A Voice Crying in the Wilderness

500^th Anniversary of the Montesino Sermon

Christopher Columbus had discovered the New World just eighteen years prior to the arrival of Spanish Dominicans on the Caribbean’s Hispaniola.  In 1510, four Dominican friars from the great Salamanca Priory of San Esteban established a mission on the Isla.

The four were soon five, as a lay brother was accepted into the new community from the colony.  The lay brother soon told the four Spanish friars of the killings and torturing of the indigenous population by Spaniards.  This new knowledge, adding to their own assessment of the enslavement of locals, quickly set the Dominicans’ minds to respond to the injustice.

500 years ago this year, on the fourth Sunday of Advent 1511, our brother Antonio Montesino drew upon the rich imagery of St John the Baptist to make the voice of the oppressed heard: he was a voice crying in the moral wilderness of Hispaniola.  His preaching was part of the friars’ strategy to defend the inherent human rights of indigenous people.

Montesino told the congregation that day that they were not likely to save their souls if they continued to live as they had been.  The colonialists had failed in their obligation to treat the locals with proper regard for their physical well-being and their catechesis.

“Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude?  On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully on their own lands?”  Montesino fired.

“Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before. Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day?”

The Preacher reminded the colonialists that the self-proclaimed superiority of the Spanish political structure and culture over those of the indigenous could not violate the inalienable rights of the people as children of God.

Admiral Diego Columbus, the Governor and son of the explorer, was among those who received the Word from Montesino.  Admiral Columbus demanded that the Prior of the Dominicans, Fr Pedro de Cordova, require Montesino retract what he had said.  Famously, de Cordova told the Governor that all the friars had been responsible for the Sermon and had preached in their name.

After the Sermon, heated debate ensued in the colony and among the Dominican friars themselves.  The then-slave owning agriculturalist, Bartolome de las Casas, joined the chorus against the Montesino Sermon.  It is thanks to de las Casas that we have excerpts from the Sermon.  It would be a short three years until de las Casas completely reversed his position.  He himself gained a reputation as Protector of the Indians.  Eight years after his total conversion to the cause of justice, in 1522, Bartolome de las Casas received the Dominican habit as a friar.

Montesino and the other friars were recalled to Spain to put their case before King Ferdinand II.  They convinced him of the merit of their position.  Ferdinand subsequently proclaimed the Laws of Burgos, the first legal code of a colonial power recognising and protecting the rights of an indigenous people.

The call of Montesino is yet to be heard by other oppressors today, those who advocate abortion, euthanasia, and all the practices which obscure or remove entirely the rights we have as human persons, made in the image of God.  “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!”

(Statue of Friar Antonio Montesino delivering his sermon, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic)