The Colonist Who Finally Saw

In 1514, a Spanish colonist named Bartolomé de las Casas stood in his church in Cuba preparing a Pentecost sermon when a passage from Sirach arrested him mid-sentence: "The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a man of blood." He looked beyond the chapel walls to the enslaved Taíno people laboring in his own fields and saw, for the first time, what he had willfully ignored for twelve years.

De las Casas freed his enslaved workers that week. Then he spent the next five decades — from his thirties until his death at ninety-two — traveling between the Americas and the Spanish court, pleading for indigenous peoples who had no advocate in the halls of power. He wrote meticulous accounts of atrocities. He debated theologians who insisted indigenous people were less than human. He knelt before Emperor Charles V himself and begged the crown to recognize that the blood being spilled an ocean away was precious.

He did not win every fight. The exploitation ground on. But de las Casas embodied the very heartbeat of Psalm 72 — that true authority exists not to enrich itself but to "deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help." The psalmist prays for rulers who see what de las Casas finally saw: that every life crushed under the wheel of power is precious in the sight of the Almighty.