This past week has seen many instances of the “trash Columbus” movement that surfaced about five years ago. One statue of Columbus in Norwalk and two others in adjoining towns were defaced. According to the local newspaper a “radical leftist organization” is claiming responsibility. Historians have never portrayed Columbus as a saint or lauded him for his moral sensibilities. Why he has been important in this country is because he discovered the Americas in three small navigation boats, which feat took a great deal of courage and grit. His 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 what we became to the whole Western world is a fact. 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 opine that much of the current antipathy if not downright hatred of Columbus that is currently in vogue has its roots in that great American sportly virtue of anti-Catholicism. Columbus planted the flag of Catholicism firmly on the soil of the New World and believed that the most important thing he was bringing to the indigenous peoples of the New World was the truth of the Catholic faith. And there is one of the sources of the hysterical unColumbus Day crowd that is 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. The formation of the Knights of Columbus was 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, romantic box. The current move to make Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples Day is a dangerous form of romanticism 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 ISIS-like destroyers of good but flawed men and women. George Washington? Thomas Jefferson? Abraham Lincoln? Martin Luther King?
Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
Pastor
