Columbus, Marco Rubio, and the Nations
The Catholic Thing
By Robert Royal I wouldn't have taken a more than average interest in Christopher Columbus if ill-informed and sometimes ill-intentioned people hadn't made it necessary. Fairfax County, Virginia, where I've lived for more than thirty-five years, abolished Columbus Day in 2020 as a paid holiday, but schools are closed today anyway – to celebrate "Indigenous Peoples' Day." The state legislature did the same for all of Virginia, as have other states, in effect replacing our Western Christian heritage with – frankly – they know not what. Now, Columbus, like all of us, was an imperfect human being. But unlike most of us, he was also a great human being, who carried out one of the most daring feats in history, which remains of central importance to the Americas, the Church, and the whole world. The more you know about him, the clearer that becomes. It's a symptom of our current moment that few people bother to learn – or teach – about him, beyond the blanket condemnations of Columbus as the origin of virtually everything bad that's happened in the Americas since 1492. (Somehow, by the same illogic, he gets no credit for the good things that have happened on these shores.) And while there's much to admire in some native groups, and to lament in the way they've been treated, there's also much to deplore. Columbus was partly motivated by the desire to "preach the Gospel to all nations.' He was right to do so. You don't have to turn to the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan cultures built on human sacrifice to understand that. Anyone who looks, for instance, at how the North American Martyrs (Catholics and others used to, and should again) were brutally tortured and killed – the way all prisoners, native and European, were treated by several Northeastern tribes – may wonder why Europeans are regarded as brutal villains and Indigenous as peaceful environmentalists. So, a necessary question: Why are the Indigenous celebrated today? Columbus didn't bring slavery to the Americas. It was already here and widespread. As were indigenous forms of imperialism and colonialism. As for the acknowledgement of "stolen lands," here's a sad case for those who want to know the truth beyond the current ideological battlefield. As I've recounted in my book Columbus and the Crisis of the West (a new edition of my very first book, 1492 and All That), Native Americans were themselves guilty of genocide and "stolen lands." Take the controversy over the American presidents on Mount Rushmore and even about the U.S. government's ownership of the site. The history of the place tells a melancholy tale, in fact several. In 1776, the year the American colonies declared their independence, the Lakota Sioux conquered the Black Hills, where Mount Rushmore is located. They wiped out the Cheyenne, who held it previously; the Cheyenne had taken it from the Kiowa, who took it from. . .no doubt some other tribe. As one historian pointed out: "The Lakota-Sioux arrived in the West after being on the losing end of a war with other tribes in Minnesota in the late 1700s.They waged genocidal war on other tribes before they took over the Black Hills from the Cheyenne. . . .They did the exact same thing that the United States did to drive the Lakota out." And this was only one example of a series of "stolen lands" – among indigenous peoples themselves. So how should we sort out these historical entanglements? Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in Athens this past week and gave a stirring speech about the value of our Western civilization. He touted the impulse Greece gave to philosophical and scientific thought, which sought to know the nature of the world, as well as to democratic institutions. He even identified Plutarch – not modern Enlightenment figures – as the writer most quoted by the authors of The Federalist Papers, the articles that were influential in the adoption of the American Constitution. All this needed repeating and not only as a history lesson, but to remind a world tha...