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14th Century

1366 - Because of conflicts with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury,

1381 - A major uprising spreads across great parts of England, known the Peasant's Revolt. On top of the burden of taxes and the catastrophe brought on by the Black Death in the 1340s, there was the political stirrings of the capital, London, where different classes and guilds struggled for power in the face of expanding Crown control of the judiciary. Rural peasants and artisans, as well as certain intellectuals and politically powerful groups, collaborated for the negotiation with the King's authorities over wages, taxes and freedoms. Met with censure and violence, great masses from the country marched on the urban centres to face the enforcers of the status quo.

It is not known how long the priest John Ball from Hertfordshire, disciple of protestant reformer John Wycliffe, was involved in the year's escalating conflict. After

June 12 - The rebellion arrives in Blackheath, just southeast of the capital. There John Ball

When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

July 15 - John Ball executed

May 6, 1382 - John Wrawe executed.

16th Century

September, 1510 - Eighteen years after Christopher Columbus discovered Hispaniola— present day Haiti and Dominican Republic, where Spanish colonisation began —the Dominican priest, Pedro de Córdoba, on an expedition from Andalusia to Santo Domingo, denounced the terrible conditions of slavery he witnessed imposed on the Taíno peoples by the Spanish conquerors. He would be the first priest in the New World, that we know of, to speak out on humanitarian principles regarding the indigenous populations.

December 21, 1511 - Fray Antonio de Montesinos preached an Advent message against the abusive enslavement of the indigenous Taíno in the Spanish encomienda system, taking the reading from John's Gospel (1:19b-28) in his Dominican liturgy.

"I am a voice crying in the wilderness" (Jn 1:23) recalled a young man sitting in the audience, Bartolomé de las Casas, who would also become a priest and advocate for the rights of the American Indians; a quote from John the Baptist referencing the prophet Isaiah and interpreted by Fray Montesinos in the context of indigenous dispossession:

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? 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.

It would be three years before de las Casas sympathised with the message against slavery in the new world that he heard from Montesinos. Also in the audience that day was Admiral Diego Columbus, son of the famous explorer, among other conquistadors and powerful Spaniards. They rejected the sermon as heresy, treason and a threat to the hard won spoils of colonisation, complaining to Montesinos' superior, Fray Pedro de Córdoba. Montesinos was forced to clarify his position the next week. Instead of recanting he reiterated his position on colonial violence. When King Ferdinand heard of the two sermons and was incensed by the claims, Montesinos and Córdoba returned to Spain, debated their adversaries, and convinced the regent of the Spanist crimes.

December 27, 1512 - A year after those first sermons in Santo Domingo, theologians and jurists from Burgos and Valladolid gathered under the king's edict to write new laws on the encomienda system and Spanish treatment of the native population. The Leyes de Burgos did not, however, call into question slavery as a fundamental right of the Spanish conquerors, but only qualified its use with some basic humanitarian boundaries (such as housing, food, leave for pregnant women, restrictions of corporal punishment, etc.); boundaries that were rarely applied. The first two laws actually assume the forced transferral of populations to colonial estates, and the burning of their native homelands to discourage returning (in ley uno); so that "[t]he Indians will leave their land voluntarily to come to the encomiendas so that they shall not suffer from being removed by force" (in ley dos).

These laws permitted the continuing enslavement of the the indios and only sought to curb the excesses of the masters who were prone to committing unsightly atrocities. In that sense, the Laws of Burgos and the appeals of Antonio de Montesinos were not particularly "radical", in the sense of "getting to the roots" (radize), but the use of religion in social advocacy and human rights— that is, a kind of teología de la liberación (liberation theology) —was attempted from the earliest days of the church-authorised conquista of the New World.

Neither can Cordoba, Montesinos or other Dominican patronage of the natives be called the root of the liberation theologies that grew up in Latin America in the 1950s and 60s and blossomed in the 1970s and 80s, ministers dealing with the colonial realities four hundred years down the track. Yet many contemporary liberation theologians, especially from Latin America, have pointed to these original voices as pre-echos of liberationist themes in the continent and its church. This is despite the problems that arise between contemporary ethics and the ideas of clergy from the 1500s who believed that a more gentle slavery was sufficient for the populations they had forcefully taken control of. Liberation theologians of the 20th century carefully stressed that sin was not just its worst excesses, or from particularly violent individuals, but rather arises within structural inequalities and the accompanying master-servant mentality that dehumanise. Racism and religion played a part in the oppression, especially of the indigenous, in 16th and 20th century Latin America, but politics and capital also played a driving role in creating subclasses, slaves and the "third world", the reality of most of the continent, including the Caribbean, into the present day. Even the idea of teacher-student, which the early reformers saw as their relationship to the unbelieving Indians was under critique among the worker-priests of the 20th century who understood the relationship had to be among equals.

We can see in hindsight the blind-spots of injustice in the "New Laws" of 1512 that continued slavery. Yet the most heralded of these early humanitarian attempts was made by Bartolomé de las Casas, both in the view of many modern liberation texts that mention him and in the ubiquitous monuments and buildings bearing his name across Latin America. las Casas had heard the Advent sermon of Montesinos in 1511 and would become the famed "protector of the indians". But his alternative to indigenous slavery was disastrous, as were his earliest encounters with the Taínos.

Whereas Montesinos and the Burgos-Valladolid debates would see the Taíno continue to suffer in servitude, Fray Bartolomé's attempt to ease Indian suffering contributed to the beginning of African slavery in the New World.

1542 Nuevas leyes (New Laws) Laws of the Indies

19th Century

1810s

1817 - The Pernambucan Revolt breaks out in the Brazilian Northeast, the country's sugar producing region that had been hit hard by famine in 1816. In the Empire of Brazil (encompassing also modern-day Uruguay), ruled by Pedro I on behalf of his father João VI of Portugal, production mostly benefited the plantation owners, merchants and bureaucrats of the Central and Southern regions of the country. This was particularly the case around the urban centre of Rio de Janeiro, which had become the seat of the Portuguese crown when João VI fled Napoleon's Iberian invasion in 1808 (see, the Peninsular War. Impoverished farmers further impoverished by taxes and Brazilian born military officers outranked by Portuguese nobility collaborated to seize the town of Recife in Pernambuco and then extended to Ceará, Paraíba (by March 15) and to Rio Grande do Norte by April 25, but was only able to survive two months before Recife was surrounded by sea and land by troops of the Portuguese monarch.

As the revolution was being dismantled and the organisers rounded up, the accused included 57 priests from the Northeast:

• Frei Caneca (b. Joaquim da Silva Rabelo), a Carmelite teacher of rhetoric and geometry at the Seminário de Olinda, imprisoned for four years in Salvador da Bahia;
• Padre Miguelinho (b. Miguel Joaquim de Almeida e Castro), master of rhetoric and poetry at the Seminary of Olinda, arrested on May 21 and executed for treason on June 12, and;
• Roma
• Tenório
• Pereira de Albuquerque
• Padre João Ribeiro Pessoa de Melo Montenegro, provisional governor
• Coureiro
• Fr. Antonio de Souto Maior Bezerra de Menezes, Vicar of Goiás
• Friar João da Conceição Loureiro, Guardian of St. Anthony's Convent in Recife
• João Gomes de Lima e
• Francisco de São Pedro, o “Cachico”
• Fr. Luiz José de Albuquerque

Father Ibiapina (c.f. Kim Richardson, p. 127)

The Dean of Olinda, Manuel Vieira de Lemos Sampaio, who was also governor of the diocese, inspired by Rousseau, has published a pastoral, signed by all fitted, holding not be the revolution under way contrary to the Gospel.

20th Century

1970s

November, 1971 - Fidel Castro meets with Catholics in Chile. Frei Betto wrote of this: "I remember the impact that his statements to the priests he had met with in Chile in Novermber 1971 had made on me. I'd read them as a political prisoner in São Paulo, serving a four-year sentence "for reasons of national security." On that occasion, he had said, 'In a revolution, there are moral factors which are decisive. Our countries are too poor to give men great material wealth, but they can give them a sense of equality, of human dignity.' He said that on his protocol visit to Cardinal Silva Henríquez of Santiago, he'd spoken to him 'about our peoples' objective need to free themselves and of the need for Christians and revolutionaries to unite for this purpose.'"

October, 1977 - Castro meets with ministers in Jamaica, recalled by Frei Betto: "The first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba returned to the topic of religion during his visit to Jamaica in October 1977, nearly six years after his trip to Allende's Chile. This time, he was addressing a mainly Protestant audience. He reaffirmed that 'at no time has the Cuban revolution been inspired by antireligious feelings. We based ourselves on the deep conviction that there needn't be any contradiction between a social revolution and the people's religious beliefs. All the people — including those with religious beliefs — participated in our struggle.'"