by Matthew Gaetano

Recent events have brought to mind the stories of the injustices and violence of the original encounters of Christians with native Americans in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Dominicans Antonio de Montesinos (d. 1540) and Bartolomé de las Casas (d. 1566) spoke out against the unjust enslavement of these peoples, while drawing upon the Christian prophetic tradition, scholastic theology, Roman and canon law, and ancient ethics. You can read more about the confrontation between these preachers and the early Spanish colonists here and here. One moment is particularly striking. On the fourth Sunday of Advent in 1511, Montesinos said to his congregation in Hispaniola:

I am the voice of Christ in the desert of this island. It would be wise of you to pay attention and to listen with your whole heart and with every fabric of your being. … You are all in mortal sin. You live in it, you die in it. All because of the cruel tyranny you exercise against these innocent peoples. Tell me, by what right and with what justice do you so violently enslave these Indians? By what authority do you wage such hideous wars against these people who peacefully inhabit their lands, killing them by unspeakable means? How can you oppress them, giving neither food nor medicine and by working them to death all for your insatiable thirst for gold? And what care are you providing them spiritually in teaching them about their God and creator, so they are baptized, hear mass, and keep holy days? Are they not human beings? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves? Do you not understand or feel this?

Dominicans theologians like Francisco de Vitoria (d. 1546) and Domingo de Soto (d. 1560) took up some of these cries for justice in the academic setting of the University of Salamanca. They did consider what possible justifications for war there might be in the Americas. But, as David Lantigua reports in the link above, Soto asked the following question in his public lecture (relectio) on property (1535): “By what right do we maintain rule in the lands being discovered across the Atlantic?” His answer: “In truth, I do not know” (ego nescio).

Even Las Casas, though, did not (at first) speak out against injustices done by Christians to human beings in Africa. As a new edition of documents about Las Casas (edited by Lawrence Clayton and David Lantigua) puts it:

In his unrelenting and sometimes shortsighted defense of Amerindians, Las Casas suggested bringing slaves from either Spain or Africa to lift the burden of oppression off the backs of the Amerindians. He has since then been pilloried by some critics for being one of the “initiators” of the notorious African slave trade. It is important to observe, however, that he later vehemently condemned the slave trade, just as he had done in the case of the Spanish wars of conquest. Although Las Casas was not an abolitionist in the modern sense, he made the justifications for legal enslavement much stricter than his contemporaries did. By the end of his life, he was adamant that the enslavement of both the Amerindians and the Africans had been unjustly committed through the false rationales for war. The only legitimate response by the oppressors in the final instance was restoring the victims to their freedom and their livelihood.

As Las Casas reports in his own history of these events (speaking of himself in the third person), “When the cleric Las Casas first gave that advice–to grant the license to bring black slaves to the islands–he was not aware of the unjust ways in which the Portuguese captured and made slaves of blacks. But after he found out he would not have proposed it for all the world, because blacks were enslaved unjustly, tyrannically, right from the start, exactly as the Indians had been.” Later in the account, Las Casas said that he “regretted the advice that he gave the king on this matter. … It was not, in any case, a good solution he had proposed, that blacks be brought in so Indians could be freed. … He was not certain that his ignorance and his good intentions would excuse him before the judgment of God” (emphasis added).

Other theologians in subsequent decades gave appropriately harsh accounts of the horrors of the slave trade and the treatment of slaves in the Americas, but their tolerance and at times support for the perpetrators of these injustices are a source of deep sadness (see the discussion of Molina, Vieira, and Sandoval here).

Until this week, I was unaware of a very different kind of story–the narrative of two Capuchins (one major group of observant Franciscans), Epifanio (or Epiphane) de Moirans (1644-1689) and José de Jaca (1645-1689), as well as an Afro-Brazilian layman, Lourenço da Silva (1620-1698). I hope to do more work with their writings in the future (here, here, here, and here), but for now I’ll simply present the story of these (apparently) little-known voices crying out in the wilderness (perhaps even more alone than Las Casas in some respects) in defense of human beings of African descent. I’m depending mostly on the account provided by Peter Stamatov (82-85), professor of sociology at Yale University.

By the 1680s, the Capuchins had been pushing the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (founded in 1622 in part to take over the direction of missionary efforts from Catholic monarchs) towards a much more critical look at how European Christians treated Africans for some time. Capuchin missionaries were in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. They witnessed the persistence of slavery in even the Christian areas of Africa; they were frustrated with the sale of indigenous Christians to Protestants (mostly English and Dutch traders); they found themselves disappointed with how Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries were involving themselves in the slave trade. In 1630, the Congregation condemned the cruelty of slave traders. But Moirans and Jaca demanded something much stronger than that.

Jaca (also the name of the Aragonese city from which he came) spent some time in the Capuchin mission near Caracas (capital of modern Venezuela) before being sent back to Spain, perhaps because of his fierce defense of the indigenous people. Indeed, he sent a letter to King Charles II of Spain in 1678 about this matter. Eventually, he ended up back in the Western Hemisphere and, in Cuba, found an ally in Moirans, a French Capuchin who had also been expelled from a mission in what is today Venezuela. Jaca provoked greater anger from the settlers when–like Montesinos decades earlier–he refused to grant them absolution unless they freed their slaves of African descent. When the controversies with the settlers forced him to leave the Franciscan convent, he and Moirans moved into a chapel, and they began to preach on the sugar plantations.

Eventually, the vicar of the bishop intervened and commanded them to stop and eventually excommunicated them (in the year 1681). Jaca and Moirans refused to stop their preaching and asserted that the vicar had excommunicated himself by condemning these two preachers despite having no jurisdiction over them. The Capuchins were under the jurisdiction of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and ultimately under the direct authority of the pope.

Imprisonment and trial followed these mutual excommunications, and the two friars were sent back to Spain in July 1682. Conflicts between the Spanish monarchy and the papacy erupted, but their written arguments apparently moved Tomás Carbonell, a bishop and confessor of Charles II, as well as a supportive Dominican in the king’s circle, José de San Juan. In 1683, the State Council issued a decree which sought to discourage cruelty to slaves and indigenous people. According to Stamatov, it turns out that this was, for the early modern period, “the end of any effective antislavery influence on Spanish policies” (84). Two years later, the Council of the Indies produced a “learned opinion” justifying slavery, which apparently used “Jaca’s and Moirans’s persecution by authorities … as a dire warning of the unrest that would follow any legislation outlawing slavery and the slave trade.”

The story, however, wasn’t over. In 1684, while the matter of slavery was under consideration by the Council of the Indies, the Congregation heard the petition of Lourenço da Silva (see the fine article by Richard Gray on the topic to learn more). Silva was a Brazilian of Portuguese and African ancestry (who claimed to be a descendant of the kings of Kongo). He was a leading member of one of the many confraternities (a lay association for assistance of the sick and the imprisoned, for the encouragement of daily prayer and regular communion, for aid in the financing of the burial rites of its members, and so on) in the Portuguese-speaking world that drew their members from the population of free and enslaved black people. Silva opposed the perpetual slavery of his fellow human beings, especially black Christians. He presented powerful accounts of the cruelty done to slaves, describing how they were burnt “with sealing-wax, lard, resin, pitch, and other materials” (Gray, 58). He compared this treatment to that used by tyrants–the Roman imperial authorities–who persecuted the ancient church. Silva said that “innumerable souls of these Christian blacks” were lost because of the despair brought about by perpetual slavery; they were “overworked and subject to ill-treatment” and “see that not only they but also their children … are condemned to remain enslaved” which leads some to “kill themselves in desperation.” Such slavery was a “diabolical abuse.” He wanted all those involved in the sale and purchase of “these unhappy Christians” to be placed under severe excommunication and called on the pope to “liberate all these Christians” in a way that would be comparable to the defense of the native Americans by Pope Paul III in 1537.

Lourenço da Silva’s first-hand account of these cruelties did cause a stir in the Curia. The cardinals of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith wrote to the nuncios (papal ambassadors) in Madrid and Lisbon with words that reflected Silva’s description of his experience and those in his confraternity and beyond:

New and urgent appeals on the part of black people [instead of other terminology throughout] in the Indies to his holiness, and by him remitted to this holy Congregation, have caused no little bitterness to his holiness and their eminences on seeing that there still continues in those parts such a detestable abuse as to sell human blood, sometimes even with fraud and violence. This involves a disgraceful offense against Catholic liberty, by condemning to perpetual slavery not only those who are bought and sold, but also the sons and daughters who are born to them, although they have been made Christians.

To this is added an even greater grief on hearing how they are then so cruelly tormented that this results in the loss of innumerable souls, who are rendered desperate by such maltreatment perpetrated by those same Christians who should indeed protect and defend them; and, by the hatred which this conceives, the progress of the missionaries in spreading the holy faith remains impeded. (60 – emphasis added)

The nuncios were ordered by the Congregation to instruct the rulers of Spain and Portugal to make sure that local officials would, under threat of severe penalties, prohibit “such inhumanity as contrary to natural and civil law and much more to the gospel and sacred canons” (61). Also in response to Silva’s account, missionaries in Kongo were reminded of the cruelty of the slave trade.

By March 1685, Jaca and Moirans were in Rome, and they entered into an environment favorably disposed to their pleas because of Silva’s petition. They also had allies who were friends of Pope Innocent XI (d. 1689). The Capuchins argued that the wars which might (under certain circumstances) justify legal captivity were, in the case of the Africans and Americans enslaved by these early modern empires, clearly unjust. The Christian slave traders used fraud to obtain slaves and showed no concern about the legitimate captivity of the individuals that they bought and sold. The Capuchins discussed the horrors of the middle passage and the “inhuman conditions” of the condition of slavery in the Caribbean and South America (63). They asked the authorities in the Curia to require any Christians to emancipate their innocent slaves and to compensate them appropriately. Gray notes in his article that the Capuchins were noteworthy because, at key points in their argument, they “made no distinction between persons on the ground of religion” (64). They were speaking in defense of justice for all human beings, not only for the baptized.

It turned out that the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith did not have the authority to make these theological and ethical determinations. So, they were submitted to the Holy Office. For over a year, nothing happened. Silva submitted another petition on 14 January 1686 on behalf of “the blacks and [those of mixed heritage] born of Christian parents both in Brazil and in the city of Lisbon” (64). The petition asked the pope to condemn perpetual slavery, particularly for the baptized, reminding the Curia that “God sent His own Son to redeem humanity and that He was crucified” (65). The cardinals were reminded by an ally of Jaca and Moirans about the proposal submitted by the Capuchins and that “no one knew what decisions had been taken about them.” On 20 March 1686, the Holy Office, according to Gray, “formally declared its complete agreement with every proposition.”

The bishops of Angola, Cadiz, Valencia, Seville, Malaga as well as the nuncios in Spain and Portugal received the resolutions of the Holy Office. Despite Silva’s request, the papal power of excommunication was not specifically invoked. Indeed, not much happened as a result of all these events. The Spanish king’s Council of the Indies provided legal cover and justification for the slave trade in the Spanish Atlantic World. Moreover, the Spanish and Portuguese crowns resisted any restriction to their authority over ecclesiastical affairs in their domains. As Gray puts it, “The Holy Office could define questions of ethics, but the enforcement of its decisions depended on clerics and laity whose immediate ecclesiastical, and ultimate political, loyalties lay elsewhere” (66). And despite the seriousness of the challenge brought forth by Jaca and Moirans to the slave trade and the institution of slavery as it actually existed (though not to legal captivity as such), these two friars have been mostly forgotten. Moirans’s detailed engagement with the biblical, theological, philosophical, and legal issue of slavery, the Servi liberi, was apparently only available in one copy that was in Seville’s Archivo General de Indias (and unpublished, it seems, until 1982!). Indeed, the story of a Brazilian of African descent like Silva, a person who found a way to move the powers in Rome to see the injustice and cruelty that his people were experiencing, was only recovered a few decades ago.

Though Moirans, Jaca, and Silva had a limited impact on the future, I hope that an account of their struggle, their apparent victory with the Congregation and the Holy Office, and their defeat “on the ground” might be instructive. Perhaps some will see this story as only deepening our sadness as Christians and (for some of the readers here) as members of the same church that, at the end of the day, handled the cries for justice of these three people with such negligence. At the same time – and I acknowledge freely that I am open to correction and instruction on this topic – I think that, despite the persecution faced by Jaca, Moirans, and Silva as well as Antonio de Montesinos and others before them, one might find some hope in the fact that these voices (however few) did cry out for justice and for the love commanded in the Gospel. These lay brethren, Dominican theologians, and Capuchin missionaries could–in the face of much opposition–draw upon the Christian moral tradition, as Montesinos did, to tell his congregation that they must immediately repent of the sin of enslaving native American people. The indigenous people of Hispaniola were their fellow human beings with rational souls; the European settlers were obligated to love them as they loved themselves. Moirans could find a way to draw upon this long moral tradition to defend–with even greater clarity and conviction than the Capuchin proposal to the Holy Office–these three points which he saw as summarizing the entire case in his book:

1. No one can buy or sell anyone from the slaves of Africa, commonly called blacks.
2. All who possess any of them are obliged (tenentur) to emancipate (manumittere) them under the penalty of eternal damnation.
3. Their masters when emancipating them are obliged to make restitution to them for their labors and to pay the price.

It did not take until the nineteenth century for such voices to say that slaves must be released immediately. These voices at the end of the 1600s were not merely pointing out cruelty; Moirans and Jaca (as Las Casas before them) believed that Christians who held people of African descent were in serious danger of damnation. And these Capuchins believed that these injustices required restitution to the victims of these immoral actions. I hope to discuss the shape of this argumentation in the not-too-distant future, but, for now, I thought that more attention could be brought to these key events in the lives of Moirans, Jaca, and Silva. I trust that their experiences–even though they were forgotten for three centuries–can enrich our own dialogues. Perhaps these three human beings might provide us more images of prophetic speech and courageous action in the face of a hostile and indifferent world–words and deeds inspired by timeless but always timely (though rarely popular) ideals of love and justice.