The Bishop Who Counted Every Drop of Blood

In 1542, Bartolomé de las Casas knelt before the Spanish court and read aloud testimony that made grown men weep. He described indigenous families in the Caribbean and Central America — their names, their villages, the precise cruelties inflicted upon them by colonial overseers. He had once been a colonist himself, profiting from the encomienda system. But something broke open in him when he read Ecclesiasticus 34: "The bread of the needy is their life; he that defraudeth them thereof is a man of blood."…