By SHAUN KENNEY
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sail’d the ocean blue. I remember learning such nursery rhymes in Catholic school when I was a child, alongside poems such as the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Back then, the American canon was not only taught, but it had a certain cadence to it. Labor Day was the official kickoff for school in Virginia, and once fall began to arrive we were treated to what we called an Indian Summer — a now offensive term deemed as such by a few self-appointed apparatchiks and a bevy of sympathetic media outlets short on ideas and long on opinions.
Yet I digress. For us Virginians, history began with stories of Jamestown and John Smith as he mapped the four great rivers of the Tidewater. Pocahontas — whose real name was Matoaka — saved John Smith’s life by legend and eventually married the Virginia tobacco farmer John Rolfe, which gives every First Family of Virginia a thimbleful of that most coveted of all Virginia first families: royalty.
By October, we were already past the founding of Virginia and moving on into the founding of America, with stories of the War for Independence mixed into stories of the first Thanksgiving (at Bermuda Hundred in Virginia, certainly not Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts) and the Pilgrims struggling against the wilderness before the Puritans arrived with their cargo of witch burners.
All of this brackets the one major secular holiday that Catholics were able to impose on the national calendar, that being Columbus Day in honor of that great Italian converso who discovered the Americas and began the long process of converting the mainland to the glory of God and saving them from a thousand years of superstition and human sacrifice.
Columbus And The
American Founding
Of course, it would be thanks to the Knights of Columbus who had the moral fortitude and backbone to defend Fr. McGivney’s vision — an Irish priest who saw the plight of hundreds of thousands of Italian and Slavic immigrants to these shores only to endure the parochial abuse of the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and their allies in the Democratic Party during the turn of the twentieth century.
McGivney knew that Catholics in America had a great deal of which to be proud. During a time when temporal activity of Catholics was not a dirty thing, Catholics had built their own parishes, schools, and hospitals. Catholics had served faithfully in public office despite Protestant aversions that Catholics were inimically hostile to the American experiment (of course, we were hostile to the Masonic influences, but that’s another story).
America was just as much a Catholic country as it was a Protestant one, so went the feeling. Not in a sense of dominance, but in the sense that Catholics too could share in the American founding and the American narrative. This grand experiment in human freedom was predicated not on the soil, nor on that Puritanical shining city on a hill, but rather on the grand idea that one half of humanity was not born booted and spurred to ride the other half of humanity.
Christopher Columbus in many ways broke the superstitions of the New World in the same manner that the Founding Fathers broke the superstitions of the Old World. McGivney knew this and understood the power of a Columbus Day properly celebrated.
Columbus Vindicated
Let’s begin with the single greatest contribution Columbus delivered to the New World, that being the conversion of two continents to the Catholic faith.
Historians will remark upon how the European arrival killed 50 million indigenous peoples through smallpox and other diseases. A seventh-grade course in biology will point to smallpox as a pathogen not particularly motivated by ideology. Such a charge is ludicrous.
In fact, what Columbus should be praised for? Ending the Aztec religion, which was so charged with superstition and blood sacrifice that Planned Parenthood might even pause at their barbarity (might). So deeply felt was this belief by the Aztecs in blood sacrifice to propitiate the god of war that in 1487, some 20,000 souls perished at the command of the Aztec emperor.
Second, the charge that Columbus “brought” slavery with him to the New World is preposterous for this one reason alone: It was waiting for him when he got here.
Third, one must remember that Columbus had his enemies. Those men who took over the governance of the Spanish colonies in the New World were very quick to invent and slander Columbus’ previous fiefdom over the newly discovered West Indies. Did he do so imperfectly? As a man of his times, most likely, but it is difficult to judge (if not the epitome of arrogance) from 500 years in the future and play the armchair diplomat.
This leads to a final point about the substitution of Columbus Day for the politically correct Indigenous People’s Day. Suffice to say, once again we are presented with the arrogance and stupidity of the American leftists who assume that these natives existed in some sort of pre-civilized utopia untouched by the cruelty of antibiotics, capitalism, and industry. Which peoples are we supposed to honor, precisely? The Aztecs who routinely killed thousands to feed their gods? The Incas who brutally subjugated and killed two other empires before the Spanish followed suit? The Kalinago people who roasted human flesh and treated babies and fetuses as delicacies?
History As Perspective
This leads to a very final point about Columbus and English history, and that is the story of the Black Legend.
The story of the Black Legend isn’t terribly complex. Many years ago, a king wanted to change his wife and did. Eventually his daughter — Queen Elizabeth I of England — rose to the throne, killed the true heir, and the Spanish Armada was defeated by the “Protestant Wind” and a few dozen fire ships led by Sir Walter Raleigh.
During this time, the Spanish government — despite massive hauls of gold and silver from the New World — declared insolvency four times. Thus the English propagandists went to work, decrying the Spanish qua Catholic rape of the New World and substituting their example for a more benign, Protestant-led colonization of the New World in North America.
Thus Columbus — thanks to the work of his early detractors — became a devil and all the Spanish that followed him became cruel taskmasters. We might remember such films as The Sea Dogs and other pirate adventures where the swashbuckling English privateer squares off against the evil Captain Mendoza and his poorly led but wealthy galleons of ill-gotten loot.
The point remains that — despite the “scholarship” that seems to have aggregated in the early 1990s — that the Black Legend remains a vicious libel against the characters of the men who brought Catholicism to these shores — and that libel sticks to every Catholic who stepped foot on the shores attempting to make a living for themselves in the Land of the Free.
So when we hear attacks on Columbus, it’s not really Columbus that these critics are disparaging, but rather Christendom — and Catholicism directly. Repeating the propaganda of the Black Legend isn’t a defense of a single soul on behalf of an oppressed people, but rather a weapon in the hands of slanderers in order to suppress truth.
Challenge them on it, and encourage your Knights of Columbus councils to state definitively how they intend to celebrate and defend Christopher Columbus next year.
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First Teachers warmly encourages readers to submit their thoughts, views, opinions, and insights to the author directly either via e-mail or by mail. Please send any correspondence to Shaun Kenney c/o First Teachers, 5289 Venable Road, Kents Store, VA 23084 or by e-mail to kenneys@cua.edu.
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