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  • To Heaven or to Hell: Bartolomé de las Casas's Confesionario by David Thomas Orique
  • Evan C. Rothera
Orique, David Thomas. To Heaven or to Hell: Bartolomé de las Casas's Confesionario. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

Bartolomé de las Casas has intrigued scholars for generations. His powerful denunciations of Spanish cruelty in his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies) are required reading in many courses on colonial Latin American history. In addition, anyone who writes about the Spanish conquest usually discusses the pugnacious Las Casas in some detail. However, while scholars have paid considerable attention to Brevísima relación, they have not adequately analyzed, contends David Thomas Orique, "Las Casas's little-known 1552 publication of the Confesionario para los confesores (Confessionary for confessors), which is commonly referred to as Avisos y reglas para los confesores de españoles (Advice and rules for confessors of Spaniards)" (1). The Confesionario does not have the same name recognition as Brevísima relación, but it is no less important in helping scholars understand Las Casas and his world. Orique, an Associate Professor of History and [End Page 165] Director of the Latin American and Latino/a Studies Program at Providence College, offers the first complete and annotated English-language translation of the Confesionario. In so doing, he has produced an excellent contribution to Penn State University Press's Latin American Originals series.

Brevísima relación emphasized the cruel and barbaric behavior of the conquistadors and their many abuses of the indigenous people. Las Casas did this deliberately. He intended to shock the Crown and convince it to back more effectual reforms. Appeals to the heart can convince people to do the right thing—and in this case they certainly helped secure more stringent laws—but they are not always successful in causing the wicked to repent and modify their behavior. Las Casas seems to have understood this. In the Confesionario, he adopted a very different strategy to ensure behavior modification. He targeted several groups of people: "conquistadors, encomenderos, slaveholders, settlers, merchants, miners, ranchers, and anyone who had maltreated or profited from the indigenous people" (1). He shrewdly stipulated that a confessor confessing a member of any of these groups was required to "ask these Spaniards to make a secular and legal pledge prior to or upon entering the sacred and private reception of the sacrament, which obligated them to restore what they had taken unjustly from the indigenous people and to make restitution for the spiritual and physical harms done and for ill-gotten financial gains acquired" (1).

Was Las Casas an idealist? Why would he think that those who had profited from the conquest would return their unjust gains? Las Casas understood that confessors held a powerful weapon. If the guilty refused to make the pledge that Las Casas demanded, the confessor could not, at least without incurring a severe penalty, absolve the sins of the guilty party. Consequently, according to Catholic teachings, the Spaniard would remain in mortal sin and, after death, would go to hell. If appeals to the heart did not work, Las Casas seems to have reasoned that concern about one's immortal soul might be a more powerful motivator.

One of the strengths of this book—aside from the carefully annotated translation—is the adept analysis of Las Casas in the chapters preceding the translation. Orique is an excellent guide to often-complicated theological issues and skillfully navigates the reader through Las Casas's life to demonstrate how he developed the ideas in the Confesionario. Interestingly, at some point between 1511 and 1514, a Dominican friar denied Las Casas absolution. The friar did not see Las Casas as he saw himself—a "good" encomendero—but considered him similar to the other conquistadors. As Orique notes, "although Las Casas was [End Page 166] reportedly benevolent in his treatment of the encomendado indigenous Other, his conscience was deeply troubled and his lifestyle profoundly challenged by the Dominican friar's refusal to grant him God's pardon" (7). This proved a critical moment, and Las Casas soon...

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