By Brad Miner, The Catholic Thing - This is not about Christopher Columbus – at least not directly so. All I ever needed to know about the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” I’ve learned from Robert Royal’s Columbus and the Crisis of the West... I’ll begin at the beginning: October 12, 1955. That was when Edoardo Alfieri’s statue of the world’s greatest sailor was unveiled in Columbus, a gift from the people of Genoa, Columbus, Ohio’s first “sister city.”