Pastorale officium

Pastorale officium is an apostolic brief issued by Pope Paul III, May 29, 1537, to Cardinal Juan Pardo de Tavera which declares that anyone who enslaved or despoiled indigenous Americans would be automatically excommunicated.

The harsh threat of punishment (Latae sententiae) contained in Pastorale officium made the conquistadors complain to the Spanish king and Emperor. Charles V went on to argue that the letter was injurious to the Imperial right of colonization and harmful to the peace of the Indies. The urging of Charles V to revoke the briefs and bulls of 1537 exemplifies the tension of the concern for evangelisation as manifested in the teachings of 1537 and the pressure to honor the system of royal patronage. The weakened position of the pope and the memory of the Sack of Rome (1527) a decade earlier by imperial troops made the ecclesiastical authorities hesitant in engaging in any possible confrontation with the Emperor. Under mounting pressure Pope Paul III succumbed and removed the ecclesiastical censures in the letter titled Non Indecens Videtur.

The annulling of the ecclesiastical letter was not a denial of the doctrinal teaching of the spiritual equivalence of all human beings. The annulment gave rise to the subsequent papal encyclical Sublimis Deus promulgated by Pope Paul III on June 2, 1537. "A Prophetic Challenge to the Church:The Last Word of Bartolomé de las Casas", Luis N. Rivera-Pagán, Inaugural lecture as Henry Winters Luce Professor in Ecumenics and Mission, delivered on April 9, 2003, at Princeton Theological Seminary fn. 45: "Helen Rand Parish reproduces the Latin text of the bull and the brief, with a Spanish translation, in Las Casas en México (México, D. F. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1992), 303–305, 310-312. There are English versions of both documents in Bartolomé de las Casas, The Only Way, edited by Helen Rand Parish and translated by Francis Patrick Sullivan, S. J. (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 114–115, 156–157 and in Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, translated     by Stafford Poole, C. M. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,      1992), 100–103. In his anthology of ecclesiastical normative documents      regarding the Spanish empire, Francisco Javier Hernáez reproduces Pastorale officium, but not Sublimis Deus, though he includes Veritas ipsa, a variant of Sublimis Deus. He blames Las Casas for the 'exaggerated news' regarding the mistreatment of the Native Americans as the source for the Pope's concern and reproduces some of the most denigrating testimony against the Native Americans ever expressed in the sixteenth century. Francisco Javier Hernáez, Colección de bulas, breves y otros documentos relativos a la iglesia de América y Filipinas (1879) (Vaduz: Klaus Reprint, 1964), Vol. I, 101–104. Pastorale officium and Veritas ipsa, but not Sublimis Deus, are included in America Pontificia. Primi saeculi evangelizationis, 1493–1592 documenta Pontificia ex registris et minutis praesertim in archivo secreto Vaticano existentibus, collegit et edidit Josef Metzler (Città del Vaticano: Librería Editrice Vaticana, 1991), Vol. I, 359–361, 364-366. For a detailed analysis of these Papal documents, see Alberto de la Hera, 'El derecho de los indios a la libertad y a la fe: la bula Sublimis Deus y los problemas indianos que la motivaron', Anuario de historia del     derecho español, Vol. 26, 1956, 89-182. Parish has given a closer look to the origin of these documents, including another 1537 Papal bull, Altitudo divini consilii, regarding the performance of some sacraments and liturgical ceremonies in the New World (Las Casas en México, 15–28, 82-90)." Thus the Pastorale officium has been seen as a companion document for the encyclical Sublimis Deus.

Stogre notes that Sublimus Dei is not present in Denzinger compendium of theological-historical source texts.