By Robert Royal
Today is Columbus Day, or —among those of alternative orientation— Indigenous Peoples’ Day; both displaced, in any case, as are now the major Catholic holidays, to another date, so that people have long weekends, or are not “inconveniently affected,” or something like that. In any case, it is now a day redefined in such confusing terms that it is no longer clear what we celebrate or deplore, in this deafening noise and vibrant confusion that we still (more or less) believe to call the Christian twenty-first century.
So let’s seek a bit of clarity.
For most of the history after his voyages, Columbus’s reputation was firm and recognized. It began to change in the nineteenth century, in the United States, of all places. Washington Irving conceived the idea that Columbus must have been Protestant and progressive —for he opposed the counsel of learned theologians who told him (rightly) that the distance from Spain to China was greater than he claimed—. But in an expanding and confident America, The Admiral became, in Irving’s imagination, a precursor of American initiative and vision.
Medieval Europe, contrary to another myth about Columbus, knew that the world was spherical (see Dante), not flat —what the historian Jeffrey Burton Russell rightly ridiculed as “the pizza theory”—. Columbus did not “prove that the Earth was round”, and no one thought that until ignorance about Christian antiquity became widespread.
However, the nineteenth-century American progressives had other plans for the Catholic Genoese navigator. Andrew Dickson White, founder and president of Cornell University, recruited him for the Darwinist cause —for reasons similar to Irving’s—, as a rebel who broke with religious obscurantism to “follow the science.”
Other appropriations and distortions followed.
The Knights of Columbus, mostly Irish, around the same time, saw in the explorer a model of an American Catholic. And the growing number of Italian immigrants —just look at Columbus Circle in Central Park— also took him as a symbol.
In recent decades, of course, all that has become material for accusation. A significant part of the American elites has chosen to repudiate their own history, ironically based on selectively Christian principles that Columbus helped bring to America.
Today he is accused of having brought all the evils that supposedly afflict the continent since 1492: slavery, genocide, racism, inequality, patriarchy, rape, torture, war, environmental degradation, diseases, etc.
Contrary voices have asked (including this author): if we are going to attribute all those evils to him, doesn’t he also deserve credit for the many goods that also followed in these lands?
Moreover, he didn’t have to bring those evils, because they already existed among the native peoples whom we also “remember” today. Few stop to look at the indigenous cultures and practices, which also included colonialism, imperialism, territorial conquest, warrior ethos, human sacrifice and —dare we say it before our “LGBT-ized” elites— an overwhelmingly binary view of human sexuality.
Before the great reversal of judgment on Columbus, in 1892, Pope Leo XIII praised him in the encyclical Quarto abeunte saeculo:
«The feat is in itself the highest and grandest that any age has seen performed by man; and he who accomplished it, by the greatness of his mind and heart, may be compared with few in the history of humanity.»
And he added that Columbus brought Christianity to «an immense multitude, wrapped in miserable darkness, given over to perverse rites and the superstitious worship of vain gods».
Amid all these confusions, the man himself has been lost. The Dominican missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, the famous —and almost fanatical— “defender of the Indians,” noted the “sweetness and benignity” of the admiral’s character. And although he criticized some of his actions, he writes: «Truly I would not dare to blame the admiral’s intentions, because I knew him well and know that his intentions were good.» Las Casas attributed his defects to ignorance of how to handle an unprecedented situation.
His religious faith, for example, was authentic. Columbus believed deeply that the Gospel must be preached to all nations before Christ’s return, and left money in his will for a crusade intended to recover the Holy Land.
Sincere Christian. Great navigator. Poor governor. When he was arrested and returned in chains to Spain during his third voyage, it was for his harshness toward both the natives and the Spaniards. He is not an unknown type: an affable man who overdoes it when things get tough.
And also a keen observer. He noted subtle differences between the Caribbean tribes. And with rudimentary technologies, he made surprising discoveries, in addition to the new lands. The historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto sums it up thus:
«His deciphering of the Atlantic wind system; his discovery of magnetic variation in the western hemisphere; his contributions to the cartography of the Atlantic and the New World; his epic traversal of the Caribbean; his demonstration of the continental character of parts of South and Central America; his intuition about the imperfect sphericity of the globe [the Earth bulges in the Atlantic, near Brazil]; his astonishing intuitive skill in navigation. Any one of these achievements would suffice to grant enduring fame to an explorer; together they constitute an unmatched record of feats.»
We must add: the world as we know it began in the fifteenth century. Not the world in the sense of human life or civilizations, which had existed for millennia, but the world as a concrete reality, in which all parts of the globe came into contact with each other and began to recognize themselves as part of a single human race —a process still underway—.
And it all came about through a small expedition of a few men and ships, led by Columbus, the real one, not the mythical, driven by a mixture of personal ambition, search for wealth, and religious fervor, who prayed the Salve Regina every night at sea, and who united the Old and New Worlds into one great humanity.
A Spanish chronicler, a few decades after 1492, called it “the greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it)”.
So, happy Columbus Day.
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West y A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.