The Requirement, or "El Requerimiento" in the Castilian or "Spanish" language, and which I will call the "Viveran Requirement," after its author, is a declaration that was draw up by the jurist John Lopes of Vivero, later ennobled as De Palacios Rubios, affirming the Kingdom of Castile's rights to assume sovereignty and governance over the territories and peoples of the New World, preferably by peaceful means, but failing that, by war.
The Requirement was read to Native Americans to inform them of Spain's rights to conquest. The Spaniards thus considered those who resisted as defying God's plan, in accordance with Catholic theology.
In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull "Dum Diversas." It granted King Afonso V of Portugal the right to reduce war-conquered "Saracens, pagans and any other unbelievers" to hereditary slavery.
In 1455, the papal bull Romanus Pontifex approved Portugal's claims to lands discovered along the coast of West Africa.
On May 4, 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull known as Inter Caetera that provided Portugal and Spain the religious backing to expand their territories in Africa and the Americas for the sake of spreading Christianity. The papal bull said that land not inhabited by Christians could be claimed, while "barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself."
In 1506, Pope Julius II ratified the Treaty of Tordesillas between the Portuguese and the Spanish by issuing the bull "Ea quae pro bono pacis" and turning the "Tordesillas Line" into a "papal line of demarcation" between the Portuguese and Spanish fiefs.
The Barthomists, followers of the heresies of Bartholomew de las Casas, mainly Dominican friars at Santo Domingo in 1510, along with other priests, rightly objected to the inhumane treatment of the Native Americans, but then wandered into heresy by pretending that Spain had no legal rights in the Americas, denouncing Spainish conquests in the Americas as unjust and illegal in an audience with the King of Spain and to the subsequent royal commission which the King appointed, which oversaw the "Valladolid Debate."
Moved by Bartholomew de las Casas and others, in 1550 the King of Spain Charles I ordered further military expansion to cease until the issue was investigated. The King assembled a Junta (Committee or Commission) of eminent doctors and theologians to hear both sides and to issue a ruling on the controversy. Bartholomew de las Casas represented one side of the debate. Representing the other side was Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a humanist, who argued that the mass human sacrifices of thousands of innocents, cannibalism, and other such "crimes against nature" were unacceptable and should be suppressed by any means possible, including war.
Gines de Sepulveda, basing his arguments largely on Aristotle and the Humanist tradition, asserted that some at least of Native Americans were subject to enslavement due to their inability to govern themselves, and could be subdued by war if necessary. He put forward many of the arguments from his Latin dialogue "Democrates alter sive de justi belli causis," to assert that the barbaric traditions of certain Native Americans justified waging war against them. Civilized peoples, according to him, were obliged to urgently punish such vicious practices as idolatry, sodomy, and cannibalism. Wars had to be waged "in order to uproot crimes that offend nature." He articulated four main justifications for just war against certain Native Americans. First, their natural condition deemed them unable to rule themselves, and it was the responsibility of the Spaniards to act as masters. Second, Spaniards were entitled to prevent cannibalism as a crime against nature. Third, the same went for human sacrifice. Fourth, it was important to convert Indians to Christianity.
The arguments made by the Humanist Gines de Sepulveda are interesting, but Humanism was not the basis of the Papal Claims over all the Earth, as the legitimate Supreme Ruler ("Lord of the World"), the Catholic Popes being constituted "Vicars of Christ," Viceroys of Christ the King over all creation, and the Papacy's enfeoffment of the Kings of Castile and Portugal with rights to discover, conquer and Christianize lands in the Indies, the Americas, Africa, etc.
Comparing the situation in the Old World and New World: In Spain's wars against the Mahomettans, the Dissident clerics or Bartholomists, after Bartholomew de las Casas, claimed that Muslims had knowledge of Christ and rejected Him, so that waging a Crusade against them as Infidels was legitimate; in contrast, in Spain's wars against the Native Americans, wars against those who had never come into contact with Christianity were illegitimate.
However, this Bartholomist premise was & is false: 1. Dum Diversas and other Catholic and Papal enactments and the Portuguese and Spanish Conquests of the New World, were not predicated upon the Iberian Reconquests against Mahomettan Heresy, but were and are predicated upon the Holy Bible, particularly, chapter 1 of the Epistle to the Romans. 2. The Reconquest of Iberia was not an Iberian "Nationalist" endeavor to reclaim Visigothic Iberia from the Mahomettan intruders, but it was an endeavor of all Catholic Christians to push back the encroachments of the Mahomettan Heresy, and also, not only Mahomettans, but all other unbelievers, from all the Earth, as much from Egypt and Arabia and from the Indies, etc. as from the Holy Land and Iberia, etc.
The Requirement was drawn up specifically to counter the Bartholomist Heresy, and to restate the Catholic theological justification for war against, and conquest of, the local states, statelets, city-states, chiefdoms and other Native American communities, on the ground of their refusing the legitimate authority of the Kings of Spain and Portugal as enfeoffed and granted by the Pope.
Bartholomew de las Casas Infamously stated that he did not know "whether to laugh or to cry," at the performances of the Requirement: Critics, largely the Bartholomists, objected that the Requirement was read or proclaimed to people who did not comprehend the Castilian language in which it was written and read out, and therefore could not correctly respond to it, either favorably or otherwise.
This "Bartholomist" understanding is false, based on a false premise: The readings and proclamations of the Requirement were mere dramatizations, mere formalities, and while ostensibly addressed to the Native Americans, they were, in actual fact, addressed to the Spaniards themselves, as a Dramatic Presentation of Divine Law justifying the Conquests and subjugations of the Native Americans.
As stated before, the Requirement is founded principally (but not exclusively) on Divine Law, on the theology enunciated by Chapter 1 of the Epistle to the Romans, which affirms that God has placed witnesses to Himself in all His creation, so that no one has an excuse to turn to error and to falsehoods, to the grotesque errors of heresy, infidelity and paganisms.
The Requirement was also corollarily premised upon natural law, embodied in the doctrine of "just wars," which justified (and continues to justify) war, not only against the Mahomettan Infidels, but also the (then) pagan Wends, Finns and Balts, the Albigensian, Hussite, etc Heretics, and also against fellow Catholic Christian rebels or who were otherwise in collective wrong, e.g., the Drenther Crusade, the Stedinger Crusade, the Bosnian Crusade, etc.
The Requirement is also premised on Politics: Every polity or state or state like structure, exists solely and purely to protect and to preserve morality and to prevent, suppress and punish immorality. No state ever existed or exists for any other reason (firms of government, kings and parliaments, are merely drama, pageants, not adding or subtracting, in themselves, from the purpose of a state: Morality).
As the Biblical Message, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, constitutes the only true Morality, it demands exclusive submission, not only "merely interiorly," but also exteriorly, not only of individuals, also of communities, peoples, cultures, nations, states, polities.
The primary purpose of the Requirement was not to communicate an idea or ideas or notions to the ostensible audience of Native Americans, it was to communicate ideas and notions to Spaniards themselves, to help overcome scruples and moral hesitancies in the Conquest of the New World.
That is, as the Spaniards were themselves not unthinking brutes and savages, but deeply imbued with moral concepts, and as they were being attacked and subverted in the works of the Conquests of the New World, by such as the Bartholomist Heretics, the Requirement sought to reiterate the justifications for the Spanish presence in the New World, and for Spain's demands of the Native Americans to submit to it, as being not immoral and as unjust impositions, but as being deeply moral and just impositions upon the Native Americans.
The Requirement is an integral part of Catholic Theology and remains in place, valid, and binding. It is irrevocable. It was originally an internal document of the Spanish Empire.
With the overthrow of Greater Spain by Traitors, Heretics and Freemasons, a subsect of the Pharisees, and servants of the Jews and of the Protestant Heretics such as Simon Bolivar, Bernardo OHiggins, Hidalgo, Morelos, Iturbide, Joseph St Martin, Peter Bragança, Aguinaldo, etc. and with the replacement of the Legitimate Kings of Spain (Carlism) by intruders, pretenders, and usurpers, and, finally, due to the Great Modernist Apostasy which began October 1958, due to which all thrones were rendered vacant, as per the Council of Verona's Decree "Ad Abolendam," which has also been incorporated as Canon # 3 of the Lateran IV Ecumenical Council, thus giving it a higher legal standing, and as legislated by, among other laws, Dum Diversas, Inter Cetera, Unam Sanctam, Cum Ex Apostolatus Officio, Regnans In Excelsis, and a huge body of other Catholic Ecclesiastical and Civil legislations, (e.g., the Theodosian Decrees), which are also restatements of Divine Law, the "El Requerimiento" is now a Universal Law, not merely restricted to Greater Spain.
The behavior of the King of Castile (King of Spain) in the face of the Bartholomists can be contrasted to the behavior of the Protestant "Courts." Was there even one instance where any of these Protestant "Courts" allowed a free debate, or even allowed, countenanced, the free expression of dissident ideas, as did the King of Spain?
The Protestant pretension of a "Right by Discovery," further modified to a "Right by possession," is a perversion of the Catholic theological position by which the Popes enfeoffed the Kings of Spain and Portugal with lands in the Indies, the Americas, Africa, etc. It is, all said and done, mere the "Right of might," shorn of all lies, lip service, pretensions.
Thomas Jefferson, and John Marshall, claimed this "Right of Discovery," to dehumanize Native Americans, butcher them en masse, and to steal their lands.
All the gloss that John Marshall put on the pretended "Right of Discovery," is pure fakery, Humbug, that and nothing more.
The "Requirement" remains a valid and binding legislation. All actions, such as the Balkanizations of Greater Spain and Greater Portugal, and the encroachments by Protestant England and Gringostan upon New Spain, Greater Florida, Luisiana, etc., are illegal, null and void. These lands are under illegal occupation and are subject to reclamation. All rights emanating from the illegal acts of secessions, occupations, etc. are null and void. All who have in any way unjustly benefited from these robberies are liable under Proverbs, Chapter 6, verses 30-31, to make good in full.
Lucio Joao Mascarenhas, Sept. 12, 2022
https://www.vaticaninexile.com
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