Garcés, Julian (1851?-1542)

Cofounder of the church in Mexico. Born in Aragón, Spain, of a noble family, Garcés studied at the Sorbonne and then entered the Dominicans. He served for a while as a court chaplain and in 1527 Charles V named him first bishop of Tlaxcala, Mexico. En route to his new diocese Garcés conferred with fellow Dominicans Antonio de Montesinos and Bartolomé de Las Casas in Santo Domingo. In Mexico he supported the work of Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop of Mexico City and cofounder (with Garcés) of the church in Mexico. Like Zumárraga, Garcés also defended the Indians against the abuses of fellow Spaniards. He wrote a letter in 1533 to Pope Paul III in which he took up the cause of Indians and praised their human qualities. This letter influenced the Pope’s bull, Sublimis Deus (1537), in which the pontiff solemnly defended the humanity of the Indians and rejected all arguments in favor of enslaving them. Shortly after Garcés’s death the seat of his diocese was moved to modern-day Puebla.

Jeffrey Klaiber, SJ, “Garcés, Julián,” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 235.

This article is reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, Macmillan Reference USA, copyright © 1998. Gerald H. Anderson, by permission of Macmillan Reference USA, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

Bibliography

Mariano Cuevas. Historia de la Iglesia de México, vol. 1. Mexico: Editorial Patria, 1921-1928.

Enrique Dussel. El Episcopado Latinoamericano y la Liberación de los Pobres, 1504-1620. México: Centro de Reflexión Teológica, 1979.

Antoine Touron, Sketches of Illustrious Dominicans: St. Louis Bertrand, Julián Garcés, Jerome de Loaysa, tr. from the French. Boston: T. B. Noonan, 1884.