Father Higgins: The Voyage of Christopher Columbus and the First Mass in the New World
Posted with permission from Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Parish, Newton MA
”Almighty and Eternal Cod, who in the Glorious Mother of Your Son has granted a heavenly protection to as many as invoke her under the title of the Pillar; grant us, through her intercession, strength in faith, sureness in hope, and constancy in charity. Through Christ Our Lord Amen. “
-Collect, Our Lady of the Pillar (October 12th)
October I2th has (until recently) been recognized as “Columbus Day”. On this day in history, October I2th, 1492, the Spanish Admiral Christopher Columbus made landfall on the Bahama Islands. He had been sailing west from Spain since August 3rd with three ships: the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. He had convinced his royal patroness Queen Isabella of Spain that he could find a sea route to the Far East by sailing west. Trade with the native peoples he would find and their evangelization to Christianity were his proposed objects.
Here is how one 20th Century historian describes Christopher Columbus:
The man … was without Question competent and experienced He came of well-to-do Genoese stock, and had first gone to sea at age 10. He looked hardy. Once, having fallen overboard, he floated and swam six miles to shore. He was married to one of the leading Portuguese families, worked at mapmaking with the [Portuguese] experts, and had even persuaded a Spanish Count-shipowner to subsidize his plans. But the Queen insisted that if the attempt was made it must be a crown enterprise …
Jacques Barzun: From Dawn To Decadence, A.D. 2001
Before leaving on his voyage Columbus received the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist. He was a pious man. The three ships together carried 120 men.
The crew was both professional and aristocratic. The … ships boys, paid about $4.60 a month, were recruited to Say the Lords Prayer and sing religious songs when turning the hourglass: “Five is past and Sixth followeth, More shall flow if God willeth.” There were a surgeon and an Arabic translator for bartering with the natives of China and Japan, some convicted felons, and a few expelled Jews …
Barzun
The voyagers saw signs of land on October 11th , and at 2 AM on October 12th, the land was seen plainly by one of the crewman on the Pinta. Before noon that day Columbus went ashore and claimed the island for the Spanish Sovereigns.
He named it “San Salvador” (St. Savior) for Christ Our Lord. Assuming, as later chroniclers did, that Columbus had a priest chaplain on board, we mark October 12th, 1492, as the date of the First Mass offered in the Americas.
October I2th was a most important Catholic Feast day, especially, for Spaniards. It is the Feast of Our Lady of the Pillar, which tradition identifies as the first Marian apparition, occurring while Mary was still alive on the earth. In a miracle of bi-location she appeared to James the Apostle, then struggling to bring the Gospel to the local tribes in Roman Spain. She appeared to him on a pillar of jasper stone, holding the Child Jesus, accompanied by a host of angels, in order to console and encourage him. In the discovery of this “New World”, Our Lady of the Pillar was to became the patroness of the whole Hispanic world of the Americas as well as of Spain itself.
What then are we to make of the vilification and monsterization of Christopher Columbus in our present moment, to the degree that even continuing to call the legal holiday “Columbus Day” is tantamount in some quarters to “hate speech”? I will leave you with the assessment of the eminent historian Jacques Barzun, writing at the beginning of the 21st Century:
The Spanish colonists committed atrocities from greed and racist contempt that nothing can palliate or excuse. But to blame Columbus is a piece of retrospective lynching: he was not the master criminal inspiring all the rest. It is moreover a mistake to think that because the native peoples were the sufferers, all of them were peaceable innocents. The Caribs whom Columbus first encountered had fought and displaced the Anawaks who1occupied the islands … Today this fusion or dispersion of peoples and cultures by means of death and destruction is abhorred in principle but flourishing in fact. Africa, the Middle and Far East, and South Central Europe are still theaters of conquest and massacre. And Columbus is not the responsible party.
From Dawn To Decadence, pp. 100-101, 2001