Joe Hargrave has a fantastic little article, with no apologies, on Christopher Columbus, which is posted on the American Catholic website. Catholic historians used to rave about Columbus. They told what a brave sailor and explorer he was, and, above all, that he was a devout Catholic and third order Franciscan. He put the Faith wholeheartedly alongside his quest for a western sea route to the East Indies. The full name of his ship was Holy Mary of the Immaculate Conception. No discovery, be it gold, silver or precious spices, was more important to him, as the American Catholic author points out, than bringing the gospel to the ignorant natives whom he would encounter. If anyone claims the contrary, he is either an anti-Catholic bigot, or just plain ignorant of the genuine historical facts and testimonies, or both. I am not speaking of those conquistadors and explorers who followed after Columbus in South America, or even of his own brothers, who lacked somewhat his nobility and justice. I speak of the great Christopher Columbus himself, the man after who the Americas ought to have been named, were it not for an accident of history.
Our website has a riveting account of the Columbus adventure from a past issue of From the Housetops here. My own favorite Columbus story is here and a complementary article on Our Lady of the Pillar here.
Here’s the lede from Joe Hargrave’s article: Few days provide so great an occasion for an orgy of self-hatred (among the white elites) and faux moral outrage as Columbus Day. But long before communists, socialists, and their fellow-travelers seized control of our educational institutions and rewrote the history of the Western civilization – a revision which is force-fed to most students in our public reeducation centers – Columbus was celebrated as a great explorer and a daring adventurer who undertook great hardships to undergo the voyage that would lead to the discovery of the New World. Pope Leo XIII, on the 400th anniversary (1892) of that famous voyage, wrote of Columbus in Quarto Abeunte Saeculo: Read the rest of Hargrave’s tribute here.
