The Bishop Who Counted Every Drop of Blood

In 1542, Bartolomé de las Casas knelt before the Spanish court and read aloud testimony that made grown men weep. He described indigenous families in the Caribbean and Central America — their names, their villages, the precise cruelties inflicted upon them by colonial overseers. He had once been a colonist himself, profiting from the encomienda system. But something broke open in him when he read Ecclesiasticus 34: "The bread of the needy is their life; he that defraudeth them thereof is a man of blood."

Las Casas spent the next fifty years becoming the voice the voiceless did not have. He traveled eight times across the Atlantic, wearing out his body on wooden ships, pressing kings and councils to see what they refused to see — that the Indigenous peoples were fully human, fully beloved, and that their suffering was an offense before the Almighty.

He was mocked as a fanatic. Colonists burned him in effigy. But he kept careful records of every atrocity, because he believed what the psalmist declared: that the blood of the oppressed is precious in God's sight.

Psalm 72 paints a portrait of the ruler God desires — one who delivers the needy when they cry out, who takes pity on the weak, who rescues them from oppression and violence. Las Casas never wore a crown, but he understood the calling embedded in this psalm: that true authority kneels before the vulnerable, because that is where God's own heart bends.