The Priest Who Made a King Listen

In 1550, an elderly Dominican friar named Bartolome de las Casas stood before the Spanish court at Valladolid and did something almost unthinkable. He argued that the indigenous peoples of the Americas — dismissed by conquistadors as subhuman — possessed souls of infinite worth and deserved the crown's full protection.

De las Casas had not always believed this. As a young colonist in Hispaniola, he had owned enslaved workers and profited from their labor. But reading Ecclesiasticus 34 one Lenten season shattered him: "The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a murderer." He freed his workers, took holy orders, and spent the next fifty years pleading their cause before kings and councils.

He walked the halls of power in Madrid not for his own advancement but to speak for those who had no voice in those halls. He wrote thousands of pages documenting atrocities. He wept publicly. He was mocked, threatened, and called a traitor to Spain.

Psalm 72 dreams of a ruler who "delivers the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help." It envisions a kingdom where the blood of the powerless is "precious in his sight." De las Casas spent a lifetime insisting that earthly kings must reflect that divine standard — that no crown is legitimate if it is built on crushed lives. The psalm reminds us that God's justice always flows downhill, toward the lowest and most forgotten.