Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ

In this passionate work, the pioneering author of A Theology of Liberation delves into the life, thought, and contemporary meaning of Bartolome de Las Casas, sixteenth-century Dominican priest, prophet, and “Defender of the Indians” in the New World. Writing against the backdrop of the fifth centenary of the conquest of the Americas, Gutierrez seeks in the remarkable figure of Las Casas the roots of a different history and a gospel uncontaminated by force and exploitation.
Las Casas, who arrived in the New World in 1502, underwent a conversion after witnessing the injustices inflicted on the Indians. Proclaiming that Jesus Christ was being crucified in the poor, he went on to spend a lifetime challenging the Church and the Empire of his day. His voluminous writings, along with those of his numerous adversaries, provide the substance for Gutierrez’s reflections.
What emerges is both a prophet of unquestioned courage and a theologian of remarkable depth, whose vision continues to set in relief the challenge of the gospel in a world of injustice. Not only did Las Casas point the way to such contemporary themes as the church’s “preferential option for the poor” and the denunciation of “social sin,” but he anticipated by centuries the principles of religious freedom, the rights of conscience, and the salvation of non-Christians, articulated at Vatican II.
Through the poor of his time, Las Casas was moved to rediscover the radical challenge of the gospel. Gutierrez writes from a similar location and with a similar pathos. Far from a dry exercise in historical retrieval, Las Casas represents the author’s most recent effort to articulate the Gospel of Jesus Christ in our own world and time, now as then marked by oppression as well as the struggle for liberation.