Bartolome de las Casas Quotes
I write ... in order to help ensure that the teeming millions in the New World, for whose sins Christ gave His life, do not continue to die in ignorance, but rather are brought to knowledge of God and thereby saved.
Casas, Bartolomé de las. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Translated by Nigel Griffin, Penguin Books, 1992, p. 3.
This was a large part of the “moral” justification of conquering the New World peoples.
Those who argue that the United States is a Christian country often point to this quotation to illustrate the fundamental religious purpose to the Massachusetts Colonies
Bartolomé de las Casas was a 16th-century Spanish landowner, friar, priest, and bishop, famed as a historian and social reformer. He arrived in Hispaniola as a layman then became a Dominican friar and priest. He was appointed as the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies. He described the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.
