On October 11, 2019, President Donald J. Trump commemorated Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America with these memorable words:

On October 12, 1492, after a perilous, two-month journey across the treacherous Atlantic Ocean, Christopher Columbus and his crew aboard the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria landed in what is today the Bahamas. This watershed voyage ushered in the Age of Exploration, changing the course of history and setting the foundation for development of our Nation. Today, we commemorate this great explorer, whose courage, skill, and drive for discovery are at the core of the American spirit.

Recently in Boston during the so-called “peaceful protests’, allegedly funded by George Soros, a statue of Christopher Columbus overlooking Boston Harbor in Columbus Park was decapitated. The statue abuts Boston’s North End neighborhood where many Italian immigrants and their families reside after making their legal entry into this country.

The coward mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, removed the vandalized statue and put it into storage pending “historical review,” as if any American would need to review the importance of Columbus to this nation’s founding. All of us remember the simple rhyme taught in our grammar schools: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Back then, we had real teachers who read books on their own initiative and were not reduced to mere ‘educators’ by teachers’ unions.

Boston’s mayor should review the tremendous books by Professor Samuel Eliot Morison, the late great Harvard historian who made the European discovery of America and Christopher Columbus his life’s passion. Morrison’s biography of Columbus stressed the deep religious devotion of the explorer.

Here is a quote from Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Morrison’s masterful biography: “We may be fairly say that the first step toward the discovery of America was taken by the parents of Columbus when they caused him to be baptized ‘Cristoforo’ in some ancient Church of Genoa one day in the late summer or early fall of 1451.”

Christopher means ‘bearer of Christ’ and it was Columbus who brought Christianity to America. One could say that just as Saint Christopher was said to have carried Christ on his back over a body of water, so Christopher Columbus carried Christ to the new world. It needs not be mentioned that the left loathes Columbus and Christianity.

Morison also adds that on the journey to discovering America the continual prayer of Columbus and his crew was “Jesus cum Maria sit nobis in via” which means, “Jesus and Mary be with us on the way.”

Columbus, along with Fr. Bartolomé de Las Casas, advocated against exploitation of native Americans. American sociologist Margaret Hodgen wrote that “Columbus approached ethnological phenomena with an amount of tolerance and critical detachment unusual in his day.”

The destruction of the statue in Boston was perpetrated by a small, organized group of protesters whose importance the media exaggerate out of all proportion. The endless coverage perpetuates the pretense that these destroyers of our heritage are expressing the popular will, so as to browbeat the majority of the population and to give cover for spineless politicians to conform to the latest media narrative.

It is now clearly apparent to even the most gullible that we no longer have a free press or media in the United States of America. Since the election of 2016 with its invidious acrimony against Trump, we have seen a further hardening of the press and media into a revolutionary party intolerant of the truth and against any free expression of opinion. Free discussion of issues is not tolerated. Witness the refusal of The New York Times to publish in its print edition an op-ed piece by Republican Senator Tom Cotton because it was not in line with its imposed ideology. The editor who allowed the online publication of Cotton’s piece was summarily fired.

The press also falsely accused the president of conspiracy with the Russians. The Senate exonerated Trump of wrongdoing, and we now know that this accusation was nothing more than a coup attempt by the Democratic Party. The real conspiracy reminiscent of the Russia of old was the transformation of the American media into something like the Pravda propaganda arm of the old Soviet Socialist Republics.

The desecration of Columbus’s statue and our past is an insult not only to Italians in America but to every other immigrant group who came to these shores. Columbus’s discovery made our country possible!

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out that while the Roman Empire’s barbarians came from without, ours come from within. Muggeridge further pointed out that Western man has lost his way because of his complete abandonment of its past and of its sense of good and evil. In doing so we are now in an increasingly weak position before these new barbarians, Muggeridge writes:

So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, laboured with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.

 

[Image by bynyalcin / CC BY 3.0 via wikimedia commons, resized]