AN article by the late Solange Hertz, posted online today at Tumblar House, re-examines the life of the controversial explorer, who has been the target of endless defamation in recent years. An excerpt:

Curiously enough, the vicious denigration of his character which had served to deprive him of his just rewards in his lifetime, did not die with him, but only gathered momentum after his death. Spawning ever-new calumnies, it grew simultaneously with the revolt against Christendom. Justin Winsor, a biographer representative of the Protestant establishment, summed up at the turn of the last century the heinous opinion of Columbus now prevalent even among educated Catholics. Quoted by Frederick Saunders in The Story of the Discovery of the New World by Columbus, he says:

We have seen a pitiable man meet a pitiable death. Hardly a name in profane history is more august than his. Hardly another character in the world’s record has made so little of its opportunities. His discovery was a blunder; his blunder was a new world; the New World is his monument! Its discoverer might have been its father; he proved to be its despoiler. He might have given its young days such a benignity as the world likes to associate with a maker; he left it a legacy of devastation and crime.

He might have been an unselfish promoter of geographical science; he proved a rabid seeker for gold and a viceroyalty. He might have won converts for the fold of Christ by the kindness of his spirit; he gained the execrations of the good angels. He might, like Las Casas, have rebuked the fiendishness of his contemporaries; he set them an example of perverted unbelief. The triumph of Barcelona led down to the ignominy of Valladolid, with every step in the degradation palpable and resultant.

Such an indictment is a tissue of lies, of a piece with the barrage of calumny let loose by the prospect of Columbus’ canonization, whose foremost promoter was none other than Pope Pius IX, who as a young priest serving the Apostolic Delegate in Chile was the first of Christ’s Vicars to set foot in the New World. He was so convinced of Columbus’ divine mission that he made it one of the first duties of his pontificate to order an official biography compiled from the wealth of Catholic source material to offset the current secularized caricatures then circulating. His choice for this task fell on Comte Antoine Roselly de Lorgues, a Frenchman of Italian ancestry who had already made a beginning in 1844 with La Croix dans les Deux Mondes.

[cont.]

Happy Columbus Day!

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