal seal. One named a vicar general with authority to place
his entire diocese under interdict if required; the other appointed confessors and
directed them to use, in the strictest secrecy, the enclosed Doce Reglas Para Confesores, especially at the
deathbed of encomenderos. These rules were designed to force compliance with
all the New Laws, including the recently revoked Law of Inheritance. But going further, he insisted that everything had
been stolen from the Indians because the conquest and that the encomienda were illegal and immoral, hence unjust.
Therefore the Spaniards were obligated to make total restitution, as circumstances would
permit – he had spelled this out in the last section of De Unico Vocationis Modo Omnium Gentium ad Veram
Religionem. But if this was the truth, then it followed that
the king, who must rule for the good of his subjects, had no right to authorize conquests
and grant encomiendas which would doom the
Indians to death and the Spaniards to hell. Challenging
that right could have brought with it the charge of high treason, and Las Casas knew it. As a result of his bold writing and daring actions
he was forced to defend himself against accusations from enemies at home and in the
Americas. In Spain he faced his most notorious
opponent, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Speaking of this opposition lascasian Dominican
scholar Isacio Pérez Fernández writes succinctly to this point:
Upon
arriving in Spain, in June of 1547, the imperial chronicler Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was
trying to obtain approval to print a book, Democrates
secundus, in which he defended the licitness of the wars of conquest that were being
waged in the New World. In it he applied to
the reality of the New World the doctrine that he had expressed in another of his books, Democrates primus, published in 1535, in which he
defended the licitness of the wars that had been waged in the Old World (against the Turks
and the Moors). Father Las Casas, no sooner
than arriving, became aware of Sepúlveda’s proposition and opposed tenaciously the
publication of Democrates secundus. He acted to impede it using every means at his
disposal. In retaliation, Sepúlveda denounced the Confesionario
to the counsel of Castilla in 1548 as
constituent of high treason and to the counsel of the Inquisición as constituent of heresy. Both counsels handed the Confesionario to censors for examination. Their
judgments remained there; the counsels did not resolve anything. Father Las Casas was not charged, nor condemned, by
either of them.
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