By Phillip Campbell, Catholic Exchange - Given the current zeitgeist of hostility towards the great Admiral, you might be surprised to learn that Christopher Columbus was once proposed for canonization. The story goes back to the golden age of Italian immigration, between 1875 and 1914. Columbus was a powerful symbol of Italian-American identity, venerated as a Catholic Italian immigrant hero. It was during this era, in 1882, that Connecticut priest Fr. Michael McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus to attend to the temporal needs of Catholic immigrants, many of them Italian.