On October 12th, 1492, at about 2:00 in the morning, a man named Rodrigo de Triana, shouted from his ship the words “¡Tierra! ¡Tierra!” That moment marked one of the pivotal events in history. Europeans had returned to the Americas for the first time since the age of the Vikings, but this time with lasting consequences. This was an epic feat that would begin a new epoch for the entire world.
The man behind this accomplishment was a 41-year-old Genoese mariner named Christopher Columbus—one of the most critical figures in all of history.
At a young age Columbus had opportunities to take to the sea and travel widely. He was a devoted student of cartography, geography, history, and astronomy. Few scholars or mariners at the time believed the world was flat as is commonly believed today. The real question being asked at the time was how far away the lands of the Orient were if one took a westerly route. Columbus believed Asia was just over the western horizon. He was daring enough to find out for sure. He spent almost 15 years pitching his audacious plan to open a westward trade route to the far east. At last, he finally found a supporter in the Spanish crown. After expelling the Moors from Spain, Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II were now able to focus on voyages of discovery to expand their empire and decided to sponsor Columbus’ expedition.
The goal of his voyage was to discover a new westward trading route to the far east, establish trading relations with China, India and Japan and to lay the groundwork for the introduction of Christianity to the region.
To his dying day Columbus maintained that the lands he visited on a total of four different voyages across the Atlantic were Asia. As we all know, of course, he actually rediscovered for the Europeans the continents of North and South America. On his four voyages he visited various islands of the West Indies in the Caribbean as well as mainland North and South America by landing in what is known today as Central America and Venezuela. For Renaissance Europe, he discovered a “New World” which eventually led to a mass migration of European settlers to the numerous colonies of the Americas that would eventually be established. The world would be altered forever.
The American people have long taken inspiration from Columbus’ accomplishments. His daring spirit, ingenuity, and perseverance would eventually lead to the founding of the United States in the Western Hemisphere which he put on the map. The capital of this nation is named after him and the date of his discovery of the New World is a national holiday.
Catholics too, have always taken inspiration from Columbus. In his 1892 encyclical Quarto Abeunte saeculo written in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Americas, Pope Leo XIII called Columbus’ exploits “the highest and grandest which any age has ever seen accomplished by man.” The Pope was eager to emphasize in the same encyclical that since Columbus’ “Catholic faith was the strongest motive for the inception and prosecution” of his grand enterprise, “the whole human race owes not a little to the Church.”
In this age of historical revisionism, in which the whole history of Western exploration has been reduced to nothing but a tale of exploitation, imperialism, and “white supremacy”, can we still claim with pride as Pope Leo XIII did that “Columbus is ours?”
Robert Royal maintains that we can. He is the founder and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. and is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing. His book Columbus and the Crisis of the West, which is a revised and expanded edition of his 1992 work, 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History, has just been published by Sophia Institute Press. It provides a measured assessment of the complexities of this topic and cuts through the sweeping and most popular indictments of Columbus and his legacy.
This past year has brought the surreal sight of mobs taking over American streets. The ire of many of these riots were directed towards monuments dedicated to celebrating Columbus’ legacy. Several statues in his honor were toppled, showing that we need a measured and learned perspective more than ever. Robert Royal recently discussed Columbus and his book with CWR.
CWR: Should Christopher Columbus be considered a saint?
Robert Royal: No, he was a flawed man, as we all are—even saints. But there were many aspects of his faith that bring him quite close to a certain kind of sanctity. For instance, God played a large role in his conception of his mission and—despite the trouble he sometimes found himself in on land in the Caribbean—his Catholicism also guided his behavior, imperfect as that was.
There was a time when his voyages were described in a simple formula: “God, Gold, and Glory.” He certainly did seek profit, because exploration in the fifteenth century also entailed trying to establish global trade routes. And he wanted the glory that would accrue to the man who first crossed the Atlantic—and was able to return. (Several had sailed West and were never heard from again.) But many people today neglect “God” in that old phrase. Since we live in a materialist and commercial age, we assume Columbus wasn’t really serious about the place of God in his efforts.
But we have plenty of documentation about how much he consulted prophetic texts and religious writers as the idea of the Atlantic crossing was being formulated in his mind. In this, he was part of a late medieval Franciscan tradition that predicted a new age of the Holy Spirit. (Columbus was quite close with the Franciscans in Spain and seems to have dressed as a lay Franciscan towards the end of his life.) That movement posited that the Gospel would have to be preached to all nations before Christ could return to Earth in his Second Coming. In a famous letter that he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella, he describes how he became convinced that the voyage was not merely possible but his own special vocation:
During this time, I have searched out and studied all kinds of texts: geographies, histories, chronologies, philosophies, and other subjects. With a hand that could be felt, the Lord opened my mind to the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies, and he opened my will to desire to accomplish this project. This was the fire that burned within me when I came to visit Your Highnesses.
For those still skeptical about the sincerity and importance of the Faith to Columbus, I like to point out that he left money in his will for the effort to free the Holy Land, Jerusalem in particular, from Muslim domination so that Christians could visit the holy sites again. That may sound too much like a Crusade to some today but, to put it somewhat vulgarly, he put his money where his mouth was, contributing to a cause that would be carried out after he was dead.
CWR: Should Christopher Columbus be considered a monster?
Robert Royal: Columbus may have been idealized by various groups in the past—interestingly as a proto-Protestant and entrepreneur by American Protestants in the nineteenth century, followed by the wave of Catholic immigrants—Irish, Italian, Slavic,—who took him as a kind of American patron saint. But he has been wildly demonized for decades now owing to the influence of radical, Marxist-leaning historians in American schools and universities. You often hear grade-school students say that he was a “genocidal maniac.” No serious historian would say that Columbus perpetrated genocide or even intended to. Though he enslaved some natives—Spanish law, in theory, only allowed that when men were captured during war or were perpetrating gross violations of the natural law—the slave trade was never of serious interest to him. And to connect him with the later slave trade—particularly the Middle Passage of Africans brought to the New World —is historically wrong.
He wasn’t a good governor on land, though he was a great navigator and explorer. He got into trouble because he was alternatively too lenient or too harsh—towards both indigenous and Spaniards. Fr. Bartolome de las Casas, the great Dominican “defender of the Indians” talks about Columbus’ sweetness of character and good intentions, even as he allows that Columbus didn’t always realize how he should have handled problems. I find it telling and somewhat comic to read one of Columbus’ letters back to the Spanish monarch in which he complains about the ne’er-do-wells coming from Spain, asking the king and queen to be careful who they allow to come over, and by the way could they send 60 or so missionaries to help convert the Spaniards to Christianity?
CWR: What is the legacy of Christopher Columbus? Should this legacy continue to be celebrated with a national holiday and historic monuments?
Robert Royal: It’s telling to me that many jurisdictions this year are replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day without knowing much of anything about the one or the other. I have no quarrel about celebrating certain indigenous peoples and their cultures—but not all by any means—any more than I would honor every “white” or “European” figure from the past.
Long before Columbus, indigenous peoples practiced slavery, human sacrifice, torture, racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism, and much more that we would object to today alongside their great achievements. And those who believe that the indigenous had escaped Original Sin and were innocents living in perfect harmony with God, nature, and one another, have set themselves up for deep disillusion when they actually look into the record.
But even more than all that, why is it necessary to replace Columbus Day? It would be quite easy to pick another day to honor the contributions of other, previously marginalized groups and individuals—if you mean it when you say you want to be more “inclusive.” How is it more “inclusive” to exclude a central episode in our history like the voyages of Columbus? And if we refuse to celebrate the first moment that the European and Christian tradition came to these shores, I think we’re in peril of a kind of cultural suicide, demanding that figures of the past be perfect—in way we consider perfect—before we’ll allow that we should honor or feel gratitude towards them.
Columbus is bearing a lot of later peoples’ sins just now. People who know nothing about him stomp on his statues and, symbolically, charge him with everything bad that happened after him in the Americas. I often ask: if you’re going to overgeneralize, exaggerate, and blame him for all that, are you also going to give him some credit for all the obviously good things that have happened on these shores over the past 500 years? And show some gratitude for the truth that without him, none of us would be here?
My dear friend the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago used to talk about how much of an impression it made on him when the first pictures from space came back showing the green and blue ball of the earth floating in space—showing that we all live in one world. That’s true enough. But it’s also the case that the sense that all human beings live in one world began in 1492. It was his daring, skill, perseverance, and even perhaps divine inspiration that he achieved the great things that he did.
As Leo XIII summed it up in his encyclical Quarto Abeunte saeculo at the time of the 400th anniversary: “the magnitude of the undertaking, as well as the importance and variety of the benefits that arose from it, call for some fitting and honourable commemoration of it among men. And, above all, it is fitting that we should confess and celebrate in an especial manner the will and designs of the Eternal Wisdom, under whose guidance the discoverer of the New World placed himself with a devotion so touching.”
(Editor’s note: This interview was originally posted on October 11, 2020.)
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We read that: “No serious historian would say that Columbus perpetrated genocide or even intended to. [But also, that] He wasn’t a good governor on land, though he was a great navigator and explorer.”
On the FIRST point, Samuel Eliot Morison, offers us “Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus,” 1942, Pulitzer Prize winner), and was the author of dozens of histories, taught at the university level including Harvard for decades, and received about a dozen honorary doctorates plus over half-dozen other prestigious awards.
On the SECOND point, Columbus indeed was not a good governor on land. From Morison, the history is complicated, including brutal behavior by mutineers, and then Indian ambushes, and even Columbus at one point being returned in chains to Spain. He was often incapacitated with severe arthritis and, putting it mildly, was uneven in administering justice. Morison writes: “Columbus proceeded to establish a slave trade with the inhabitants of Hispaniola. And this, after he had declared time and again that the Tainos were the kindest, most peaceful and generous people in the world, who wanted nothing but a chance to become good subjects and good Christians” (p. 486).
Unable to pay TRIBUTE in sparse gold diggings, the natives fled only to be hunted down by hounds, or succumb to starvation and disease, or to the desperation of cassava poison. Morison summarizes:
“Of the original natives, estimated by a modern ethnologist at 300,000 in number, one third will killed off between 1494 and 1496. By 1508 an enumeration showed only 60,000 alive. Four years later that number was reduced by two thirds; and in 1548 Oviedo doubted whether 500 Indians remained. Today [1942] the blood of the Tainos only exists mingled with that of the more docile and laborious African Negroes [now Blacks] who were imported to do the work that they could not and would not perform” (p. 493).
The abuse of Columbus’ CANCEL-CULTURE critics is not that they resort entirely to fiction, but that by their iconoclast statue toppling they ALSO commit “genocide”—against our entire and complex Western legacy. Morison and Royal, both, offer functional literacy as an antidote for the airbrush memory-poisoning served up by today’s agitator illiterati.
I think native people in the America’s overwhelmingly died from introduced diseases but it seems probable that would have been the case also if Asian explorers had come first.
It’s odd that the Vikings arrival didn’t set that off earlier. Or perhaps it did in a limited way?
Thank you, mrscracker. Do you have any sense of the proportion of natives on Hispaniola that died of disease vs being killed by the Spanish up to 1548?
No Ted, I don’t know that offhand.
I’ve read in general about the decimation of native peoples in the Americas & it seemed the spread of disease was very rapid.
The Vikings had much less personal contact with the natives than did later explorers. The few records of the Vikings seem to indicate a level of mutual hostility that kept them apart. In addition, Vikings were from colder climes and probably carried less communicable bacteria than those from warmer areas. Finally. Vikings were not known for peaceful integration with other peoples until long after their conversion to Christianity.
Peter, that was very helpful. Thanks for the research. How reliable is that 300,000 estimate by the ethnologist?
Author Morison offers no footnote.
Fr Sean says nothing or glances off of the barbaric practices of Columbus in the new world as it was to Euros. Greed and self aggrandizement is at the root of all this in history and no matter how you doin it for the church at al, it is what it is: imperialism, false civilization, colonialism and the spill over of European failures of Christians to even tolerate each other, ad museum. Father Matthew Ellis, Archdiocese of Detroit. Where I was born was where I was born.
“…Greed and self aggrandizement is at the root of all this in history…”
All of it? Sounds like chronological snobbery to me, not mention a rather fundamentalist approach to history and human nature.
Sounds like typical Marxist revisionist drivel to me. An honest reading of European history might correct your myopic attitude if you have the courage to travel that route.
Hello Athanasius (or whoever you are, LoL). I’ve been trying to look for sources in the internet about Christopher Columbus which is not revised by liberals (such as: History.com, Vox.com, etc.) but right now, that’s all I see in Google. Do you have any source that honestly or neutrally records/writes accounts about Christopher Columbus. I am from the Philippines and you may wonder, “What do I have to do with this?”, well I have family in America and if the liberals get their fun, I can not imagine the state of my family there.
Sincerely.
Sorry ,
So many slaves were brought over to the New World is so many Indians may have been converted but it came in the price that they enslaved both the blacks and the Indians after Columbus came.greed greed greed greed.all in the name of money hidden by Christianity. Fiar De la CAsas is the only guy I would ever travel back in time to want to meet. Hyster up for the dignity of the Indian and the black person dieg
A small consolation to United States citizens, both Black and White, between 1525 and 1866 only 3 or 4 percent of slaves shipped to the Americas came to North America (388 Thousand out of 10.7 Million, according to universally respected Black historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Ph.D.; like Morison, Harvard University). And of these, nearly all were first rounded up and delivered to the African coast by Black slave traders in Africa. Again, a “complicated” history.
Of the most inhumanly brutal traders, Gates in his documentaries, remarks of Tippu Tip (1832-1905 in Zanzibar; real name Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi) that this is the one person that he (Gates) would most like to see burning in hell for all eternity.
Ironically, it was technology–with the 1794 invention of the Cotton Gin–that increased 50-fold the speed that one person could separate cotton fiber from the seeds, thereby multiplying the demand for cotton acreage, slave planters and pickers to satisfy the faraway and growing market for cotton clothing.
If Columbus had died of natural causes after returning to Spain after his first trip to the Indies, he could have been a candidate for sainthood. His voyage of discovery was brave and intelligent, and he was just and charitable to the natives he met. But on this third trip to the Indies, Columbus served as governor of the Indies, and as governor he enforced a Spanish decree that required the natives to provide, as “tribute,” a certain amount of gold to Governor Columbus on a regular basis, and those natives who failed to provide the gold were punished savagely, including having their hands amputated. Gold was hard for these natives to acquire. Many natives received these savage punishments from the government of Columbus. These natives never asked Columbus to be their governor, or even consented to it. Columbus and the royal gov’t of Spain had no moral right to impose this heavy burden on the natives, with such heinous punishments for those who couldn’t pay this “tribute.” This whole scheme was and is indefensible from the point of view of Catholic morality and social doctrine. This waas nothing but a money-getting scheme. Columbus’ government of the Indies was not there to supply services to the natives of the Indies. There are plenty of documents from witnesses to these events to know that this all happened. When Columbus was made a cultural hero in the United States, a hundred or so years ago, very few people knew about all this. But now we have the Internet, and everyone knows, or can easily discover this info. We have so many wonderful saints in the Church! Saint Teresa! Saint Ignatius! Saint Francis! Saint John Paul II! There’s no need to defend the sanctity of Columbus. Columbus was the head of a local government that carried out horrific crimes against humanity. We can hope Columbus made it to Heaven. We can suppose that Columbus may not have approved of or known about every gruesome deed carried out by Spanish soldiers under his command. But the facts of his governorship’s grave violations of the duties of charity and justice remain on the historical record. Every time Catholics try to glorify or sanctify Columbus it only gives ammo to Socialists, Anarchists, and other enemies of true social justice. One of the first duties of true social justice is to tell the true facts about what has happened. If Catholic leaders and parishioners won’t tell the truth about Columbus, how can we expect outsiders to trust our proposals about how things ought to be in today’s world? How can they take seriously our Pro-Life values if we won’t take the side of the innocent natives who were victims of Columbus’ unjust governance of the Indies?
Barto, thank you for improving my understanding about Columbus. Do you have information about how the Church cooperated with Columbus’ government and also opposed it or at least tried to ameliorate the effects?
It has been a number of years since I did research into his topic, using the most authoritative scholarly books I could find in libraries. What I mainly recall about the presence of Catholic priests and religious brothers in the Indies in these early years was that it was a very slight presence. These were the very early years of Spanish activity in the New World. Yet, there were some priests and religious brothers who were there at times. The most famous is probably Bartolome de las Casas, who was a priest of the Dominican order. He wrote a document recounting all the abuses of the natives by Columbus’s governorship. That document played a role in the king of Spain having Governor Columbus arrested and sent back to Spain in chains. But I seem to recall that there were other priests who wrote defenses of Columbus. And a short time after Columbus arrived back in Spain, he was released and, for some reason, all charges were dropped against him, and the king backed Columbus in a fourth and final trip to the Indies (but he never again was allowed to exercise rulership in the Indies). The Church at this time did have moral principles that Spanish soldiers were obligated to follow in dealing with conquered peoples. But the New World was so far away, and the government of Spain and the bishops and pope were so far away, it created a situation in which there was often great moral laxity on the part of the soldiers and governors.
But I understand why people want to defend the reputation of Columbus. There are Socialists and other radicals and revolutionaries afoot in America today who are eager to re-make America into a socialist “utopia” just like present-day Cuba and Venezuela. This is a great danger, and must be resisted, of course.
And I understand how many people see the reputation of the Catholic Church, and of Western Civilization itself, being tied to the reputation of Columbus.
I make the judgment that is usually best to go with, and admit to, the facts that can be verified to a reasonable degree, when it comes to historical matters, even if the facts are unflattering to the Church. By way of comparison, it is practically dogma among political Progressives that Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri was wrongly murdered by a police officer. But when you really review the available facts, it’s pretty clear that Michael Brown was the aggressor and that the police officer killed Michael Brown in self-defense. Progressives just hurt their cause by trying to defend the innocence of Michael Brown.
I may be a dope or a dupe, but I don’t think Columbus statues or Columbus Day celebrations are necessary for the Church to succeed it the Divine Mission that has received from its founder, Jesus Christ.
I’m a member of the Knights of Columbus. I revere Fr. Michael J. McGivney, the saintly, benevolent founder of the K of C. But if its name were changed to the Knights of John Paul II, I wouldn’t mind a bit.
A few years ago, in “Columbia” magazine (published by the Knights of Columbus), there was an article written by a historian that provided a defense of Columbus’ conduct as governor of the Indies. The article defended Columbus by attacking the accuracy and honesty of Father Bartolome de las Casas, the Dominican priest who was the main accuser of Columbus as governor. The article showed that Father Bartolome’s report on the crimes of Columbus contained some factual errors. I personally was not convinced that the facts and reasoning in this article meant that Columbus was innocent of crimes in his capacity as governor of the Indies. I remain convinced that Father Bartolome de las Casas’ report on Columbus as governer was basically correct, and I think the fair and objective professional historians generally hold the same view. But for those who really want to know should not rely on random people on the Internet like me, but should dig into the best information they can find, from people taking a variety of final views on the matter of Columbus as governor of the Indies.
Yes, I want to fight Socialists and Fascists who are plotting in our midst to tear down all that is good. I want Liberty, Security, and the Catholic Faith to survive and triumph. But I want to fight with the truth, justice, and charity.
in searching more about Columbus one finds that
it more likely that he was a member of the
Sephard community in Genoa which survives today.
An excellent article. I commend both Fr Connolly and Mr. Royal for pushing back against one-dimensional zombie groupthink. I especially appreciate Mr. Royal’s query as to why “inclusiveness” has to mean replacing Columbus Day. Why not recognize the importance of both Columbus’s voyage and the American Indian cultures, by just adding another holiday somewhere else on the calendar?
It seems to me that part of the reason Columbus’s reputation has taken such a downturn is not so much because of new scholarship, but because today’s preferred virtues — tolerance and sensitivity — are obviously not his. (Although the caveat that he was hardly the genocidal maniac his enemies would pretend is, of course, well taken.)
His place in history comes from his initiative, daring, seamanship, and leadership, along with his intense commitment to the Church. So Columbus’s gifts are not valued in our day because in the warm, safe, hygenic bubble now enjoyed by so many post-American man-children, the worth of such gifts is much harder to discern than it once was.
It is also interesting to note that it is thanks in large part to the legacy of Columbus and his fellow French, Spanish, and Italian explorers that we can as Catholics legitimately claim a deep connection to the American story. Without Columbus, America looks a lot more like a purely Deist-Protestant project, with Catholic features superficially tacked on a little later.
Once again Father Connolly set the record straight regarding one of America’s most important figures.
Take that all you revisionist false historians!
Father Connolly strikes again, setting the record straight on the single most important figure in American history.
Take that all you revisionist false “historians”!
Columbus – an anomaly of history.
The year is 1492, and Columbus has successfully petitioned Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain for funds to pay for his voyage. “No serious historian would say that Columbus perpetrated genocide or even intended to. Though he enslaved some natives.”, (History magazine).
At the behest of the Spanish monarchs Columbus took a more robust approach to his actions on the most vulnerable humans, indigenous peoples, and in particular the Taino tribes of Hispaniola, (today’s Dominican Republic).
“Instead of ravaging the newly found countries…he sought to colonize and cultivate them, to civilize the natives.” (Washington Irving, The Life and Voyage of Christopher Columbus, 1828 Irving admitted that Columbus made mistakes, such as enslaving and killing.”
Although Columbus apparently did not participate in the violations of the Taino people, he did release the wrath of his Conquistadors on them. Their attack on the peaceful Tainos was brutal. Rapes, hangings, pillage, degrading, etc. Columbus’ command from Spain was to steal gold and return with slaves to Spain. His return voyage killed many slaves to squalor and disease in the hold of the ship.
When Columbus left the West Indies he did indeed discover the “new world”, but leaving a decimated Tiano nation decreasing the population from millions to several hundred.
What is your source that there were millions of natives in the New World?
I would ask about Columbus bearing an “earlier* persons sins specifically Nicholas V and his letter Dum Diversas to the Kings of Portugal and Spain in 1452, granting license to put certain african saracens and other unbelievers into “perpetual servitude”. This is not a document most Catholics know about but I would think it would have a very long shadow.
One point puts it all in perspective, “The goal of his voyage was to discover a new westward trading route to the far east, establish trading relations with China, India and Japan”. For prior to this time frame, India was the richest region on Earth. And the British of the time did, Splitting up India into religious affiliations regions and inflicting total anarchy to the people of India. A ruination and plundering of the wealth of India, taken back to Britain, so a few could dominate, Europe. In a short time, few came to attain the majority of wealth in Europe, leading to the mass exodos to the New World, or starve by the people, Catholics. For we also need to recognize, the British as a government, outlawed the Catholic mass. Generating of fleeing of “Catholics/Christians to America. Noted, the gold was stolen out of the Catholic Churches in India by the Europeans. Genocide was a common event.
Yet those that fail to know history, are doomed to repeat it..
Lyle,
Along with the unfortunate aspects, European colonialism brought valuable things to the the people in the colonies also. Longer life spans, higher rates of education, better status for women and assuming we value evangelization:Christianity.
There’s good and bad. Plus you have to consider the differences between colonial rulers throughout history. I think the British come out quite well in comparison to others.
Sadly, diseases introduced unintentionally by colonial explorers decimated native populations. But that might have been the case also had Asian explorers arrived first.
What is really interesting, the Mayan people of where Columbus arrived, were of the most advanced, intelligent people of the time. They where building, and built that which rivaled the Pyramids, the most accurate Calendar known, and had writings, which the newcomers destroyed. Tall, healthy and knowledgeable, eating very healthy, unlike Columbus and Europe natives of a poor diet, and short.
Some have said that the acclaimed picture was made shortly before the World Fair, out out of the blue, as none existed. Its most likely not prudent to question the current affair of columbus in the mass donation to a country that is slaughtering the people to hold corrupt political power, and has ties to the leader that is tied to a major money laundering corruption. Slaughter, extermination of humans, continually comes up in the issue.
The Europeans were short, terrible diet, and uneducated to the Mayans who had a more accurate Calendar, writings the Europeans destroyed.
Structures that today cannot be explained how the stone was moved, placed.
Disease was purposely brought to exterminate the natives, germ warfare. The six shooter was invented to mow down the women, children in mass extermination.
Stories exist that in the final time of European take over, after Natives had converted to Catholic faith. Women and children fleeing in hopes to go to Canada as a safe haven, where mowed down in defenseless ways..
Today, this very moment the USA is committing the exact same Genocide on the People, Women and Children of Yemen, by not guns, but forced starvation.
Catholic organizations are sending Millions to Syria, in support of a corrupt leader that has been exterminating its people protesting the corruption of government. In 1949 the USA over threw the elected government of Syria, and the Democratic government of Iran in 1953.
Both of which are in turmoil, in the greed of wealth from oil, and pipelines.
What makes the United States Catholic Religion Obutuse is as, Guatemala and the destroying of its Legitimate and rightful government in 1954 by the Dulles Brothers. A crime against humanity, total defiance to the Catholic Faith, as Yemen today.
Yet the Dulles Brothers, Fruit wars, gained enough power and unchecked by elected leaders, corruption, over threw Iran, Guatemala governments, and took over countries for a few people. The kicker is, not Catholic, their Son was the first Cardinal of the US Catholic Church.. The people have no say in the USA..
The biggest export from the USA is murder, extermination of humans, war, with not a whipper of protest for “assumed” Catholic leaders. Nor do we see a protest or recognition of the crimes on humanity inflicted on Haiti, Mexico, or all of the Americas (Catholic) or on Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Syria (our Brothers and Sisters the Islamic, by the US, from Catholic leaders.
All of which calls for the wrath of God.
Goodness Lyle, 15th & 16th Century people carried disease pathogens on them with no idea of infecting another hemisphere.
Smallpox, deliberately carried in blankets gifted to the native Americans, to exterminate them.
Buffalo/Bison in the Us, the primary food source, nearly exterminated from the Earth, in the Genocide of the native Americans. Eliminating the Buffalo, starved the native Americans to death. As the United States is doing this very hour in Yemen, exterminating food sources, white phosphorus used to burn crops, preventing other nations from feeding the people (destroying the ports to stop imports). Defiant to Just War, a Genocide, defiant to the Catholic faith. The worst crime (most evil) against humanity in World History, right now.
Mrscracker, recognize one US Catholic leader that stands against the United States total immoral, unjust war, Genocide actions inflicted on Yemen today.
Lyle,
You are correct about the attempt to spread smallpox to the Indians but that was several centuries after Columbus. The pathogens brought by early explorers like Columbus were devastating but unintentional.
the atrocities committed against the natives of the Americas really is a sad story.. I still find it surprising that Pope Alexander VI “gave” the lands of the Americas to Spain and Portugal. Where in the world did this pope get the power to give other peoples’ lands away? Even if they were pagan. And the conquistadores pursuit for God, gold and glory? Christ says you can’t serve God and Money. And how is lusting after glory a virtue? But some of these conquerers brutalized others under the guise of Christianity. The widescale human sacrifices of the aztec probably justified the the conquest of it…but not the atrocities that followed.
Oh well, the Bible says that God loves the little ones, the poor ones, the ones who are oppressed. The powerful He casts down from their thrones and sends them away hungry
Only now am I hearing negative things about Christoper Colombus (Cristobal Colon). As a Mexican American, I am proud that the Spaniards came to our Land. Mexico was a huge Country once called Nueva Espana (the term is still used) all the way from Central America to the Canadian Border. The Spaniards destroyed the idolatry of our people. The Spaniards assimilated with the Aztecs and other Tribes. As also the Aztecs assimilated with the Spaniards and all the European peoples. A whole new race was created we have the blood of the people from every European Nation that could only be the work of the Supreme being. Mexicans are both equally Aztecs and Europeans. What is sad is that we the Indigenous are still treated as not being fully human. That is a disgrace to God and to Our Lady of Guadalupe who from Heaven appeared with both the skin tone of the Aztecs and that of Mexican-Europeans. That is one of the miracles of the Tilma of St. Juan Diego.
Instead of sitting on lofty thrones, reciting many litanies of wrongs and injustices committed by our forefathers, we would do better to pray for them and beg mercy from almighty God for those who have gone before us, and for ourselves.
You never know who may be in your family tree.
Please pray specifically for generational healing.
History is indeed fickle; Hegel’s warning of the true sign of a nation in decay being multiple contrasting and divisive national narratives of national identity becomes more and more apparent for these once united United States of America. So as I tell my kids, as we move from a Pax Americana world towards a Post-God/One World/One Government modus operendi we need to remind our selves that we as Christians and Catholics know this world has always been the realm of Satan and we are just pilgrims doing the best we can to keep a good account of our own personal narratives.
Re Article on Christopher Columbus.
Undoubtedly his discoveries are history changing. Yet we believe Gods’s purpose for nations and people will go according to His plans,
Records of his treatment of black people are horrendous and undeniable. Treatment of black women and giving them away as sex slaves are painful part of his life. Let’s balance that. Sainthood? Umm I think not