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SECULAR FRANCISCAN ORDER
FIVE
FRANCISCAN MARTYRS REGION
THE NEWSLETTER
SEPTEMBER,
2006 |
The Legacy of Christopher Columbus
Fr. Thomas K Murphy, OFM
In the U.S.A. the fame of Christopher Columbus
probably reached its peak when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
in the midst of the Great Depression (1934), proclaimed October 12th
as a national holiday. The scholars of the Western world have
generally held Columbus in the highest regard. One Spanish
historian, Francisco Lopez de Gomara, wrote in 1552: "The greatest
event since the creation of the world (excluding the Incarnation and
death of Him who created it) is the discovery of the Indies"
(cf.
Conquest of Paradise, Kirkpatrick Sale,
1990, page 224).
Already before his death in 1506, the renown of
the great explorer began to be eclipsed within the Spanish
government under whose patronage the enterprise was accomplished.
Queen Isabell, his chief patroness in the Spanish court, died in
1504 shortly after his return from the fourth voyage. King Ferdinand
(1479-1516) never had a warm relationship with Columbus and very
much resented the persistent claims which Columbus and his older
son, Diego, brought before the court, charging that Columbus had not
received from the Crown all that was promised in the original
agreement signed in April 1492 in Granada, Spain.
Later, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519-1556),
grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, revoked the appointment of Diego
Columbus (Christopher's older son) as Governor General of the
Indies. It is commonly reported that this emperor forbade mention of
the name of Columbus in his presence. The proscription of Columbus
at this time contributed to the fact that the New World eventually
came to be named not for Columbus but for Amerigo Vespucci, who
beginning in 1499 made several voyages to the New World and wrote
interesting accounts of what he called the new "fourth part of the
world," adding to Europe, Asia, and Africa already known.
In 1507, a German map maker, Martin Waldseemüller,
after reading a predated (1497) account of Vespucci's explorations,
proceeded to label the new continent on his map "America" in honor
of Amerigo Vespucci. Despite some strong objections, "America"
prevailed, and Columbus continued to recede from the spotlight of
history. In 1592 and in 1692 there appears to be no reports of
celebrations in honor of Columbus in the colonies of the New World.
During the 18th century, the truth of Columbus'
great discovery once again came more and more to be recognized in
educated circles. In 1784 King's College in New York City changed
its name to "Columbia." In 1786 Columbia, South Carolina became the
new capitol of that state. In 1792 the new capitol of the United
States became Washington, District of Columbia. In 1812 the State of
Ohio built a new capitol city and named it "Columbus." The American
writer Washington Irving learned of Columbus on a trip to Spain, and
in 1827 wrote an English biography of Columbus which quickly spread
the fame of the great navigator.
During this period of Columbus' re-emergence from
the shadows of history, a serious debate began in the United States
about changing the name of this country from "The United States of
America" to "The United States of Columbia" or simply "Columbia."
The debate ended quickly in 1819 when the Spanish colony of
Nueva Granada,
at the juncture of South America and Central
America, declared its independence from Spain and renamed
itself Columbia Grande,
later reduced to "Columbia."
The new glory heaped on Columbus culminated in
the 1892 Quartercentennial celebration. New York City began the
commemoration with a Columbus extravaganza
lasting five days, drawing about a million
people and far exceeding anything the city had seen before. The
southwest corner of Central Park was renamed "Columbus Circle" and
graced with a magnificent statue of the new hero.
Kirkpatrick Sale offers in his
book The Conquest of Paradise, pages 352-3, a full
description of the extraordinary Quartercentenary celebration in
Chicago in 1893, called The World's Columbia Exposition, which
featured a grand display of the new technology of electrical energy:
[it] proved to be the most
elaborate and extensive yet undertaken in the world. On the opening
day, May 1, 1893, President Cleveland addressed a crowd estimated to
be more than 300,(}00 people, then concluded his remarks, exactly at
noon, by pressing a gold telegraph key that sent a current starting
the thousands of engines and gears and belts and wheels . . . [of]
the innumerable pieces of machinery throughout the grounds.... The
site was a 644-acre stretch of parkland along Lake Michigan (almost
thirty times larger than the Paris Exposition of 1855), on which
were erected forty buildings for the main exhibitions ... and
forty-two more for the displays of individual states, with another
four score buildings and walkways for the exhibits of eighty foreign
nations, colonies, districts, and corporations .... The cost of it
all was an astonishing thirty million dollars (as against eight
million each for the 1867 Paris and 1876 Philadelphia fairs) . . .
and it attracted 24 million visitors, in a nation of 63 million
people, the largest crowd for any single event in the history of the
world to that point.
In Rome at this same time, the
Raccolta di Documenti e studi publican delta Romana Commissione
Columbiana (1892-94), a collection of all the known writings of
Columbus and all the early historical documentation about his life
and work, was produced in thirteen volumes by the Kingdom of Italy.
Included in this collection, of course, was his Libro de las
profecias, a notebook in which Columbus declares that he was
guided by divine inspiration to make his voyage of discovery in
1492, and in which he cites many scriptural passages, especially
from the Book of Psalms, as providing his personal revelation. The
major libraries of the world quickly bought up the 560 copies of
this historic work. Prior to this publication many of the
significant writings of Columbus had not been readily available to
the scholars of the world.
Many countries were planning to
honor Columbus with another splendid observance at the 500`s
anniversary of his famous voyage in 1992. However, as the date
approached, a new specter appeared on the scene-a subject that had
not been duly considered in prior centuries the consequences of the
discovery on the native populations. In The Conquest of Paradise,
Kirkpatrick Sale, a founder of the New York Green Party, reminded
the world that the indigenous peoples and the environment had
suffered severe, adverse effects from the overly aggressive
colonization practices of most of the European nations, who often
drove the native peoples from their own lands and forever altered
their traditional way of life.
In portraying many of these
tragedies, Sale did not single out Spain exclusively and clearly
pointed out that the English had been far more brutal to the native
peoples. However, many groups which seemed to have a special agenda
against Catholic Spain and Columbus, in the tradition of the Black
Legend between England and Spain, began claiming that the Spanish
had come with the intention of wreaking havoc upon the natives.
These efforts largely succeeded in obstructing plans to celebrate
the Quincentennial. There is no question that the time had come to
bring out into the light of history the sad story of the sufferings
of the native peoples; but it was a shame that Columbus was defamed
and in many places deprived of the honor due him on the 500'
anniversary of one of the most heroic feats in the history of
mankind.
Members of the Five Franciscan
Martyrs Region of the Secular Franciscan Order in the Southeast
United States did succeed in bringing honor to their fellow
Franciscan hero when, in 1994 a prayer book containing 75 of the
Psalms of David arranged in seven categories that parallel the seven
phrases of the Lord's Prayer was published. This new arrangement of
the psalms was dedicated in part to the Great Navigator, who as a
lay person in the Catholic Church during the 15'" and 16"'
centuries, loved, prayed, and was inspired by the psalms of the
divine office of the Church. To commemorate the 500' anniversary of
the death of the Admiral of the Ocean Seas on May 20, 1506, a second
revised, expanded edition of this prayer book, entitled Praying the
Psalms in the Light of the Lord's Prayer, hopefully will be
published later this year in collaboration with the Five Franciscan
Martyrs Region of the SFO. The psalm section of this book could be
called the "Colombian Psalter," in honor of this famous Franciscan.
Statue of Columbus in Central Park |
