by Father Richard G. Cipolla
From St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Some years ago, but not that long ago, when I was a priest at St. Mary’s church in Norwalk, Connecticut, the statue of Christopher Columbus was moved from what is known as Heritage Square, a place for acknowledging the contribution of various ethnic groups important in the history of the city of Norwalk.
It was moved for fear the stature would be defaced or destroyed by those who claimed that Columbus was the ultimate source of the destruction of the indigenous people of what was called the New World.
Most historians have never portrayed Columbus as a saint or lauded him for his moral sensibilities. But why he has been important for this country is because he discovered the Americas in three small navigation boats, which feat took a great deal of courage and grit. His later lack of skills in administration and his failure in the historical context of his time to understand the significance of what this discovery meant for Europe and then for the whole Western world must be acknowledged.
But to hold him responsible for the introduction of slavery in the New World flies in the face of the fact that slavery was already practiced in civilizations and tribes long before Europeans came to their shores, not to mention the practices of cannibalism and human sacrifice. To hold him responsible for wiping out whole populations because of disease from Europe cannot withstand the test of rational discourse. One thought the idea of the Noble Savage died with Rousseau, even if the latter did not coin that phrase.
Cristoforo Colombo was a flawed man, so much a man of his time, with suppositions and ways of thinking that were of no help in the totally unique situation in which he found himself. But I would venture to say that much of the ongoing antipathy if not downright hatred of Columbus that continues to be in vogue has its roots in that great American non-virtue of anti-Catholicism.
Columbus planted the flag of Catholicism firmly on the soil of the New World and believed, quite rightly, that the most important thing he was bringing to the indigenous peoples of the New World was the truth of the Catholic faith, that Jesus Christ came to save all peoples of the world. And there is one of the sources of the hysterical anti-Columbus Day crowd that is still the current darling of the press and the militantly leftist academic crowd who people our elite universities.
Columbus has always been a hero for Catholics, especially for Italian-Americans. That lies at the basis for the formation of the Knights of Columbus which was not only to put into practice charity as understood by followers of Jesus Christ but also to allow Catholics to experience that fraternity and sense of belonging that Masonry and the WASP establishment organizations like the Elks and Rotary offered, which latter most often excluded Catholics.
A Catholic always understands that man is deeply flawed, and that moral perfection is unattainable in this fallen world. But a Catholic also understands, through the lives of the Saints of the Church, the meaning of a hero, especially heroes whose moral imperfections are often scoured out only by the fires of suffering and martyrdom.
The Catholic understands the action of grace in the world as something that can never be pigeonholed or graphed as a straight line or put into a rationalistic or, in the case of the current crowd, illogical and hateful box.
The continuing agitation to cancel Columbus Day by those driven by a hatred of the Catholic faith is a dangerous form of ideological blindness that is destructive in its determination to rewrite not only human history but to claim to know the motives of the hearts of men and women of a radically different time in the history of the world. The question is who is next to fall to these Taliban- like destroyers of good but flawed men and women. George Washington? Thomas Jefferson? Abraham Lincoln? Martin Luther King?
