and gentle people, eager to learn the Christian faith. However, he discovered that the Spanish colonists were anything but gentle. They treated the natives cruelly — "worse than animals," Bartolome later wrote — and often enslaved them. Most of the Spanish colonists had come to the New World simply to make a fortune, as his father had done, and the quickest way to do that was to enslave the native peoples and make them do all the hard labor. "It was upon these gentle lambs," Bartolome wrote, that the Spanish colonists "fell like ravening wolves upon the fold."

A group of his fellow Dominican priests in New Spain began to protest these injustices, even threatening with damnation anyone who dared to hold natives as slaves. Bartolome joined their causeand devoted the rest of his life to publicizing through his writings the cruelty inflicted upon the indigenous peoples of the New World. By divine Providence, his words ultimately reached the ears of Pope Paul III in Rome, who responded by writing the papal bull "Sublimus Deus" in 1537, declaring that all the peoples discovered in the New World were equally and fully human, that they should therefore be treated with human dignity, and that those who enslaved and mistreated them were guilty of grievous sin. As a result of this papal document and several more by subsequent popes, slavery was gradually abolished throughout the entire Spanish Empire. In fact, "Sublimus Deus" is judged by many historians to be the first real treatise on human rights in the