A young priest at his desk, slapping away the persistent flies, turns the pages of scripture, troubled by many things. He is not just any priest but a proud member of the las Casas family – a family close to Christopher Columbus – and resides in Hispaniola, one of the first Caribbean islands taken by the Spanish. He says Mass when he must but spends much of his time managing his encomienda, a plantation with a set number of Indigenous assigned as his slaves.

The priest is troubled by two recent experiences. He has just returned from serving as a chaplain during the conquest of Cuba. There he witnessed brutality, the likes of which he had never seen before. One story a Franciscan fellow chaplain told him stuck with him. Kneeling beside a dying chieftain, the Franciscan urged him to become Christian before he died so he could go to heaven. The chieftain asked if there were Christians in heaven. Upon being told yes, he shook his head; he “would rather go down to hell so he would not be where the Christians were, such cruel people.”

The young priest was also anguished by the fiery words of Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar who had, upon arriving in Hispaniola, demanded not just that the Spanish treat their slaves well but that they free them all. “By what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible slavery?” he proclaimed. “By what right do you wage such detestable wars on these people?” The young priest did not know by what right he blessed the Spanish conquerors of Cuba or sat in his study while enslaved Indigenous harvested sugar cane for him. There was no right he could think of to justify such things, nor could he square them with the gospel.

Tom Callos, The Repentance of Bartolomé de las Casas, Linocut print, 2025. Used by permission.

Turning the pages of his Bible to the Apocrypha, he settled on Ecclesiasticus, or Sirach. Saint Paul had his road to Damascus, where a light from heaven knocked him to the ground and he heard Christ calling to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9). Augustine heard “tolle lege” (take up and read) and took up and read that he must “put on Christ” (Rom. 12:4). In Ecclesiasticus, Bartolomé de las Casas found a passage that charged his heart: “Offering sacrifice from the property of the poor is as bad as slaughtering a son before his father’s eyes” (34:20).

The land his chapel was on, and the offerings made by conquistadors that paid for the vestments, bread, and wine used at Mass – in short, everything that he as a priest offered to God – was literally stolen from the poor. These words of scripture cried out to him that his actions were worse than killing a son before his father’s eyes. Who could continue, knowing that he had no right to any of this land, knowing that he was guilty of murder in God’s eyes? And so, the young priest gave up his plantation, gave up being a well-off, complacent, slave-owning priest, and launched into a fifty-year campaign to defend the rights of the Indigenous to their land and freedom. He did this to follow the way of the Gospels and to share that way with others.

There are few people in history who have been as dynamic, impassioned, or active as Bartolomé de las Casas, who would go on to become Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico. He petitioned kings, governors, and popes. He argued with Renaissance scholars, spoke with Indigenous resistance fighters in the mountains, inspired young friars to join his work in the Americas, and endlessly enraged conquistadors. Abandoning his wealth, he took the poor habit of a Dominican friar and steeped himself in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and the scriptures.

He was not an easy man. Prone to exaggeration, he often inflated the numbers of Indigenous killed by the Spaniards. His outrage boiled over in an endless stream of polemics, but also found its way into his anthropological works, histories of the Spanish in the Americas, philosophical arguments, and guides for confessors. He crisscrossed the Atlantic multiple times, traveled to Mexico City, Cuba, and Hispaniola, and attempted to start a cooperative community for Spanish and Indigenous farmers in Venezuela. Kings wrote laws inspired by his writing, and the pope issued decrees based on his ideas.

None of this activity can be understood outside of the context of conversion. His life was deeply entwined with the realities of Spanish imperialism and thus he was often clearly in the wrong. But what made him unique was that he saw his own and his nation’s wrongness and committed his life to repenting of sinful actions, changing the way he and Spain acted, and seeking to repair some of the damage caused by his and Spain’s actions.

Las Casas was not a man without flaws. By the standards of many today, he was insufficiently critical of colonialism. Many now consider any attempt to convert the Indigenous to Christianity “religious colonialism.” He was also an early advocate of enslaving Africans and bringing them to the New World. Some modern critics have held him responsible for the enslavement of thousands of Africans. They cite his 1516 request to King Charles V to send black slaves from Spain to replace Indigenous ones, which may have influenced Charles V’s decision to approve the transport of four thousand African slaves to Jamaica in 1518. Others argue that the transatlantic slave trade was already underway and that las Casas’s suggestions had little effect.

What is clear is that here again he later converted, writing, “I soon repented and judged myself guilty of ignorance. I came to realize that black slavery was as unjust as Indian slavery.” Three centuries before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, las Casas demanded the end of African slavery in the Americas.

Thus, las Casas was a colonist who questioned colonization, a slave owner who questioned slave ownership, a coercive evangelizer who renounced coercion. He was a man of repentance who called upon his fellow Christians to repent. Seeing his own wrongdoing, he pointed out the wrongdoing of others. Knowing he had chosen the wrong path, he demanded that Christians take up the right path. He was prodigious, tireless, polemical, repentant, obsessed. As a critic of his wrote at the time, “He is a candle that sets everything afire wherever he goes.”

Las Casas insisted that Christian ethics had to be grounded in the gospel. He meant this in two senses. The first is that the preaching and witness of Christ is to be our only norm: to know how we are to be and act, we must always look to Christ’s behavior and imitate him who teaches not just by words but by deeds. No doubt las Casas also drew on natural law, virtue ethics, and canon law, but the norm for these must always be Christ, because “what Christ did is law to us.” If our natural law traditions run contrary to this incarnate, eternal law, then our interpretation of natural law needs to be changed or jettisoned.

Further, the gospel is good news – it is proclamatory. And the way we ought to proclaim it is with our lives; this should be the guiding principle for how we structure our entire lives. We must always ask ourselves, “What will these people think of Christ when they see us?” Las Casas learned this from the story of the dying chieftain who could not receive the good news as good because of the actions of its messengers. Not only must we imitate Christ, but we must do so publicly. The fundamental question is: Does my life attract others to Christ? There is, las Casas writes, “one way only, of teaching a living faith, to everyone, everywhere, always, set by Divine Providence; the way that wins the mind with reasons, that wins the will with gentleness, with invitation.” Only if we live this way will the gospel be received as good news.

This understanding of mission led las Casas to champion universal human dignity. “All humanity is one” for las Casas because Christ set forth only one method for evangelizing: “Christ commanded: ‘Go everywhere, teach everyone.’ No one, no place is privileged. We are not to discriminate between places or persons.” There can be no place for racism, coercion, or unjust treatment of anyone, because everyone is a recipient of the good news. When Christians use coercion of any kind, they make the good news bad news. “Who would want the gospel preached to him in such a fashion?” We must shape each moment of each day of our lives so that, through word and deed, people encounter in us a proclamation of the gospel.

The question of “by what right,” for las Casas, is answered in the proclamation of the gospel according to the norm that is Christ. “Not by war. Not by force of arms. By the taste of peace. By an atmosphere of charity, by the works of kindness, of mercy, of modesty.” The gospel means I have no right to war, injustice, exploitation, or harshness. I only have the right to offer freely what has been offered to me: faith, hope, and love. The question of what is right is thus determined by the good news as a gift, which must be offered “with gentleness.” In being shaped by the gospel, I lose the false right to take; I gain the real right to give. Where the young las Casas took an encomienda, took slaves, and took part in colonizing, a deeper encounter with the gospel led him to give his whole life.

If the life of a Christian is always to imitate Christ, we live that life most especially in our care for the poor and suffering because, as las Casas says, “they are our brothers, redeemed by Christ’s most precious blood.” Christ’s redemptive offering of his blood made humanity one family. Now no one is not my kin, no one is outside the order of my loves. But the oppressed need to come first because “God has a special memory for the smallest and the most forgotten.” God holds the colonized, the enslaved, the unborn, the refugee, the poor, the neglected old and ill in his memory and requires that we too keep them close. The good news is primarily for them.

What is right, las Casas says, must be shaped by the reality of the situation. And what was the situation? That a son was being murdered before the eyes of his father. For las Casas, Ecclesiasticus 34:20 was no abstraction. It was the image of the Son of God on the cross, murdered by us. It was also what he found in the New World: “Jesus Christ, our God, scourged and afflicted and beaten and crucified not once but thousands of times.” The reality is that those we oppress or neglect are Christ and him crucified. To worship rightly thus is not only to cease to oppress but to stand in solidarity with Christ crucified in the oppressed.

An old priest at his desk takes up his pen as he has so many times before. He writes to the pope to tell him that the Indigenous are “capable of understanding the gospel and eternal life.” The old bishop considers the many successes and failures in his life. He has helped end slavery in Mexico and inspired countless friars to bring the gospel peacefully to the New World. But also there on his desk he has a letter from Indigenous leaders begging him to represent their cause in the Spanish court. His attempts to stop the destruction of Indigenous peoples have mostly been ignored. Spanish seminaries have refused his call to accept Indigenous men into formation for the priesthood. The African slave trade has grown while the Indigenous population of the Caribbean islands has collapsed.

Does he despair? No, he takes pen to paper once again. The gospel does not promise him success. In a world that rejects the refugee, aborts the young, euthanizes the old, exploits the labor of the poor, and rejects the gospel, we too are not promised success. What we are given instead is a deeper story of “goodness going out and goodness coming back.” Las Casas calls us to commit to being a part of that goodness, to join him in following goodness incarnate in Christ, in defending everyone’s right to hearing the gospel with love, and in offering worship in solidarity with Christ, the divine Son, and all the crucified sons and daughters of the Father.