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Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999: V ‐ The New World: Bartolomé de las Casas and “the option for the poor”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Austin Smith CP
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If you look in a popular atlas for the world of Las Casas—in other words, Central and South America and the West Indies—you will find it tucked away at the end. An afterthought, you might say. Our atlases very much help to shape our mental geography.

In fact the world of Las Casas covers one-sixth of the earth’s total land surface and now contains over 500 million people, the vast majority of them Catholics (they account for almost half the world’s Catholic population). However, still nearly half of the people in that world are illiterate, and nearly half of them are landless peasants; there is, in other words, still a huge gap between the rich and the poor. Las Casas would be broken-hearted to know that today at least some of the ugly consequences of the colonisation which began five centuries ago are still there for every discerning foreign tourist to see. But who was Las Casas?

Men like Dominic and Francis in varying ways powerfully articulated timeless questions in the lights of their times, and we call them men of vision. We must not claim too much for them, for they were in and out of their times. At the same time, we must keep them alive in our collective memory in a living historical conversation rooted in discernment and interpretation. They took hold of the past, immersed themselves in a living experience of their present, decoded from all that some of the timeless questions of humanity, and humbly suggested a possible and perhaps better future by word and action.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 80 , Issue 937 , March 1999 , pp. 119 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

Footnotes

1

The text of this article is substantially based on the author's Las Casas Memorial Lecture, given in London and Glasgow in November 1990 and first published in New Blackfriars in April 1991. The material on modern Latin America has been contributed by die Project Editor, J. Orme Mills OP.

References

2 Imperial Spain 1469-1716, Penguin 1963, p.62.

3 Quoted in Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions, Penguin 1971, pp. 170f.

4 Cf. Enrique Dussel, Ethics and Community (Liberation and Theology Series), Burns & Oates 1988, chapter 20.

5 Quoted in Englander, David et al., Culture and Belief in Europe 1450-1600, Basil Blackwell 1990, p.321Google Scholar.

6 Ibid. p.329.

7 Quoted in Friede, Juan & Keene, Benjamin ed. Bartolomé de las Casas in History: Towards an understanding of the man and his work, Northern Illinois University Press 1971, pp.53fGoogle Scholar.

8 Cf. ibid. for an historical review, and cf. Gutierrez, Gustavo, The Power of the Poor in History, SCM Press, p.218 n.58Google Scholar.

9 ibid. p.30.

10 “The abolition of Indian slavery was not achieved in a day, and it was tragically to be accompanied by an increasing importation of negro slaves, whose fate disturbed the Spanish conscience much less than the Indians.” (J.H. Elliot, op. cit.) I mention this point because there has always been a debate about this and Las Casas’ role and attitude. Las Casas actually admitted a neglect in this regd. Cf. Friede & Keene, op. cit.: “In a work of his maturity, the fruit of long toil and meditation, following a passage in which he criticises his earlier decision, he writes that “the blacks have the same right to freedom as the Indians”. Elsewhere he declares himself “not sure whether his ignorance and good intention will excuse him before God's judgment seat”. Cf. G. Gutierrez, op. cit., p. 218 n. 62.

11 Friede & Keene, op. cit., p. 34.

12 G. Gutierrez, op. cit., pp. 195, 196.