Yes, we should celebrate Columbus Day

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 11, 2024

We are now four years removed from “the Great Awokening.” That is, the eruption of anti-American riots and ideological idiocy that occurred all across our country in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

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That fentanyl and meth made Floyd’s death more likely does not alter the fact that he was murdered. One need not agree with how Floyd’s murder was exploited to understand the outrage or to sympathize with those who marched for justice.

But exploited it was. In ways too numerous to count. “Mostly peaceful protests,” that weren’t, were just the tip of the iceberg.

Here in Connecticut, the Great Awokening mostly passed us by. Our state was, unfortunately, already pretty Woke to begin with. There was, however, one big exception. An aspect of the Great Awokening that really should have concentrated the minds of our fellow Catholics in 2020 much more than it did.

I am talking about the attacks on Christopher Columbus. Why faithful Catholics did not rise as one, to defend the Grand Admiral in the year of the Great Awokening, I will never know. They should have. With Columbus Day coming around again this Monday, they still should.

What little pushback there was against anti-Columbus sentiment occurred mostly on behalf of Italian-Americans. All well and good. But Columbus is much more than a folk hero to one ethnicity. And attacks on Columbus are an insult to far more than just a single ethnic group.

The attack on Christopher Columbus is an attack on Western Civilization.

No, he was not a saint. Yes, there were others here before him.

But it was Christopher Columbus and no one else who discovered America in the sense of bringing a vast continent previously unknown to Europeans into the history of the world. It was Columbus and no one else who began the civilization in America of which you and I are a part.

Yes, he thought he was in India. Yes, he never set foot on the soil of what would one day be the United States of America. So what? When Columbus-haters mention these facts as if to blow our minds, I always wonder what sort of schools they attended. I was taught these things about Columbus in my local public school in first grade in the 1970s. There is nothing the Columbus debunkers can say to me that I have not already known for 50 years.

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But Columbus did what no European did before him. Whatever Europeans may have been here prior to Columbus left no lasting legacy. You and I are part of a civilization in this hemisphere that begins with—and is in direct continuity with—the great explorer. Yes, he was motivated by ambition. He was also motivated by a deep Catholic piety.

This is important because the origins of Columbus Day have less to do with the actual event—the discovery of America—than with the acceptance of Catholics in the United States.

Our country suffered waves of sometimes-violent anti-Catholicism throughout its history. Catholic churches and convents were burned in Philadelphia in the 1850s. The Ku Klux Klan targeted us in the 1920s. It was said that Catholic immigrants could not be true Americans. Columbus Day was a response to it. Reminding our fellow countrymen that America was discovered by a Catholic sent a message: “We belong here too.”

The first Columbus Day was celebrated by the Irish in New York in 1792. A mass lynching of Italians in New Orleans in 1892 led to a one-time national celebration of Columbus Day in response. And thanks to lobbying by the Knights of Columbus, Franklin Roosevelt made it a permanent holiday in the 20th century.

We should not lose that connection. Without 1492, there never would have been 1776. And, in addition to anti-Catholicism, I think that’s what the anti-Columbus hysteria is really all about.

It should not surprise us that, when fascism came to America, it came in the guise of those claiming to be fighting fascism. I think what “Antifa” and BLM and so forth really hate in Columbus is the Christian West’s legacy of freedom, liberty, and the rule of law. No 1492, no 1776, no USA in the 20th century to take down fascism and communism.

None of this is to deny the darkness in our own history. It is only to ask that we not be overwhelmed by it. That we put it in perspective.

That is not a new suggestion for readers of Catholic Culture. Check out Robert Royal’s book “Columbus and the Crisis of the West.” And Phil Lawler’s 2020 column on it. And, if you have two hours to spare, the YouTube video of the 2020 forum held on it at Thomas More College, “Rediscovering Columbus: A New Adventure in the Age of Cultural Obliteration.”

Whether you view Columbus’s discovery of America as a net gain or a net loss for humanity depends on your politics, unfortunately. For myself, I think it’s been a great thing for humanity. And it would have been a still greater thing had humanity these last 250 or so years followed the example of liberty set in the New World by the American Revolution and not the totalitarianism of the Old World’s French Revolution. It was the French Revolution that put us on the path to the God-hating communism that created rivers of blood and mountains of corpses that far exceeded anything attributed to Columbus, and in the lifetime of many who are still with us. Columbus-haters don’t seem as concerned with those genocides, which is telling.

I’m sorry history hasn’t been perfect, Columbus-haters. But I’ll take Christianity and Western Civilization over the alternatives you’re peddling. Always.

Happy Columbus Day.

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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• Posted by: loumiamo4057 - Oct. 12, 2024 4:17 PM ET USA

  The 3 most important words in your column, Mr. Wolfgang, "...over the alternatives...". Whether you want to talk about the Catholic Church or the United States, they are always at the top of the list and all the other alternatives are a not-even-close distant second, to not even worth mentioning in the same sentence.