Sublimis Deus

Sublimis Deus answers a question that had been argued in Spain for a generation: whether the peoples of the Americas were rational beings capable of faith and of holding property, or whether they were natural slaves in the Aristotelian sense, fit only to be governed by others. Paul III answers plainly. They are true men. They are capable of understanding the Catholic faith and are, in the pope's words, exceedingly desirous to receive it. Therefore they are not to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even if they remain outside the faith, and anything done to the contrary is null and of no effect.

The bull is short and its scope is wide. It covers not only the peoples already encountered but any others who might later come to the notice of Christians, which is unusual drafting for the period and was probably deliberate.

What it does not do is repeal anything. Inter Caetera stood. The encomienda stood. The bull addresses the treatment of persons, not the title to territory, and the two questions were kept carefully apart. Read next to the 1452 and 1455 grants it is a genuine reversal on slavery and an eloquent silence on conquest, and the atlas records both halves of that.

A declaration without a penalty is an opinion. Paul III appears to have understood that, because on 29 May 1537, days before the bull, he issued a brief called Pastorale Officium, addressed to the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, which attached automatic excommunication to anyone who enslaved the peoples of the Indies or seized their goods. That brief is the enforcement that Sublimis Deus lacks.

The Spanish crown objected. It held the right of patronage over the church in its American possessions and regarded a papal penalty imposed directly on its subjects, without passing through the royal council, as an intrusion on that right. The objection was jurisdictional rather than doctrinal, and it succeeded. On 19 June 1538 Paul III annulled Pastorale Officium.

The result is an instrument in two halves with different fates. The declaration survives, is quoted in every account of the sixteenth century debate, and was invoked by Bartolome de las Casas for the rest of his life. The sanction lasted a year. Slavery of indigenous Americans continued under changed legal forms, and the Atlantic traffic in enslaved Africans, which the bull does not address at all, expanded through the same century. Reading the declaration without the annulment produces a much better story than the record supports, which is why the atlas carries both dates.