Back to the Beginning
A Catholic View of Columbus
I believe in nothing if not the fact that the truth is often complex and nuanced, requiring careful distinction, particularly when the virtues and vices of Fallen humanity are involved.
For that reason, I was up until this year decidedly neutral on our national controversy surrounding Christopher Columbus — not because I believed him to be a saint, by any stretch of the imagination, but because I believed him to be a complex figure: someone whom I was confident neither in praising nor condemning, without having honestly taken the time for myself to thoroughly investigate and consider the competing arguments on both sides.
Prior to this year, if you had asked me for an accessible resource summarizing my view of Christopher Columbus, I would have pointed you to the YouTube video “In Defense of Columbus: An Exaggerated Evil” — an assessment which (even by its very title) appeared to capture and rightly hold in tension a critical but balanced sense of the pros and cons.
But today, I would point you to Dr. Warren H. Carroll: award-winning Catholic historian, founder of Christendom College, and author of the major multi-volume series “A History of Christendom”. For it was none other than Dr. Carroll’s assessment of Christopher Columbus that, in the end, finally solidified my opinion, swept away my remaining doubts, and convinced me of the truth: Christopher Columbus is simply not worth defending.
Perhaps that conclusion surprises you, as it almost surprised me.
After all, I knew Warren Carroll personally — along with his wonderful wife, Mrs. Anne W. Carroll, who personally taught every single one of my history classes at Seton High School in Manassas VA. With only rare exceptions (as my memory recalls), Dr. Carroll was personally present throughout every single one of my high school history classes. He sat in a chair with his cane at the front of the classroom, listened to Anne lecture, and regularly chimed in with supplementary details. We were required to take detailed handwritten notes on Anne’s daily history class lectures, and were frequently given brief open-note quizzes that pushed the thoroughness of our note-taking abilities to the brink.
I loved those classes. If I were given the chance to go back and sit through all six years of them all again, I would not hesitate to do so. But somehow, I did not walk away from those classes with any deep-seated disposition in favor of Columbus. It was not until this year — as an adult, revisiting this question for the sake of my own intellectual honesty — that I finally realized why.
A few years after Dr. Warren Carroll’s death in 2011, I had made the decision to purchase the entirety of his published history books available on Amazon. I made this decision partly motivated by a sense of nostalgia for those history classes that I remembered so fondly, and partly motivated by utility: so that I could easily revisit the substance of those history lectures in detail, without ever having to scry through my surely-terrible (but very detailed!) handwritten high school notebooks.
Thus it was with great satisfaction that — after finally finding motivation to delve into the Columbus debate, after honestly engaging with the painstakingly documented, feature-length refutation of that earlier video I had originally believed to be balanced, and after finding myself mildly stunned by just how compelling the full weight of the anti-Columbus arguments appeared to be — I was immediately able to walk over to my bookshelves, find Warren Carroll’s books, and promptly consult the indices to locate all of the relevant sections on Columbus.
Surely, I thought, if anyone could offer a coherent Catholic defense of Columbus, with due regard for the relevant historical complexity, it was Dr. Warren H. Carroll. Surely, if I were overlooking compelling arguments in favor of Columbus, the reputed modern Catholic historian and founder of Christendom College would be able to help me identify them.
Or at the very least, if I couldn’t find enough good to outweigh the grave evils that Christopher Columbus was indisputably responsible for, perhaps I could still return to my committed stance of neutrality — neither condemning nor praising the man without significant qualification.
(continued below)
Alas, I found only the stunning confirmation that swept away my remaining hesitations:
…instead of bringing the mutinous Spaniards to order and halting their depredations on the Indians, [Columbus] blamed the natives for everything and sent a force to round them up with horses and hounds. …The Spanish colonists were then allowed to “take as many as they pleased” as their own slaves.
— Warren H. Carroll, “Isabel of Spain: The Catholic Queen” pg. 262
Meanwhile the spiral of disintegration and destruction was continuing on Hispaniola. Columbus’s great slave raid roused the Indians to all-out war… Columbus, now healthy again and in personal command, ranged over the island killing, capturing, and terrorizing the Indians into submission.
— Ibid. pg. 264
Sad to say, Columbus seemed interested in baptizing Indians only after bringing them to Spain. …Justice was not done for the Indians, but there was simply no way at this time for Isabel to have ascertained what really happened on Hispaniola. It was too far away, the events were too confused, and those reporting to her had too many axes of their own to grind. The full truth was not learned until the investigations of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas many years later…
— Ibid. pg. 265
[Columbus] dispatched letters to Isabel and Fernando… He asked without apology for the full legalization of a slave trade in Indians, though Isabel had repeatedly made it clear that she would never permit that. These letters from Columbus created a bad impression which was supplemented by other critical reports from Hispaniola, and convinced Isabel that Columbus should not continue as sole governor… she must have been disappointed by the very small spiritual return in Indian conversions thus far, and by Columbus’ persistent attempts to enslave those whose souls he claims to have gone there to save.
— Warren H. Carroll, “A History of Christendom, Vol. 3: The Glory of Christendom” pg. 663; see also “Isabel of Spain: The Catholic Queen” pgs. 292–3
During that year the situation on that now bloody island went from bad to worse. Columbus felt he had to pardon Roldan… and mollify him and the other rebels by granting each Spanish settler a substantial tract of cultivated land with a number of Indians to till it, solely for his own personal support and enrichment. This was the famous repartimiento or encomienda system, which Bartolomeu de Las Casas, the “apostle to the Indians”, spent his life fighting, and which Isabel’s mighty grandson Charles V was to struggle desperately and with only limited success to eliminate. If not quite slavery, the repartimiento was certainly serfdom [involving hard work], imposed upon a people who… would often die quickly if forced to do it.
— Warren H. Carroll, “Isabel of Spain: The Catholic Queen” pg. 293
As it turns out, the prospect of maintaining any neutrality on the Columbus debate was simply a sanguine self-delusion.
There is a good reason why our nation’s celebration of Columbus Day has increasingly fallen out of favor and become an annual controversy — and it has nothing to do with anti-Catholic liberal conspiracies to revise and distort noble historical truths.
There is a good reason why I did not absorb an enthusiastic view of Columbus from my deeply Catholic high school history classes with Anne and Warren Carroll — and it has everything to do with Catholic historians maintaining a disposition of sober intellectual honesty regarding the indisputable and horrifically grave sins of a famous Catholic navigator.
Indeed, were there any truth to the theory of anti-Catholic bias against Columbus, we would not find modern secular historians crediting the very same Catholic monarchs of Spain who financed Columbus:
…Queen Isabella emerged as an early champion of Indian rights. As Columbus kept insisting on his plans of enslavement and his men continued to ship Indian slaves in one guise or another, Isabella became exasperated. All along she had been extremely supportive of the Admiral. But by 1499, when she learned of the arrival of yet more Indians, she famously exploded: “Who is this Columbus who dares to give out my vassals as slaves?” Isabella and Ferdinand freed many Indians and, astonishingly, mandated that many of them be returned to the New World. …The opposition of the Catholic monarchs was a serious blow to Columbus’s plans for a transatlantic Indian slave trade.
— Andrés Reséndez, “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America” pgs. 26–28
On June 20, 1500, a royal decree of Ferdinand and Isabel condemned Columbus’s taking of Indian slaves in the Caribbean, prohibited their sale in Andalusia, mandated their freedom, and forbade that Indians be taken as slaves in the future.
— Rolena Adorno, “The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative” pg. 101
If we wish to be intellectually honest with ourselves, we must set aside the childish mythos of Christopher Columbus, reckon honestly with the demonstrable gravity of his sins and failings, and cease defending the indefensible.
