Denver, Colo., Oct 12, 2020 / 11:00 am (CNA).-
The historical legacy of Christopher Columbus is tarred by bad history in the quest to change Columbus Day, according to a researcher who has focused on Columbus’ religious motives for exploration.
“They’re blaming Columbus for the things he didn’t do. It was mostly the people who came after, the settlers,” Prof. Carol Delaney told CNA in 2017. “I just think he’s been terribly maligned.”
“I think a lot of people don’t know anything much, really about Columbus,” said Delaney, an anthropology professor emerita at Stanford University and the author of the 2011 book “Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem.”
She said Columbus initially had a favorable impression of many of the Native Americans he met and instructed the men under his command not to abuse them but to trade with them. At one point Columbus hung some of his own men who had committed crimes against the Indians.
“When I read his own writings and the documents of those who knew him, he seemed to be very much on the side of the Indians,” Delaney said, noting that Columbus adopted the son of a Native American leader he had befriended.
Christopher Columbus has been in the news in recent months, as a Wisconsin high school named for Columbus faced pressure to change its name, a Massachusetts city faced pressure to remove a statute of the explorer, and statues of Columber were temporarily removed in July from Chicago parks.
The EWTN network will air this week a documentary that aims to respond to critics of the explorer.
Some critics of Columbus note the writings of Bartolome de las Casas, a Spanish Dominican friar born in 1484 who became the first Bishop of Chiapas, Mexico and advocated for indigenous Americans. He wrote strong polemics against Spanish abuses.
Bishop De las Casas depicted the Spaniards as “acting like ravening beasts, killing, terrorizing, afflicting, torturing, and destroying the native peoples, doing all this with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty, never seen or heard of before.” De las Casas claimed that the native population of Hispaniola was reduced to 200 people from 3 million.
He said the Spanish killed “such an infinite number of souls” due to lust for gold caused by “their insatiable greed and ambition.” He charged that the Spanish attacked towns and did not spare children, the elderly or pregnant women. He said they stabbed and dismembered them “as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house” and made bets on how efficiently they could kill.
Delaney, however, emphasized that the acts of other colonists need to be distinguished from those of Columbus.
Bishop De las Casas’ own view on Columbus is more complex, she said. Other scholars have noted that Las Casas admired Columbus and said he and Spain had a providential role in “opening the doors of the Ocean Sea.” The bishop thought Columbus was treated unjustly by the Spanish monarchs after he was accused of mismanagement.
De las Casas himself is not above criticism. He owned indigenous people as slaves before changing his mind on their mistreatment. At one point he suggested to the Pope that black Africans be enslaved as an alternative to enslaving Native Americans.
In 2017, the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternity founded in 1882, which takes its name from the explorer who brought Christianity to the New World, noted that “scholars have long shown that de las Casas was prone to hyperbole and exaggeration, and the bill does not take into account recent scholarship on de las Casas or Columbus.”
“The legacy and accomplishments of Christopher Columbus deserve to be celebrated. He was a man ahead of his time and a fearless explorer and brilliant navigator whose daring discovery changed the course of history,” the group continued. “Columbus has frequently been falsely blamed for the actions of those who came after him and is the victim of horrific slanders concerning his conduct.”
Columbus Day, observed Oct. 11 as a federal holiday, has been a point of controversy among Columbus critics in recent years, and some states and cities have declared the day Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Columbus Day drew particular controversy in Colorado on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World. Organizers of Denver’s 1992 Columbus Day parade canceled it at the last minute due to threats from radical activists with the American Indian Movement.
Columbus has been a major figure for Catholics in America, especially Italian-Americans, who saw his pioneering voyage from Europe as a way of validating their presence in a sometimes hostile majority-Protestant country. The Knights of Columbus, the largest Catholic fraternal organization in the world, took his name, his voyage and his faith as an inspiration.
At one point in the nineteenth century there were even proposals to push for the voyager’s canonization.
In 1892, the quadricennial of Columbus’ first voyage, Leo XIII authored an encyclical that reflected on Columbus’ desire to spread Catholic Christianity. The pope stressed how Columbus’ Catholic faith motivated his voyage and supported him amid his setbacks.
Delaney acknowledged that some Native Americans were sent to Spain as slaves or conscripted into hard labor at the time Columbus had responsibility for the region, but she attributed this mistreatment to his substitutes acting in his absence.
She thinks Columbus Day should be continued, even if the indigenous peoples of America also deserve recognition.
For Delaney, Columbus’ handling of the killings of his crew showed restraint. After his ship the Santa Maria ran aground on his first voyage, he left 39 men on a Caribbean island with firm orders not to go marauding, not to kidnap or rape women, and always trade for food and gold.
“When they returned on the second voyage, they found all of the settlers had been killed,” she said. The priest on that voyage wanted to attack the locals and kill all of their people in revenge, but Columbus strongly refused to make such a move.
She noted the explorer’s relationship with a Native American leader on Hispaniola, a Taino chief named Guacanagari. Columbus had very good relations with him and adopted one of his sons. That son took the name of Columbus’ natural son, Diego, and accompanied Columbus on his final three voyages.
Columbus on his second return voyage took six Indians back to Spain, but not as slaves.
“He took them because they wanted to go,” Delaney said.
A version of this story was first published in 2017. It has been subsequently updated.
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Build the wall on the north side of the church’s property. Let it deal with Mexico directly.
CCC
1909 Finally, the common good requires peace, that is, the stability and security of a just order. It presupposes that authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defense.
It seems to me that while the Church ignores LGBT degeneracy and abortion laws, including public officials and politicians who are Catholic, and support ‘worldly’ licentiousness it has now allied itself with socialists within the Democratic Party who have us destroy our American Culture and Catholic Culture to accommodate the will of the far left. If they Church cared for our security they would support the government in securing our borders and protecting our society from cultural genocide. But then again, since Vatican II, the Church seems hell bent on committing Catholic Cultural suicide so this comes as no big surprise. And the USCCB thinks that we should send them money and support our dioceses as we pay off victims of clerical sex abuse and work in league with the most radical of the leftists at home and in the UN. They might want to just be quiet and teach the Catechism: the WHOLE Catechism.
I wonder if Trump will ever acknowledge what a bad idea it was to campaign for the border wall and promising that Mexico would pay for it, an estimated $30 billion? Mexican President Pena Nieto and former president Fox vehemently opposed Trump’s wild idea. Currently, Trump has placed the financial burden on the American taxpayer. Yet, even with all his lies and failed promises he got elected.
After Trump insulted the Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau at the G7 meeting Trump might consider building a northern wall separating Canada and the US that is much longer and much more expensive.
The US has the most generous immigration policy on the planet: https://www.immigroup.com/news/top-10-immigration-friendly-countries
Along with our generous (legal) immigration policy we are also the most generous country with foreign aid and disaster response around the globe.
So in addition to this, people like you seem to think that open borders and illegal immigration is some kind of right without looking at what that means for the future of US going forward. Are we to take in as many immigrants as there are in the world since we have the most to offer? We give welfare, housing subsidies, health care, tuition and child care services all at the expense of the working stiff who is being displaced by a literal flood of illegal immigration. If it is controlled then we can monitor and know who is coming into our country which is the right of any nation and we can also monitor their health and other problems which may put the people of this country at risk. I wonder how many billions of dollars that works out to be . . . and it is ongoing? I also wonder why Spanish speaking South Americans march right past all their neighbors claiming that the seek asylum when they could find asylum in other Spanish speaking neighbors and not undertake such a long a treacherous journey. It is obvious that they are receiving help and are being encouraged to march across a number of countries to reach the Mexican border and we know that George Soros and his groups are funding this along with MasterCard. http://whatisupwiththesynod.com/index.php/2018/11/08/raped-a-man-attacked-police-demanded-the-state-give-him-a-wife-pakistani-judged-a-psychopath/
So is it such a bad idea to try to stop what may turn into cultural genocide? You may not care a wit about the future but some of us do and some of us would rather help these people in their struggle against their own totalitarian governments. You don’t appreciate your liberty unless you fight for it and win it yourself. You can’t steal somebody elses freedom. We paid with our blood and we should be able to protect what we gained with our blood as well even though it would be much nicer if we simply build a wall and prevent illegal trafficking. Do you feel comfortable with the mules who smuggle drugs and humans over the border as well? Just wondering. That is why we have a legal way to immigrate and why it needs to be enforced.