Question

Which priest wanted to convert native Americans to Christianity

Answer 1

Answer:  Bartolomé de Las Casas

Detail:

Bartolomé de Las Casas was a missionary from the Dominican order of friars.  He was also a historian who wrote the 3-volume work, A History of the Indies, spanning the history of the "Indies" region in the New World from Christopher Columbus' arrival in 1492 to about 1520.    Not only was Las Casas eager and zealous about teaching Christianity to the natives in the New World.  He was also a strongly vocal critic of the way Spanish conquistadors were abusing and enslaving Native Americans.  In his 1542 work, A Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies, Las Casas wrote with horror concerning what he saw happening to the natives in the Indies:  "Into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days. And Spaniards have behaved in no other way during the past forty years, down to the present time, for they are still acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before."

Answer 2

Native Americans and Christianity have a history that dates to the the arrival of the first European explorers. This history is marked by genocide, cultural destruction, domination and resistance