Roberto de Mattei
Corrispondenza Romana
June 17, 2020 [Repost]
“Columbus noster est!”
“Christopher Columbus is ours!” These words of Leo XIII, in his encyclical Quarto Abeunte Saeculo, issued July 16, 1892, on the IV Centenary of the
discovery of America, are like a distant echo to us, at a time when
iconoclastic fury in the United States of America is destroying the figure of
the Italian navigator.
Leo
XIII states in this encyclical that Christopher Columbus’s venture: «is in itself the
highest and grandest which any age has ever seen accomplished by man; and he
who achieved it, for the greatness of his mind and heart, can be compared to
but few in the history of humanity. By his toil another world emerged from the
unsearched bosom of the ocean: hundreds of thousands of mortals have, from a
state of blindness, been raised to the common level of the human race, reclaimed
from savagery to gentleness and humanity; and, greatest of all, by the
acquisition of those blessings of which Jesus Christ is the author, they have
been recalled from destruction to eternal life. (…) For Columbus is ours; since if a little consideration be given to
the particular reason of his design in exploring the mare tenebrosum,
and also the manner in which he endeavored to execute the design, it is
indubitable that the Catholic faith was the strongest motive for the inception
and prosecution of the design; so that for this reason also the whole human
race owes not a little to the Church. (…)
This view and aim is known to have possessed his mind
above all; namely, to open a way for the Gospel over new lands and seas. (…)
Columbus certainly had joined to the study of nature the study of religion, and
had trained his mind on the teachings that well up from the most intimate
depths of the Catholic faith. For this reason, when he learned from the lessons
of astronomy and the record of the ancients, that there were great tracts of
land lying towards the West, beyond the limits of the known world, lands
hitherto explored by no man, he saw in spirit a mighty multitude, cloaked in
miserable darkness, given over to evil rites, and the superstitious worship of vain
gods. Miserable it is to live in a barbarous state and with savage manners: but
more miserable to lack the knowledge of that which is highest, and to dwell in
ignorance of the one true God. Considering these things, therefore, in his
mind, he sought first of all to extend the Christian name and the benefits of
Christian charity to the West, as is abundantly proved by the history of the
whole undertaking”».
Hence, Christopher
Columbus belongs to the Church, and any affront to him is directed at the
Church, which has the duty to defend his memory. This spirit inspired Count Antoine-François-Félix Roselly de Lorgues (1805-1898)
who dedicated his life to promoting the cause for Christopher Columbus’s
canonization. Encouraged by Pius IX, in 1856, in Paris, Roselly de Lorgues published a two-volume work entitled: Cristophe Colomb. Histoire de sa vie et de
ses voyages; d’après des documents
authentiques tirés d’Espagne et d’Italie, which achieved world-wide success.
In this work, Roselly de Lorgues, for the first time, offers his thesis for the
canonization of the “Admiral of the Ocean”. He writes in a subsequent work: “…he was the
ambassador of God to unknown nations that the ancient world were unaware of” and “ the natural legate of the Holy See in
those new regions”. (Della vita di Cristoforo Colombo e delle
ragioni per chiederne la beatificazione, tr. it., per Ranieri Guasti, Prato
1876, p. 83)
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