Yes, Catholics should celebrate the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 16, 2024

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Every September 8th my family and I gather together to commemorate America’s first thanksgiving, the Mass celebrated in Florida in 1565 expressing gratitude to almighty God that the Spanish crown claimed the future sunshine state for God and country. Like millions of other Americans on that day, we eat the same food the Spaniards and the Timucuan natives shared at the first Thanksgiving: “hard biscuits and cocido—a rich garbanzo stew made with pork, garlic, saffron, cabbage and onion—washed down with red wine.” Yum.

I’m joking, of course. Not about loving Thanksgiving. I mean, yes, when I was a child it did seem a dud of a holiday. A letdown after Halloween and a mere whetting of the appetite heading into Christmas. As a 1970s kid, the one exciting thing about it was that one of the three television networks would preempt its usual weekday schedule and run Saturday morning cartoons instead.

But as an adult, Thanksgiving has been imbued with so much more meaning for me. Beginning in my college years, it was the weekend of the high school reunion—official and unofficial. Every year, the people I grew up with would return to our old hometown and we would all hang out in local establishments. Every fifth year—without fail, going back thirty years—we would have our official reunion on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. And that town in particular—Manchester, CT—is known throughout the region for its Thanksgiving Road Race. The event, attended by tens of thousands of people, is Manchester’s Mardi Gras. Another opportunity to gather with old friends in the town where we grew up, before heading off to Thanksgiving dinner with the family—with “Alice’s Restaurant” playing at noon on the radio, of course.

Almost every American has some version of that experience around Thanksgiving. Those are the real Thanksgiving traditions of our country around the fourth Thursday of November. There is no widespread tradition of celebrating the 1565 Mass at St. Augustine, Florida as America’s first Thanksgiving.

But there is a Catholic tradition of complaining about it on Facebook. I see it in my newsfeed every year. The Catholics beat the Pilgrims to the New World, Catholics should commemorate the 1565 Mass in Florida as the first Thanksgiving in America instead of the 1621 Pilgrim feast with the Indians in Massachusetts, and so forth.

That the Spanish Mass in Florida predates the Pilgrim Thanksgiving is beyond dispute. My quote of the food they ate that day is taken from this secular source. Even aside from that, the Anglican English in Jamestown had a Thanksgiving long before those Pilgrims—who dissented from Anglicanism because they deemed it too Catholic—arrived at Plymouth Rock. Our historical memory of the Calvinist celebration in Massachusetts owes much to 19th century propaganda. Accounts published in the 1800s are what led to the pervasive belief that there is some special continuity with the Calvinist dissenters rather than other Thanksgivings celebrated during the colonial era.

But if we are going to run down an American tradition that unites us all, like Thanksgiving, why stop there? We could also argue that the 4th of July as an American origin event was an invention of Jacksonians in the 1820s and that the Declaration of Independence was really just a press release to gain an alliance with France.

That is, it may or may not be true, but it has nothing to do with the actual lived experience of Americans for a century or two. Like it or not, Americans have grown up on the story of Plymouth Rock and the first Thanksgiving for generations. It forms our character, our societal DNA. Any claim to the contrary is a Facebook parlor game. But for a few eccentrics, no American who gathers for Thanksgiving two Thursdays from now will note the history of the holiday (if they note history at all) as beginning with St. Augustine or Jamestown or a Congressional resolution from 1777. They may note how Presidents Washington and Lincoln later built on the origins of the tradition, or how FDR fixed the modern date, but that’s it.

As I noted last month, we should celebrate Columbus Day because his discovery of America is an origin story for our civilization on this continent in a way that is not true of others. Likewise, the Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving is our Thanksgiving. It’s a key part of our national story. We should embrace it.

I dream of an America where Protestants defend Columbus Day and Catholics defend Thanksgiving Day. Because, friends, there is an agenda behind these attacks on our holidays. The enemies of Christ are coming for all of us. As John M. Grondelski wrote three years ago:

Let me suggest that, while “English arrivals v. Native Americans,” “genocide,” and other issues surround Thanksgiving 2021, what really sticks in the revisionist craw is that America’s origins were connected to a public religious project. Eliminating that part of the American story is vital for progressives because, unless God is removed from the public square, free persons will always have another and higher allegiance as a check against our political Leviathan.

So fight it. Embrace the holidays with which we grew up. Defend what they represent.

And, fellow Catholics, if Protestant New England’s role in our national Thanksgiving mythos makes you that squeamish, a suggestion.

Lean into Squanto’s story more. Yes, St. Augustine and Jamestown are nice stories too. But Squanto is awesome.

An early Happy Thanksgiving to Catholic Culture’s readers. Thank you, God, for your many blessings this year upon all of us and upon our nation.

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own. See full bio.

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