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Untimely Meditations in Utah, by Robert Royal – Brown Pelican Society of Lousiana

Untimely Meditations in Utah, by Robert Royal

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“Court of the Patriarchs, Zion National Park,” Utah by Ansel Adams, 1941-1942 [National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.]

By Robert Royal, The Catholic Thing, September 17, 2025

Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West , and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century

In 1776, the year that America became independent (and San Francisco was founded), two Franciscan priests, Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, traveled from what would become Santa Fe, New Mexico, through Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, aided at several points by native guides, until circumstances forced them to turn back in Orem, Utah, the very place where, last week, Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Their mission, as strange as the path may seem to us today, was to find a shorter route from Santa Fe to the Franciscan mission in Monterrey, California – and no doubt to prepare the way for evangelization of native populations, who were scratching out an existence on the hard Southwestern ground.

Most people today have little idea of how Catholicism came to the lands now part of the U.S. Southwest. But it’s quite interesting to read the detailed records, with maps and observations on local peoples, that the explorers kept for the Franciscan Order, which have been published in English as The Dominguez-Escalante Journal. …

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