UD hosts Columbus Day event to reclaim the holiday
This past Sunday, The Tocqueville Society, Young Americans for Freedom and Dr. Susan Hanssen hosted a talk on Christoper Columbus. Although famous for his voyage, the legacy of Columbus has been highly distorted by myth and public perception.
The talk was titled “Christopher Columbus and the Crisis of the West.” The information distributed for the event included a sneak peak of the talk, foreshadowing the lies we’re fed, the myths we’ve accepted, and the heroic truth we’ve never before heard about Columbus.
This lecture was not designed to be a blind admiration for Columbus, but an intellectual discussion about the impact that Columbus had on western civilization and a challenge to modern political characters of Columbus. Guest speaker Robert Royal, is an Ivy league graduate, writer, and founder of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. He published books on Columbus in 1992 and in 2020. He is deep in the trenches of the Christopher Columbus culture war, while remaining nuanced in his critiques.
Royal gave a balanced account to Columbus. Royal said: “We should avoid painting blame with a broad brush.” One modern criticism is that Columbus brought slavery and genocide, racism, inequality, environmental degradation, smallpox and much, much more. But Royal said, “If Columbus is responsible for everything bad that has happened since 1492 he should get a little bit of credit for some of the good things that have happened since 1492.”
Columbus has a complicated history and a tumultuous reputation. Every kid learns in elementary school that ‘in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue’ but very few have been taught the true history of Columbus as an explorer.
What you might not have been taught in school is the deep religious devotion that Columbus had. In his lecture, Royal said that Columbus regularly sang the Salve Regina with his crew every night of their voyage across the Atlantic. This hymn was a Marian devotion for the sailors to Mary as the Star of the Sea, their guiding light in darkness. Here at UD we sing the Salve in the evenings after Mass, over five hundred years later. Additionally, Dr. Hanssen sings it with her Am Civ classes as a piece of evidence that something from European culture has been brought over the Atlantic since 1492.
As part of Western Catholic tradition, we are in large part indebted to Columbus. Blindly labeling him as a colonizer ignores the positive impact he had on other cultures. Italian Americans could see the history and admire one of their fellow countrymen. A modern day example of that is in the state of Columbus in Central Park in New York City, and the creation of the Knights of Columbus.
Additionally, the people of Latin America have embraced the Catholicism that Columbus brought with him to the New World. There was something gratifying to the people to learn about a God who loved them so much that He would sacrifice Himself for them, not demand that they sacrifice their own children.
Much of the vilification of Columbus comes from Marxists principals using Columbus as a scapegoat for hatred towards America, Christianity, and natural law. Dr. Hanssen sees our celebration of Columbus and our defense of him as a part of UD’s countercultural tradition. Hanssen said: “It is counter cultural to study American civilization in the context of Western civilization and to celebrate the classical and Christian backdrop to American history.”
Perhaps most importantly, Royal emphasized that it was through Columbus that the Old World and the New World were able to be united creating OUR world. Royal referenced a historian that said that after the crucifixion, the single most impactful event in history was the discovery of the Americas.