LAS CASAS AMONG THE REFORMERS (original) (raw)
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Religions, 2023
This article introduces the key issues and scope of the 16th-century debate over the rights of the native American peoples encountered by Columbus and the Castilian conquistadores. The historic attempt by theologians and missionaries to limit imperial expansion and to defend the dignity of conquered peoples is an example of Western self-criticism and a fundamental contribution of the Catholic Church to the slow emergence of human rights discourses. This article then focuses on the first pages of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, a text that played a pivotal role in the formation of the Black Legend against Spain, but also in the drafting of the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) of 1542. While the Short Account’s hyperbolic and explosive prose are well-known, its religious roots can be detected in the prologue and preface, with their discussion of biblical kingship, virtuous Indians, mortal sin, and (un)Christian behavior.
Bartolomé De Las Casas and the Question of “Evangelization”
Jurnal Teologi, 2013
Dalam peringatan tentang "penemuan" benua Amerika Latin oleh Christopher Columbus, suara para korban kerap tidak cukup diperdengarkan dan didengarkan. Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) sebagai "nabi"yang menyuarakan nasib mereka juga sering hanya dianggap sebagai tokoh yang melebih-lebihkan penderitaan mereka karena dia dikenal sebagai pembela mereka. Tulisan berikut ini bermaksud menuturkan aneka upaya Las Casas, sosial-ekklesial, politik-teologis dan akademik-apologetik dalam bingkai kisah hidupnya yang panjang, termasuk proses "pertobatan"nya yang bertahap dan visi imannya. Bahan-bahan yang digunakan dalam tulisan ini, kumpulan tulisan Las Casas, diperkaya dengan temuan manuskrip baru dan interpretasi keseluruhan yang lebih seimbang. Gagasan-gagasan Las Casas sangat penting untuk mengritisi isyu penyebaran iman (evangelisasi), hak asasi dan kebebasan hidup-beragama.
Prudentia: Thomas Aquinas Interpreted by Bartolomé de Las Casas
The Transatlantic Las Casas, 2022
In 1547, Bartolomé de las Casas returned definitively to Spain and resigned as bishop after enduring many struggles with the settlers in the diocese of Chiapa.1 From there, he continued to write the works which he had partially begun in the "new world."2 One was the Apologética historia sumaria, written in Spanish and the subject of this chapter.3 Las Casas planned a rather comprehensive natural and cultural history of the Native peoples, in large part informed by his personal experience. This plan contrasted with his Historia de las Indias, which attempted to be a systematic-chronological historical account of the Americas-beginning with the colonization by Columbus.4 Worth noting, however, is that Las Casas was not only interested in presenting a historical narrative; he also wanted a descriptive natural and cultural history, which was his core purpose. In the scope of his comprehensive Apologética historia, Las 1 Regarding biographical points, see Isacio Pérez-Fernández, Cronología documentada de los viajes, estancias y actuaciones de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Estudios monográficos ii (Bayamón: Centro de Estudios de los Dominicos del Caribe, 1984); Thomas Eggensperger, "Bartolomé de Las Casas: Prophetischer Protest gegen Methoden kirchlicher Mission und politischer Kolonisation," in Die Orden im Wandel Europas: Historische Episoden und ihre globalen Folgen, ed. Petrus Bsteh et al. (Vienna: Lit Verlag, 2013), 191-208; idem, "Was bleibt? Zur aktuellen Las Casas-Rezeption," in "Ces gens ne sont-ils pas des hommes?" Évangile et prophétie ("Sind sie etwa keine Menschen?" Evangelium und Prophetie), ed.
For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Indians in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. To Sin No More is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, David Rex Galindo shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. Rex Galindo argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or "reawaken" Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Indians.