Month: October 2020

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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Denver Newsroom, Oct 11, 2020 / 03:01 pm (CNA).- Abortion is a “fundamental threat to the beginning of life itself” and Catholics can’t be passive on the “pre-eminent” human rights issue, the right to life, Bishop Felipe Estevez of St. Augustine has said in a pre-election letter to his diocese’s Catholics about the importance of conscientious political participation.

“Pope Francis has made it clear that if we fail to protect life, no other rights matter. He also said that abortion is not primarily a Catholic or even a religious issue: it is first and foremost a human rights issue,” Bishop Estevez said in his Oct. 7 letter.

He rejected the claim of those who say, “as a matter of faith, I am against abortion, but I cannot impose my belief on others.” Such claims reflect a commitment to the “false belief” that some human beings don’t deserve legal protection, said the bishop.

“It is not a matter of imposing a belief, but of being committed to the truth about human life, which, as biological science confirms, begins at conception,” he said.

Citing the Declaration of Independence, Estevez said the Founding Fathers knew that the right to life “surpassed all others in importance” because “without the right to life, none of the other rights could be protected.”

“The right to life was, and is, preeminent,” said the bishop.

He said the bishops are praying for Catholics who seek to be educated voters with well-formed consciences.

“This is a difficult time in our nation and a critical time to not only exercise your right to vote but to do so with the utmost integrity,” he said.

Discussing the importance of participation in public life, Estevez said that politics is about “securing justice in society” and is thus “a fundamentally moral activity.”

“While the Church and its clergy cannot endorse a particular candidate or political party, we do have a responsibility to encourage you to understand the issues in the context of Church teaching and to help you in this area of the ‘proper formation of your conscience’,” he said.

“As Catholics, our belief is that there are fundamental truths about the human person and society that are accessible to both faith and reason,” he continued. “We, therefore, have a right and a duty to participate in the public square in a way that reflects these truths, both for the good of our community and for the glory of the God who created us.”

He cited the words of the Our Father, when Christians pray to fulfill God’s will “on earth as it is in heaven.”

“We cannot with integrity pray the words of the Our Father or say ‘Amen’ when receiving the Eucharist, and then be passive on the issues that destroy God’s creation,” he said. “This is true for all people of faith, elector, and elected officials.”

“Some would prefer that Catholics and others of faith remain silent, or they will say that such beliefs have no place in the public square,” Estevez said. “Such views run contrary to our fraternal bonds and commitment to the common good as equal and valued citizens.”

He rejected the claim that focusing on “the preeminent issue of abortion” means the Church promotes “single-issue voting that will tend to support a particular candidate or party.”

“The Church will always act to promote the dignity and value of every human life from conception to natural death. We care about both mothers and their children, born and unborn, as well as the poor, the immigrant, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, those who are marginalized, and those on death row. We seek to promote a Culture of Life through our teaching and through our ministries, some of which are threatened by the extreme positions taken by some on issues of life and the family.”

“The political parties and their candidates have provided you with information that they believe will help you to understand their positions on issues that are important to you and for the good of the country,” he explained. “The Church engages in this political process by providing you with the faith context to judge some of these positions.”

Estevez spoke with CNA about his letter.

“It is very important that our citizens vote, and that they vote consciously reflecting on the spectrum of the entire social teaching of the Church and that they consider the intrinsic evils in a very prominent way,” he said Oct. 9.

“Like I say in my (letter’s) first paragraph: I don’t tell you who to vote for, that is your great and awesome responsibility,” the bishop said. “Please vote. It is a patriotic and common good responsibility.”

Estevez told CNA he put euthanasia on “the same level of intrinsic evils” as abortion, drawing from the teachings of Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II. “I think we need to protect as well our senior citizens. Regretfully, there are several states as well that do not protect them,” he said.

The letter includes a quotation from St. John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae, addressing the case of “an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia,” in which the pope said “it is therefore never licit to obey it, or take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it.”

Estevez said that in his letter “I enumerate all the other issues, including the death penalty, which are you aware is on the other side of the political spectrum, Republican and Democrat.”
He said the diocese and the Florida Catholic Conference had done much work to provide Catholics with a list of issues presenting the positions of the political parties.

However, he decided to write the letter after continued requests from laity who were “struggling with how to make a decision.”

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