102 CHAPTER 5 STATE, CHURCH, AND SOCIETY
issue. Some, like the famous Franciscan Toribio
de Benavente (better known by his Nahuatl name
of Motolinía), may be called “realists” or “moder-
ates.” These clergy believed that the encomienda,
carefully regulated to safeguard indigenous wel-
fare, was necessary for the prosperity and security
of the Indies. Others, mostly Dominicans whose
leader and spokesman was Bartolomé de Las Ca-
sas, believed that the encomienda was incompat-
ible with the welfare of the natives and must be put
in the way of extinction.
As we saw in Chapter 4, during the reign of
Charles V—who feared the rise of a colonial feu-
dalism based on the encomienda—the Lascasian
wing of the clergy won certain victories, capped by
the passage of the New Laws of the Indies (1542).
By their militant efforts to secure the enforcement
of these laws, Las Casas and his disciples incurred
the mortal enmity of the encomenderos. Las Casas
was repeatedly threatened. The Dominican bishop
Antonio de Valdivieso of Nicaragua, who had
tried to enforce the abolition of indigenous slavery
by the New Laws, was assassinated in 1550 by
a group of men led by the governor’s son. These
and other courageous defenders of indígenas, like
Bishop Juan del Valle in Colombia and Fray Do-
mingo de Santo Tomás in Peru, may be regarded
as forerunners of today’s progressive current in the
Catholic Church. The ideology of Las Casas, with
its demand that the Spaniards “cease to be caballe-
ros by grace of the blood and sweat of the wretched
and oppressed,” seems to anticipate today’s Latin
American liberation theology and its “preferential
option for the poor.”
Despite the partial victories won by Las Casas
during the reign of Charles V, this movement en-
tered on a decline when Philip II took the throne in- Denial of absolution to Spaniards who had vi-
olated these protective laws—an important weapon
employed by Las Casas and his co-religionists—
was forbidden by various royal decrees. The church
was instructed to concern itself only with questions
of worship and preaching, leaving problems in the
economic and social relations between Spaniards
and native peoples to the civil authorities. Since
those authorities as a rule were ready to comply
with the wishes of encomenderos, great landown-
ers, and other ruling-class groups, the descendants
of the conquistadors fi nally obtained the direct,
unchallenged dominion over indígenas for which
their forebears had struggled. The encomienda (al-
though in decline), the repartimiento or mita, and
even slavery (legalized on various pretexts) re-
mained the basic institutions in colonial Spanish
America. This new political climate was marked
by a growing belief in the constitutional inferior-
ity of indigenous peoples, based on the Aristotelian
theory of natural slavery, a theory that Las Casas
and virtually all other Spanish theologians had
previously condemned.
The fi rst missionaries in the Indies did not regard
their defense of the natives against enslave ment
and exploitation as separate from their primary
task of conversion; they reasoned that for conver-
sion to be effective, the prospective converts must
Bartolomé de Las Casas condemned the racist
attitudes of the conquistadors and defended indig-
enous culture against the scorn of Europeans. His
teachings emphasized the dignity of all people.
[Institut Amatller d’Art Hispànic, Barcelona]