The controversies surrounding Christopher Columbus are sometimes misplaced and should not overshadow Columbus’ Christian motives in his voyages, a scholar of religious studies and anthropology has said.
“In recent times, Christopher Columbus has become the symbol for everything that went wrong in the New World, so much so that it has become difficult to celebrate the holiday commemorating his discovery of the New World,” Carol Delaney, a visiting scholar of religious studies at Brown University, told CNA.

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/dont-rush-to-judge-columbus-anthropologist-encourages-33184

“I have been dismayed by the lack of knowledge about the man by those who are rushing in judgment against him and changing the day that commemorates his extraordinary achievement.”
“While we may not agree with the scenario that motivated Columbus, it is important to understand him in the context of his time,” she added.

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/dont-rush-to-judge-columbus-anthropologist-encourages-33184

Bio of Columbus after 500 yrs  -- Paolo Taviani
 :cheers:

Without doubt, the best recent paper written about Christopher Columbus can be found in Solange Hertz (RIP)'s ON THE CONTRARY. What I read I had never heard before in my life. Called Discovering Columbus she gives a history of the man and the attempts to undermine his Catholicism and that of the Spanish Queen Isabella of Spain. Oh how I want every Catholic on this forum to read this truth so that Columbus can be seen as the saint he was and not what 'the masters of disinformation' have portrayed him as.

"Already on Holy Thursday, March 28, 1991, giving way before unprecedented pressures from outside [and no doubt inside] the Church, the Roman authorities has suspended the beatification process of Queen Isabella that had begun in 1972 and was nearing a favourable conclusion."

"On his initiative, with the help of that blessed Spanish Queen Isabella the Utopian conspiracy so-called Protestant Reformation was cheated of the definitive victory it looked forward to in Europe. The domain of Christ the King upon this Earth... was suddenly extended beyond any natural calculation. As we have seen, because of the zealous Spanish who followed Columbus across the sea, the millions of souls lost to Protestantism in Europe were more than replaced by those converted to the faith in the Americas. Today more than half the world's Catholics are found there." 

I will quote some more when I have time. Imagine how our generation have been deprived of the truth. "the truth will set you free.'

Incidentally, there is another surprising good man portrayed as a demon for propaganda purposes, Rasputin and would you believe Putin. I will put these sites up elsewhere. 

Rasputin was a punk.... :heretic:

How he can be compared to Columbus is

http://russian-faith.com/people/rasputin-was-great-and-good-man-cruelly-murdered-and-slandered-evil-british-spies-n967

Introduction

‘Rasputin? [Rasputin was a punk] A horse thief, a mad monk, a fraud with hypnotic powers, a priest-charlatan who manipulated stupid, hysterical women, a flagellant sectarian and pervert, a criminal who ruled the Russian Empire, dictating all policies and making all political appointments through bribery, a debauchee who organized orgies, a drunkard (like all Russians), a primitive barbarian, a Satanist, a German spy, the reason for the downfall of Russia, even his name means ‘depraved’.

I know, I have read the book and seen the film’. So goes the view of the average ‘educated’ Western person, as also largely that of the average Soviet citizen. However, they are all the brainwashed victims of the same slanderer and we recall that the Greek for ‘slanderer’ is ‘o diavolos’, ‘the devil’.
In reality, not one bit of the above has been proved true, including that he was a debauchee and a drunkard, and most of it is patently untrue. It is all classic self-justifying Russophobia which says ‘Russians are primitive, we are superior, therefore we can do anything we like’. He was certainly not mad, never a priest, monk, thief or spy, never a flagellant sectarian or a Satanist, and had very little if any political influence. He was a pious Christian peasant, married with three children, who gave generous alms, understood the Holy Scriptures better than professors of the Bible, and was so pious that God gave him miraculous powers of healing. As for his surname, a nickname, it was common in Siberia and denotes someone who lives where roads meet, a crossroads.
On the other hand, what we do know, and this ever since the publication of the memoirs of Prince Nikolay Zhevakhov in the 1920s, is that he was murdered by British spies, with the co-operation of rich, decadent, jealous and apostate Russian aristocrats, one a transvestite prince who dabbled in the occult and savagely and ritually battered Gregory Rasputin’s corpse, as the sadistic freemason and decadent Prince Yusupov himself boasted of doing, one a more or less Fascist politician, another a Romanov prince of notoriously loose morals who betrayed his relative the Tsar. All of them through their murderous betrayal, indirectly, handed Russia over to the genocidal Bolsheviks and their imported alien ideology for three generations, 75 years of hellish torment.
What we also know is that he was much respected as a holy elder (‘starets’) and wonderworking healer by innumerable clergy and laity and that the incredible slanders against him were invented by corrupt sources, both just before the Revolution and immediately afterwards, when his body was dug up and incinerated by fanatics, frightened that veneration for him would grow. All these slanders and the mindless gossip that spread them have to this day been repeated by the sensationalist mammons of Hollywood [and CIF] , by Western and Soviet hack writers and by embittered émigrés who could not accept their responsibility for their self-punishment of exile. They only furthered their self-justifying lies and scandals, which they knew they could make money out of.

edit

http://russian-faith.com/people/rasputin-was-great-and-good-man-cruelly-murdered-and-slandered-evil-british-spies-n967

Introduction

‘Rasputin? [Rasputin was a punk] A horse thief, a mad monk, a fraud with hypnotic powers, a priest-charlatan who manipulated stupid, hysterical women, a flagellant sectarian and pervert, a criminal who ruled the Russian Empire, dictating all policies and making all political appointments through bribery, a debauchee who organized orgies, a drunkard (like all Russians), a primitive barbarian, a Satanist, a German spy, the reason for the downfall of Russia, even his name means ‘depraved’.

I know, I have read the book and seen the film’. So goes the view of the average ‘educated’ Western person, as also largely that of the average Soviet citizen. However, they are all the brainwashed victims of the same slanderer and we recall that the Greek for ‘slanderer’ is ‘o diavolos’, ‘the devil’.
In reality, not one bit of the above has been proved true, including that he was a debauchee and a drunkard, and most of it is patently untrue. It is all classic self-justifying Russophobia which says ‘Russians are primitive, we are superior, therefore we can do anything we like’. He was certainly not mad, never a priest, monk, thief or spy, never a flagellant sectarian or a Satanist, and had very little if any political influence. He was a pious Christian peasant, married with three children, who gave generous alms, understood the Holy Scriptures better than professors of the Bible, and was so pious that God gave him miraculous powers of healing. As for his surname, a nickname, it was common in Siberia and denotes someone who lives where roads meet, a crossroads.
On the other hand, what we do know, and this ever since the publication of the memoirs of Prince Nikolay Zhevakhov in the 1920s, is that he was murdered by British spies, with the co-operation of rich, decadent, jealous and apostate Russian aristocrats, one a transvestite prince who dabbled in the occult and savagely and ritually battered Gregory Rasputin’s corpse, as the sadistic freemason and decadent Prince Yusupov himself boasted of doing, one a more or less Fascist politician, another a Romanov prince of notoriously loose morals who betrayed his relative the Tsar. All of them through their murderous betrayal, indirectly, handed Russia over to the genocidal Bolsheviks and their imported alien ideology for three generations, 75 years of hellish torment.
What we also know is that he was much respected as a holy elder (‘starets’) and wonderworking healer by innumerable clergy and laity and that the incredible slanders against him were invented by corrupt sources, both just before the Revolution and immediately afterwards, when his body was dug up and incinerated by fanatics, frightened that veneration for him would grow. All these slanders and the mindless gossip that spread them have to this day been repeated by the sensationalist mammons of Hollywood [and CIF] , by Western and Soviet hack writers and by embittered émigrés who could not accept their responsibility for their self-punishment of exile. They only furthered their self-justifying lies and scandals, which they knew they could make money out of.

Rasputin was not a true Christian, he was a Schismatic and thus outside the Church of Christ.

Without doubt, the best recent paper written about Christopher Columbus can be found in Solange Hertz (RIP)'s ON THE CONTRARY. What I read I had never heard before in my life. Called Discovering Columbus she gives a history of the man and the attempts to undermine his Catholicism and that of the Spanish Queen Isabella of Spain. Oh how I want every Catholic on this forum to read this truth so that Columbus can be seen as the saint he was and not what 'the masters of disinformation' have portrayed him as.

"Already on Holy Thursday, March 28, 1991, giving way before unprecedented pressures from outside [and no doubt inside] the Church, the Roman authorities has suspended the beatification process of Queen Isabella that had begun in 1972 and was nearing a favourable conclusion."

"On his initiative, with the help of that blessed Spanish Queen Isabella the Utopian conspiracy so-called Protestant Reformation was cheated of the definitive victory it looked forward to in Europe. The domain of Christ the King upon this Earth... was suddenly extended beyond any natural calculation. As we have seen, because of the zealous Spanish who followed Columbus across the sea, the millions of souls lost to Protestantism in Europe were more than replaced by those converted to the faith in the Americas. Today more than half the world's Catholics are found there."

I will quote some more when I have time. Imagine how our generation have been deprived of the truth. "the truth will set you free.'

Incidentally, there is another surprising good man portrayed as a demon for propaganda purposes, Rasputin and would you believe Putin. I will put these sites up elsewhere.

Discovering the Real Christopher Columbus
Written by  Solange Hertz (Longtime Remnant Columnist, RIP)

Christopher Columbus, Apostle to America
THE BLACK LEGEND REVISITED
(Reproduced from The Remnant, October 1992) 

This year of Our Lord 1992, Quincentenary of Columbus’ discovery of America, finds the Black Legend demonstrably renewed in vigour and purpose. As Columbus Day approaches, the old hispanophobia so dear to enemies of Christ the King is taking on a new allure.  Already on Holy Thursday, March 28th, 1991, giving way before unprecedented pressures from outside the Church, Rome suspended the beatification process of Queen Isabella which had begun in 1972 and was nearing a favourable conclusion. As the defamatory exposes of Columbus, indicted for opening the American continents to ruthless Spanish exploitation, approach a crescendo in the media, our hallowed October 12 bids fair to provoke more controversy than celebration.

Early on the masters of disinformation turned their attention to arousing the indignation of the young. Last December’s issue of Accuracy in Academia’s Campus Report, published in Washington D.C.  sported a front page story on radical students’ condemnation of Columbus entitled.  “Discover Columbus’ Legacy: 500 years of racism, oppression and stolen land.” Already the University of Illinois student government had proclaimed last Columbus Day “People of Color Genocide Remembrance Day,” which it declared ‘marked the beginning of slavery, colonialism and other manifestations of White Supremacy’ Native American Indians, Jєωs, Moslems, African Americans, even Asians have now been inspired to join the ranks of those voicing protest against the Columbian encroachment on their rights, past or future, real or imaginary.

The whole pack seems to have found a spokesman in Kirkpatrick Sale, author of the popular and vicious The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. At least he furnishes a lot of ready quotations. The Houston Chronicle reports him as informing a teacher’s meeting that the explorer ‘was a careless mariner and cruel to his crew. Columbus’ voyage to the New World expanded European colonialism, slavery, capitalism   and   environmental degradation, among other things.’^[1]  There must have been plenty of other things, for the National Council of Churches passed a resolution calling Columbus’ arrival an invasion to be commemorated by mourning rather than celebration.

The headline to an article in the Long Island Newsday by Hans Koning, author of Columbus: His Enterprise, went even further by asking, ‘Does Columbus Deserve a Day?  The man was a cruel, greedy tyrant who drove friendly Indians to mass ѕυιcιdє.’ Wow! According to Koning, the Discoverer ‘had Indian chiefs hanged and roasted on slow-burning fires to break all resistance against the forces collecting gold dust in the streams ....Men, women and children on Columbus’ Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) were hacked to pieces and the pieces sold from stalls to the Spanish soldiers for their dogs,  it being considered ‘good military policy to give those dogs a taste for Indians.’^[2]     Even Catholics are beginning to believe these tales.

Before the year is over maybe the Spaniards will be accused of setting back organ transplants 500 years by interfering with the Aztec practice of ripping out hearts from living donors.    What an irreparable loss that these ancient techniques, part of the great American heritage were not transmitted to posterity!  In a background paper issued by the American Bishops “Commemorating 500 Years of Christianity in the Americas,” we read that Christianity’s record here has been ‘marred by intolerance, intransigence, insensitivity and cruelty . . . For these wrongs the Church seeks forgiveness and reconciliation . . . Our earliest history teaches us that evangelization   must  never again   be   linked   with conquest . . . This quincentennial commemoration presents Christianity with an occasion for a profound reappraisal of the mission of the Church in the world.’

THE REAL TARGET

It’s not surprising that the Bishops’ paper ends with a quotation from Hegel, something about Minerva’s owl flying only at sunset, ‘at the end of an era.’  And indeed now at last the Black Legend’s objective comes into full view: Those stock characters of Hollywood history, the greedy conquistadors and the cunning friars, the lascivious Borgia Pope and the leering Philip II in black and silver, still haunt the torture chambers of the Inquisition and gloat at the auto da fe, but now we are told that these were merely the tip of the iceberg. The battle between the clean-living, Bible-thumping, freedom-loving, short-haired WASP and the beplumed, libertine long-haired Latin papist, waged with such gusto for two centuries in Usan textbooks, dime novels and movie scenarios, has given way to a larger conflict.

Suddenly the villain in the Black Legend is no longer just the Spaniard, in 1992, against the backdrop of all the solve et coagula^[3] -  now actually setting up the new secularist world government, the real villain emerges. He is the whole of believing, multiplying Catholic civilization, the civilization of which the Spaniard was merely the chosen representative and spearhead in the New world.   In other words, the target of the Black Legend is, was and can only be Catholic Christendom, for whose errors the American bishops are now humbly begging pardon.

Informed by the supernatural vitality communicated to it by the Church, Christendom alone produced European civilization and sustained it for over a thousand years. In the person of Christopher Columbus, Christendom discovered, nay, conquered America for Christ.  Its political system has been dismantled by democracy, its economic life poisoned by usury, and its moral life sapped by humanism, but Catholic Christendom still lives and breathes.  Its limp, lacerated body must still be reckoned with, for weak as it is, it is humanly speaking the only thing still capable of obstructing the final victory of the Novus Ordo Seclorum.  The venom provoked, by the very memory of Christopher Columbus proves it.

This new order of the ages, which first took root on the American continent with the establishment of the United States, now commands satellites throughout the world, even in Communist countries.  Judaeo - Masonic utopianism cannot abide even a reminder of the old order of the ages which is God’s and Christ the King’s, let alone commemorate it. Christopher Columbus’ unpardonable sin was not racism or greed for gold, as his detractors allege. Like the Spaniard, he stands guilty of being a loyal son of the Catholic Church, whose cause was his very own.   He cannot be forgiven for laying claim to a whole new continent in the name of Christ the King and planting the Faith on its shores three hundred years before the new man-made republic could even reach them.

On his initiative, with the help of that Blessed Spanish queen Isabella - to her eternal honour yclept La Catolica - the Utopian conspiracy’s so-called Protestant Reformation was cheated of the victory it believed assured in Europe.  The domain of Christ the King upon this earth, which His adversaries confidently expected would soon dwindle to nothing, was suddenly extended beyond any natural calculation.   Because of the zealous Spanish who followed Columbus across the sea, the millions of souls lost to Protestantism in Europe were more than replaced by other millions converted to the Faith in the Americas.  Today more than half of the world’s Catholics are found there.

Large portions of Europe were saved as well, for the wealth of America made it possible for Spain to put unprecedented military and political resources at the service of Catholic Christendom.  American gold not only financed the defeat of Islam at Lepanto under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, it also provided funds for halting the spread of Protestantism by curbing the ambitions of England and Holland.  It could be said that Columbus and Isabella were God’s answer to the anguished prayer of the Church in the face of the burgeoning Reformation.

THE CHURCH DREW THE LINE

To these two saviours of the Church Militant should be added a third: Rodrigo Borgia, another Spaniard, who as Pope Alexander VI solemnly ratified Columbus’ discoveries and formally extended Christ’s sovereignty from the old world to include the new.  By three Bulls in May and September 1493, this Pontiff drew from north to south through the Atlantic the famous Demarcation Line which divided the new hemisphere between Catholic Spain and Portugal, entrusting its evangelization to the two rivals in perpetuity.

Columbus Appearing Before Queen Isabella and the Spanish Court

The Line itself was probably suggested by Columbus, for it is substantially the line of no magnetic variation where his compass deflected and pointed to the true north for the first time in recorded history, the magnetic pole and the north star being in conjunction at that point.  Because it had been set by Christ’s Vicar, Columbus himself abided by it scrupulously on his later voyages.  Other Catholic nations soon found it a major obstacle to their ambitions, however, and the Protestant nations, eager to establish a foothold on the other side of the Atlantic at any cost, would openly disregard it. Alexander’s Bull Inter cetera was subsequently modified but it has never been abrogated by any proper authority and presumably still stands.

‘It should not surprise us,’ wrote Archbishop Kenrick of Baltimore, ‘that the right to give, as it were, a charter for the discovery of unknown lands to a national corporation in a Christian confederacy should be recognized in him whose office imposed on him the duty of spreading the Gospel throughout all nations.’^[4]  The power Alexander exercised as supreme head of humanity has never been formally defined by the Church, but it was universally recognized from earliest times that the Popes had power to dispose of heathen lands as well as Christian Kingdoms. The famous 8th century mosaic at St John Lateran, showing St Peter bestowing the pallium on Pope Leo III with his right hand even as he hands the secular standard to Charlemagne with his left, would bear this out.

In II fermo proposito:  St Pius X calls the Church ‘the guardian and protector of Christian society. Such a fact was universally recognized and admitted in other periods of history; in fact, it formed a solid foundation for civil legislation . . . What excellent government could be obtained and maintained in the world if one could see in practice the perfect ideal of Christian civilization!  However, granting the continual battle of the flesh against the spirit, of darkness against light, of Satan against God, such cannot be hoped for, at least in all its fullness.  Hence raids are continually being made on the peaceful conquests of the Church.’

Powerless to set aside the Bull, these hostile forces vented their rage against its author. Like Columbus and Isabella, Alexander VI became the object of calumny to the point that even among Catholics the very name Borgia has become synonymous with infamy. That is another story, as is Isabella’s, but suffice it to say that the worst accusations against Alexander’s private life remain far from proven, and defenders have not been lacking.^[5]

COLUMBUS WHO?  Was he Greek?

We do not know who Columbus was.  Because he was a skilled mariner, described by contemporaries as tall, blond and blue eyed. Viking ancestry has been ascribed to him, among others. There is greater evidence, however, that he may have been a Greek Byzantine noble who found refuge in Italy after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453.   Possibly a descendant of the Emperors Paleologoi, he would therefore be, according to one tradition, of the line of David, like our Lord, the Gonzagas and the true Christian monarchs. Although Columbus knew Greek, this theory is hard to reconcile with his lack of familiarity with Greek liturgy and popular devotions.^[6]

A more compelling argument would be his knowledge of geography and the natural sciences, which was considerably beyond the western norm. His alleged correspondence with the famous geographer Toscanetti of Florence would have supplied him with no useful information about America.  As a youth he would have been steeped in the tradition of the second century geographer Claudius Ptolemy, who not only knew the world was round, but knew how to get around it.  Ptolemy’s teaching, rooted in Pythagoras and Aristotle, had never been abandoned in Byzantium.  Nor had that of the great Eratosthenes and his follower Strabo, who in the first century A.D. declared it possible to sail from Spain to the Indies, an opinion on which Columbus relied heavily.

He was thoroughly aware of the tradition in the East about the great continent lying beyond Gibraltar which figures in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Theopompus, Diodorus, Pausanias and many others. Its discovery had been long anticipated, as proved by the prophecy which Seneca incorporated into the second act of his Medea: ‘In time to come, the day will arrive when the ocean will break the bonds of nature and a majestic land will be revealed to men.  And to them Tethys will reveal new worlds, and no longer will Thule be the farthest point of inhabited regions.’ Columbus cites these words in his famous Libro de las Profecias, a work still untranslated which he compiled with the help of Fray Gaspar de Gorricio from passages in Scripture and elsewhere which he believed foretold his discovery of a new world.^[7]  In an annotation of Medea, his son Fernando stated, ‘This prophecy was achieved by my father the Admiral Christopher Columbus in 1492.’

No serious scholar today would contend that Columbus was the first to discover America, divinely inspired as his mission may have been.  His knowledge of the ancients alone would have led him to disclaim the idea, especially after he found European relics on the island of Guadeloupe. As a matter of fact, he inclined to a notion prevalent at the time that America was the continent on whose soil the Garden of Eden had been located. Like Aristotle and Theophrastus and their successors, he accepted as historical the accounts of ancient Atlantis given by Plato in his Critias and Timaeus which relate the defeat of the Atlanteans by the Athenians and the giant earthquake lasting a day and half which plunged all into the sea. When Columbus set sail, he knew that the impenetrable expanse of seaweed called the Sargasso Sea, spawned by the mud and shallows created by the turbulence of sinking Atlantis, had by that time subsided sufficiently to permit passage through it to the west.

It is unlikely he ever intended to reach India, but deemed it prudent to conceal his real destination from the general public.  The only goods he took with him were cheap glass beads and coloured cloth, in no way suitable for the sophisticated Indian trade. He did not stumble on America by accident, and he expected to find there relatively primitive natives.  Nor was the voyage anticipated by the Admiral anywhere near the 10,000 miles it would have taken to get to India, but a mere 3,500, just about the distance from the Canary Islands to the Bahamas.  India is nowhere mentioned in his final agreement with Isabella, which only specifies some land in the Atlantic, reading, ‘Whereas you, Cristobal Colon, are setting forth by our command . . . to discover and acquire certain islands and mainland in the ocean sea. . .’

OR WAS HE A Jєω?

If not a Greek, there is even more compelling evidence that Columbus may have been of Jєωιѕн descent.  In a biography of the explorer published in 1939, Professor Salvador Madariaga, Fellow of Exeter College, was among the first to explore this possibility in depth.  It was taken up again in 1973 by Simon Wiesenthal in Sails of Hope, The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus. These authors would argue that Columbus was in fact a Spanish Marrano living in Italy whose very signature betrays familiarity with the kabbala. Because it is known he aspired to using the wealth of America to free Jerusalem from Islam, they infer that he in fact wished to restore the Holy City to the Jєωs.  Much has also been made of the fact that Columbus left Spain to “sail the ocean blue” in August 1492, the very month that the Jєωs were expelled from Spain, as if he had been leaving the country for fear of the Inquisition.

That is pure speculation. If indeed Columbus was Jєωιѕн, he would have been a converso, a Catholic descended from Jєωιѕн converts to the Faith, who numbered in the thousands in Spain at the time.  As such he would have had no reason to fear either the inquisition or expulsion.   This opinion was confirmed in 1967 by Fr. Nazario Muria, cultural attaché of the Venezuelan Embassy in Madrid, who conducted an investigation into Columbus’ origins.^[8]  He believed that Columbus’ given name was Juan and that he had actually been born on Palma de Mallorca, but had fled the island when he was 21 to avoid a death sentence for taking part in a revolt.

In weighing these allegations, it must be kept in mind that anti-Semitism directed to parentage was virtually unknown in Isabella’s dominions.   Her own confessor Talavera was of Jєωιѕн extraction, as was her private secretary Pulgar, the chancellor of the royal household Luis de Santangel, her treasurer general Gabriel Sanchez and nearly all her privy counsellors. On the voyage to America which she underwrote were two Jєωιѕн doctors and the official interpreter. Hardly a Spaniard today can be certain of not having Jєωιѕн blood somewhere in his ancestry.  The reason there were so many Jєωs in Spain is that they had been so welcome there. Unfortunately, as their numbers increased, so did the tensions between them and the Christians, but this was a religious matter nothing to do with race.

Such violence erupted in Valladolid in 1470, in Cordova in 1474 and in Seville in 1478, that Isabella regretfully decided on expulsion as the only realistic means of protecting the Jєωs themselves from massacre. She decreed the death penalty for anyone harming them in person or property, and was known to extend the date of their departure where special circuмstances warranted.  In adopting this measure Isabella was actually far behind the other Christian monarchs. Jєωs had already been expelled from England in 1290, a full 200 years before. France had expelled them in 1306, and Germany in 1348. The first inquisition was not established in Spain, but very much earlier in France, in 1233. Her example was eventually followed by all the other Christian nations, not only Catholic, but also Protestant.

The papal inquisition which Isabella petitioned Rome for had jurisdiction only over Catholics.   It was never directed against Jєωs as such, for unless these declared themselves Catholics, the Tribunal had no authority to try them. Professed Mohammedans were equally exempt.  Punishment was meted out only to those found guilty of professing the Faith falsely, and who need never have done so. Even so actual executions were relatively few.  William Thomas Walsh remarks, ‘In the long run the Spanish Inquisition proved to be a life-saving organism, in the sense that it averted more deaths than it caused.  Not only was Spain free from the terrible religious wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives in countries where Protestantism obtained a foothold, but she escaped almost completely the terrors of witch burning, which claimed 100,000 victims in Germany and 30,000 in Great Britain.’^[9]

THE UNKNOWN EXPLORER

Whatever his background, Columbus the man has yet to be discovered. We are not even certain where he is buried. Both Spain and the Dominican Republic claim his remains, and it is possible that Cuba and Italy possess some portions.  The dispute began in 1506 when he is said to have died in Valladotid, and has continued to this day.  Lately a study into the genetic composition of the available bone samples is expected to cast some light on the matter. Another riddle is Columbus’ extraordinary pyramidal 12-character signature, whether or not it is derived from the kabbala.

 
   
 
Some biographers like Samuel Eliot Morison have attached religious significance to it. One of the latest theories, advanced by an aerospace engineer named Arne Molander, is that it maps the three Caribbean islands on which Columbus first landed.  All these questions and many others remain open.

Regarding his origins, the best surmise is negative: he was not Italian.  Judging by his first marriage into the aristocratic Portuguese family of the Perestrellos, or the ease with which he moved among the titled nobility of this world, it is first of all hard to believe that he was ever a poor Genoese weaver’s son.  Furthermore, if he was born in Genoa, he showed that city no particular loyalty, for in 1476 he actually fought against it on the side of the Portuguese. He never wrote in Italian.  He was proficient in Latin and Hebrew as well as Greek, but his preferred vernacular was always Spanish, and he used the Spanish form of his name, Cristobal Colon rather than the Italian form, Cristoforo Colombo.

What is not known about him continues to exceed what is known for certain.  In fact, the abnormal degree of obfuscation surrounding him suggests that much of it was deliberately contrived, not only by his enemies, but perhaps some of it by himself, and later by his son Fernando.  The motives can only be guessed at.  Exploring Columbus is a foray into a world of enigmas, contradictions, gaps and sudden drops into the void.  Anyone pretending to know very much more for sure about the discoverer of America thereby only reveals his ignorance.  After five centuries, Columbus himself remains undiscovered.

WAS COLUMBUS A SAINT?
We do not know what Columbus looked like.  Although several descriptions of him were left in writing, among them one by the famous converso Fray Bartlome de las Casas who sailed with him on one of his voyages and later became Councilman of the Indies, we possess no contemporary portrait of him. Many were produced after his death, but among these, few bear any resemblance to another.

Judged the most authentic is a woodcut first reproduced in Basle in 1575 in a biographical work by the Archbishop of Nocera.  Declared by the Royal Academy of History in Madrid in 1862 to be the oldest reliable likeness in existence, it is believed to have been copied from an original painted in 1493 after his second voyage to America.   This woodcut accords perfectly with a description of Columbus given by the curate with whom he had stayed in Palacios: ‘The Admiral arrived in Castile.  His dress was of the same order as that worn by the monks of St Francis, and in shape somewhat similar to the robes of the Order, and with the rope of St. Francis around the waist for the sake of devotion.’ (By “monks” the curate was referring to friars of the Strict Observance.)

Needless to say, this view of Columbus as a Franciscan Tertiary is hardly the one projected by his detractors or even by his standard biographers, yet the Columbus revealed by those who had known him personally seems very like the man pictured in the woodcut. His son Fernando says, ‘Of religious things he was so observant that in fact, in saying his entire canonical office, he might be deemed a professed religious, and was such an enemy of oaths that I never heard him swear; and when he found himself most angry, his reproof was to say, “I give you to God; why have you said or done this?” And if anything were to be written, he did not begin without first writing these words: Jesus cuм Maria sit nobis in via.’

Las Casas wrote of him, ’He was quick-witted and gαy in his speech . . . eloquent and high sounding in his business; he was moderately grave; affable towards strangers; sweet and good-humoured with those of his house . . . of a discreet conversation and thus able to draw love from all who saw him. Finally, his person and venerable mien revealed a person of great state and authority and worthy of all reverence; he was sober and moderate in his food, drink, garments and shoes.... In matters of Christian religion, no doubt he was a Catholic and of great devotion . . ..’

‘He fasted with the utmost strictness when ordained by the Church; he confessed often and received Communion . . . a very devout worshiper of Our Lady and the Seraphic Father St. Francis; he seemed to be very grateful to God for the benefits received at the divine hand, and so it was almost a proverb with him, which he quoted every hour, that God had shown him great favour, as to David. When Gold or precious objects were brought to him, he entered his chapel and said, “Let us thank God who made us worthy of discovering so much wealth.”’

‘He was a most jealous keeper of the honour of God; eager to convert the peoples and to see the seed and faith of Jesus Christ spread everywhere, and especially devoted to the hope that God would make him worthy of helping Him in winning back the Holy Sepulchre; and in this devotion and the confidence which he had that God would help him in the discovery of this world which he promised, he begged Queen Isabel to make a vow that she should spend all the wealth gained by the Crown as a result of the discovery in winning back the land and holy house of Jerusalem, which the Queen did.’

THE PROPOSED CANONIZATION

For the most part even Catholics are unaware that Rome at one time was seriously entertaining the possibility of canonizing Columbus.  Foremost promoter of his cause was Pope Pius IX, who as a young priest serving the Apostolic Delegate in Chile, was the first of Christ’s Vicars to have set foot in the New world.   He was so convinced of Columbus’ divine mission, he made it one of the first duties of his pontificate to order the compilation of an official biography from the wealth of original Catholic sources which would offset the secularized caricatures of the discoverer then prevalent.  His choice for this work 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.

The new biography was greeted with such enthusiasm when it appeared in 1856, that by 1877 the author was formally designated Postulator for the cause of the Franciscan Tertiary Christopher Columbus by letters patent from the Franciscan Father General Fr. Benardin.  In this capacity de Lorgues received 910 public letters and 80 private ones from Cardinals, Bishops, Metropolitans and Apostolic Delegates from all over the world urging the Postulatum, letters subsequently deposited in the Franciscan archives in Rome. An ardent French supporter was the future Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, otherwise known for reproving Pius IX for his early liberalism.

In a Brief commending de Lorgues, this Pope spoke of Columbus as one who, ‘inflamed with zeal for the Catholic faith, resolved by undertaking the most daring of navigations to discover a new world, not for the purpose of adding new lands to the kingdom of Spain, but to place new peoples under the reign of Christ, in other words, the Church.’   Momentum gathered for the cause, which was much discussed between sessions of the First Vatican Council and kept before the public by Civilta Catolica and the whole Catholic press.

BATTLE IS JOINED

Keeping pace with these developments, unfortunately, was a well-orchestrated campaign to insure that they came to nothing. For a half century battle had been raging between the forces of Christ the King, with the Pope and the Comte at their head, and those of rationalist humanism led by an ex-Barnabite priest named Angelo Sanguineti. De Lorgues steadfastly maintained that no one not believing in the supernatural can begin to understand Columbus: ‘Let freethinkers be advised that Christopher Columbus’ superiority was principally the result of his Catholic virtues. To judge him according to the spirit of the world. with the scientific pretensions and prejudices of our day, is both error and injustice. We have therefore presented the Revealer of the Globe as he really was, and not as depicted by biographers who are enemies of the very principle which made his greatness and glory.’^[10]

Until de Lorgues wrote, even in Italy the only work available to the general public on Columbus was the old biography by Washington Irving published in 1828, which had been translated, abridged and adapted by Sanguineti, whose positivist, Masonic leanings were well known. Although Irving himself was a conscientious, honest scholar, he was no Catholic, and unfortunately his researches in Spain were conducted with the assistance of biased historians like Don Martin Fernandez de Navarette.  To read Irving and de Lorgues together is to wonder in places whether they are writing about the same man.

This series, under the title “Discovering Cristobal Colon”, first appeared in The Remnant back in 1992. For 50 Years The Remnant has been going to press every two weeks, defending Catholic history, liturgy and morality. Isn't it time to subscribe?

 
CALCULATED DEFAMATION
Critics like Sanguineti were quick to follow the lead of a Protestant minister named William Patterson, who publicized the idea that Columbus was of no personal importance, inasmuch as, with the rise of scientific knowledge, America was bound to be discovered by somebody in the natural course of events. The divine inspiration of the discovery they dismissed as fantasy, choosing to disregard any evidence to the contrary.  For instance, the Yale scholar Edward gαylord Bourne pointed out that Columbus left marginal notations disagreeing in the light of his own nautical experience with the opinions of Aeneas Sylvius, Pierre d’Aitly and Marco Polo, the very authorities credited with having inspired him. As for the correspondence with Dr Toscanelli, Bourne believed the letters may have been forged expressly ‘to give Columbus’ voyage the character of a reasoned scientific experiment and the dignity of the patronage of a great scholar.’^[11]

Systematic character assassination of the explorer was particularly directed to excluding the possibility of a supernatural inspiration. Even in his lifetime he had been accused of cupidity, trafficking in human flesh, vainglory, sorcery, mismanagement, felony, sacrilege and treason, so furious was the opposition against him. The junta in Salamanca before whom he laid his theory had even suspected him of heresy.  Such accusations, however, always ended by evaporating before the evidence. The charge of enslaving and exploiting the Indians, so popular with his modern detractors, rests largely on sins committed by those who came after him.  He and his relatives never owned slaves.  On one occasion Columbus even refused the insistent request of an Indian cacique who wanted him to take representatives of his court back with him to Spain.

It is true that he followed the accepted practice of his time by countenancing the enslavement of prisoners of war and irreconcilable rebels, in the interests of the common safety. Even so, when three years after the conquest shiploads of these first arrived in Spain, Isabella absolutely forbade their sale. when Columbus after his third voyage presented each of his men with an Indian for a personal servant, Isabella had them all sent back with an indignant ‘Who authorized my admiral to dispose of my subjects in this manner?’ And there the matter rested as far as she and Columbus were concerned.

RETROSPECTIVE IMMORALITY

The slander which damaged his reputation irreparably was never voiced in his lifetime, but only 72 years after his death.  This was his alleged amour with Beatriz Enriquez de Arana in Cordova, entailing the presumed illegitimacy of his second son Fernando, borne by her.  Despite the fact that no contemporary is known to have ever raised the question, not even his worst enemies, this supposed lapse in virtue proved to be the salacious tidbit which captured public attention. It was accepted without question by Washington Irving, and nearly all the other biographers from Von Humboldt on down followed suit.

As de Lorgues pointed out, an affaire de coeur in itself constitutes no irremediable bar to universal respect, nor for that matter to canonization. Saints who erred in that direction have later risen to sanctity. In this case, however, the incrimination is absolutely false. It runs counter to a record of impeccable chastity in a man exposed to the gravest dangers to this virtue, a virtue which even his most hostile contemporaries never accused him of infringing.  It was based almost entirely on the fact that no marriage record of the relationship has yet been found, and on the wording of Columbus’ will, which refers to Beatriz merely as ‘mother of Don Fernando, my son,’ and enjoins on Diego, his elder son by his deceased first wife, to see that Beatriz ‘may be able to live becomingly as to one to whom I owe so much.  And let this be for the unburdening of my conscience, as this weighs heavily on my heart.  It is not meet to give the reason here.’  To this last testament he appended his customary signature: Christo-ferens, Christ- bearer.

Columbus Statues Being Removed, Defaced in America 2017:

It is significant that the allegation made its appearance only with the extinction of Columbus’ male line, and in lawsuit. Columbus had specified that no illegitimate heir be recognized among his descendants, the succession passing rather to the female line in such an eventuality.  For this reason, a certain Cristobal, bastard son of Luis Colon, sought to establish his claim by invoking Fernando’s illegitimacy as a precedent.  Being unable to produce even one docuмent or a reliable witness, he lost his case.  In 1792 another lawsuit, on the part of Don Mariano Colon y Larriatequy, was brought against the incuмbent of the estate; but here again the judge, Don Perez de Castro, catted the imputation ‘false, calumnious and without support,’ putting at least a legal end to the matter.

The royal historian Antonio Herrera recorded categorically of Columbus, ‘He married Felipa Moniz de Perestrello’ (whom he had met in Lisbon at daily Mass), ‘and by her had Diego Colon.  After the death of this first wife, he married a second called Beatriz of the city of Cordoba by whom he had Fernando, a virtuous gentleman highly lettered.’   So say other historians with the facts.  There is furthermore an extant autograph of Columbus addressed to the Court in which he laments that because of his explorations he ‘left wife and children.’

THE SIMPLE EXPLANATION

Without indulging in details, be it noted that the lack of a marriage record proves nothing in itself.  Moreover, before the Council of Trent none was strictly required, even clandestine marriages before a priest being recognized as valid.  In any case an illicit liaison would hardly have been tolerated by Beatriz’ family, the proud Aranas, with whom Columbus always remained on the best of terms.  One of their members, Pedro, marched under his banner, and another, Diego, was governor of his colony in Haiti.  Least of all could such an affair have been carried on under the eyes of Isabella in Cordoba, a city whose morals she kept under strictest surveillance.   Nor would she have retained the young Fernando as page to her own son Prince Juan had there been the slightest cloud over his reputation.

Columbus' mysterious “unburdening of conscience” at the time of his will was explained long ago by Count Baldassare Colombo de Cuccaro of the Italian branch of the family. Seeking firsthand information from Beatriz’ family in 1590, he found that Beatriz, forced to rear her son Fernando alone during Columbus’ enforced absences, had also taken charge of Diego.   She had furthermore spent nearly all her small fortune meeting the expenses of his first expedition, for which she was only partially reimbursed at the time of his death.^[12] This debt was what weighed on Columbus' conscience and not any irregularity in his relationship to her.

The reason ‘not meet to give’ was the fact that after Isabella’s death, King Ferdinand showed no inclination to pay the sum owing!   Neither then nor later did the Cuccaros entertain the notion of Ferdinand’s illegitimacy, but the falsehood was not allowed to die, especially in Italy, where the Dominican priest Giustiani who pioneered the vernacular polyglot Psalter propagated it assiduously.  It turned up again in a paper to the Royal Academy in Turin by Count Galeani Napione, who apparently deliberately suppressed the Cuccaro evidence.   A Genoese priest named Spotorno who trained Fr. Sanguineti also took up the story.

Perhaps the most damage was done by the Protestant wise man Alexander von Humboldt, who lent the greatest veracity to the Discoverer's “romance” by excusing and glamorizing it.  This man of science also subscribed to the notion that Columbus never really knew what he had discovered, despite Columbus’ own written testimony to the effect that he had found a whole new world, and that another ocean lay behind Panama! Humboldt’s reputation was such, however, that the majority of modern scholars accepted his opinions as fact without daring to question them. Thereafter it was merely a question of telling the same lies often enough to establish them as truth.

THE CAUSE FRUSTRATED

When Sanguineti’s venomous opus The Canonization of Christopher Columbus appeared, his protector the Metropolitan Archbishop of Genoa, alleged birthplace of Columbus, forbade ecclesiastics to discuss the matter under pain of suspension, so that no refutation of the calumnies contained in the book could be made.  At the same time, a monumental, definitive edition canonizing the lies about Columbus was published in Barcelona under the direction of Jose Maria Asensio.  Many of its prevarications, taken up later by American historians like Justin Winsor and Henry hαɾɾιsse, have been resurrected for the Quincentenary.

Vowing to quash the canonization at all costs, Sanguineti boasted later, ‘I, with one breath, burst that soap bubble!’ The first of many to lay before the secular public, without submission to Church authority, what was a purely ecclesiastical matter, he proved a true harbinger of the baleful ‘spirit of Vatican II’. With the help of two Freemasons, the Parisian Macaya d’Avezac and Cesar Fernandez Duro of the Spanish Academy, he succeeded in so denigrating Columbus in the public press that eventually the Church, as today in the case of Isabella, deemed it prudent to suspend its efforts.

This despite the fact that the generality of the faithful had accepted Columbus' sanctity without demur. In the very teeth of the opposition, on July 16, 1892, Pius’ successor Leo XIII declared in a pontifical Letter that Columbus had in truth acted for the Church: Columbus noster est, Columbus is ours! In accord with Columbus’ own express wishes, the Pope ordered liturgical prayers of thanksgiving in honor of the Most Blessed Trinity at the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Discovery. ‘All possible honours’ to the discoverer were also enjoined.  Every Christian nation took active part in the universal recognition of Columbus except for France, whose episcopacy was already in the power of Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ.

From thence the same cold worldwide silence which had engulfed Melanie Calvat of La Salette gradually began surrounding Columbus.  His caused languished.  Although de Lorgues, guilty at best of occasional exaggeration and a few honest errors, lived to be 92 and eventually published 8 volumes of painstaking, docuмented refutation, his work was dismissed as “non-historical.”  When at the close of the century the American historian Richard Clarke queried Rome in connection with his new book Old and New Lights on Columbus, he was told, ‘The Sacred Congregation of Rites cannot treat of the Cause of Christopher Columbus till the diocesan processes are completed, and these have not thus far been begun.’ There the matter rested. Today even Columbus’ patron saint St. Christopher has disappeared from the calendar.

At small loss for an explanation, Comte de Lorgues wrote shortly before his death in 1898; ‘Providence willed that the greatest event on the earth, the discovery of the New World, should be brought about by a saint; and that after almost three centuries of neglect or error, in the pontificate of the first pope to cross the Atlantic, there be revealed at last to the eyes of Christian nations the true character of the man raised up for the vastest work of human genius and divine mercy.  But inasmuch as the historical rehabilitation ordered by the immortal Pius IX implied the glorification of Catholicism, it was deemed unbearable to the pride of freethinkers, to the enemies of the Church, to the deniers of the supernatural, who adamantly refuse God the right to meddle in affairs here below.’

MISSIONARY TO THE OTHER WORLD: Apostolic America


If Columbus was too learned to believe he was the first to discover America, he would also have suspected he was not the first Christian to set foot there, for it was once common opinion that America had been evangelized in Apostolic times.

In his Letter to the Corinthians, St Clement spoke of ‘the other world’ as common knowledge; and even the great St. Paul tells the Colossians that they have received the same Gospel ‘as also it is in the whole world’ (Col 1:6).  There are consistent references to ‘world beyond the ocean’ in the writings of the Fathers, notably St. Hilary and St. Ambrose, not to mention St. Thom