Yes, Christopher Columbus, by Robert Royal

Today is Columbus Day, or (among the alternatively oriented) Native Peoples’ Day, both displaced in any case, as even major Catholic feasts now are, to a different date, so that people will have long weekends, or not be inconvenienced, or something. In any event, it’s a day now redefined in terms that make it unclear what, if anything, we are celebrating, or deploring, in this booming, buzzing confusion that we still (kind of) think of as the twenty-first Christian century.

So let us seek a little clarity.

For most of subsequent history following his voyages, Columbus’ reputation was strong and settled. It began to change, in the nineteenth century, in the United States, of all places. Washington Irving got the idea that Columbus must have been a Protestant and a Progressive – he opposed the council of learned theologians, you see, who told him (rightly) that the distance from Spain to China was greater than he was saying. But in an expanding and confident America, El Almirante became, in Irving’s imagination, the precursor of American initiative and vision. ….

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