This coming Monday is Columbus Day. It also happens to be the date traditionally associated with Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the Americas: October 12, 1492. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 moved the federal observance away from the historical anniversary and onto the second Monday in October.

Columbus Day deserves to be remembered for more than the familiar story of a Genoese navigator crossing the Atlantic. It occupies a foundational place in American history, and its establishment as a national observance also had something to do with counteracting anti-Catholic prejudice. The standard WASP history of the United States would have us believe that the really important business began when the Mayflower’s passengers stepped ashore in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Apart from the fact that these Pilgrims were hardly blue bloods, this telling ignores two inconvenient facts: European engagement with the Americas had already been underway for more than a century, and English settlement in Virginia preceded Plymouth by 13 years. Nor were the Pilgrims models of broad religious ecumenism; the Puritans who followed them were even less so.

President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed a national observance of Columbus Day in 1892, marking the four-hundredth anniversary of the navigator’s landfall, but it took 40+ more years until it became an annual federal holiday during the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. Italian Catholics had long championed the observance as a way of insisting that America’s story did not begin and end with Protestant settlers from northern and western Europe. That same impulse helps explain why Father Michael McGivney, in the 1880s, gave the Catholic fraternal organization he founded the name Knights of Columbus.

One of the most valuable books I read in high school was Msgr. John Tracy Ellis’s Catholics in Colonial America (1965). Borrowing Thomas Kuhn’s terminology, I would call it a paradigm shift. The American history taught in my New Jersey public schools covered the Age of Discovery, but when the subject turned to what became the United States, the narrative effectively began — and largely ended — with the 13 English colonies.

Ellis reminded me that the rest of what we now call the United States was there all along. The grandiose territorial claims of the English colonies, sometimes extending on paper from sea to sea, ran straight through lands that France and Spain were exploring, settling, evangelizing, and governing. The Midwest and California were not dormant wildernesses awaiting farmers after the Revolution or prospectors during the Gold Rush. They already had histories, peoples, settlements, and political ambitions of their own.

And Catholics helped shape those histories. Fathers Jacques Marquette, Pierre-Jean De Smet, Eusebio Kiño, and Junípero Serra were among the missionaries whose work left an enduring mark on the continent. Once we recognize the Catholic contribution to the lands that became the United States, Catholics have little reason to suffer an inferiority complex about their place in American history.

When I was in high school, the residual influence of Protestant America was still strong enough to make the English Protestant project on the Atlantic coast the organizing principle of the national story. Today, for different ideological reasons, the Catholic contribution is often disparaged. Columbus becomes a caricature of colonial brutality, De Smet is condemned as a white supremacist, and Kiño and Serra are reduced to villains. I will not join this campaign of historical defamation.

That does not mean pretending that every European missionary or colonial official was faultless, or that every encounter between Europeans and Indigenous peoples was just. It means refusing to substitute caricature for history. De Smet, Kiño, and Serra performed important spiritual and temporal services among the peoples with whom they worked. Their missionary efforts, considered in their historical and religious context, cannot honestly be reduced to a single indictment. The Church has no reason to apologize for evangelization as such, even while Catholics can acknowledge particular wrongs committed in the course of colonial history.

What, then, of the Genoese navigator himself? Was everything the Spanish and Portuguese colonial powers did in the Americas just? Of course not. Was everything they did unqualifiedly evil? No.

Our contemporary debates about immigration often insist that the arrival of foreigners on American shores is an unalloyed good, whether those arrivals are wanted or unwanted, legal or illegal. The slogan “No person is illegal” is sometimes presented as a universal moral principle. One might ask, then, why the arrival of Europeans five centuries ago is so often treated as an evil in itself. Presumably, the moral dignity of persons does not depend on which side of the Atlantic their ancestors inhabited.

The analogy has limits: the circumstances of migration, conquest, settlement, and colonization are not interchangeable. But neither should we pretend that the encounter between the peoples of the Americas and Hispanic civilization produced nothing but destruction. It also brought profound cultural and religious transformation, creating societies whose languages, institutions, art, customs, and religious traditions reflect both Indigenous and European inheritances.

Here I will venture another paradigm shift, one I encountered in a series of summer seminars in the late 1980s at universities in Eichstätt, Puebla, and Villanova devoted to the Christian roots of Western culture. The lecturers urged us to see European Christian civilization as formative, in fundamental ways, of the cultures of both Latin and North America.

Some will dispute that inheritance or resent its implications. Yet the relationship between Europe and the Americas is not unlike that between mothers and grown-up daughters: the daughters may insist on their independence, but listen close enough and you begin to hear mom in the next generation. Inherited habits and expressions have a way of resurfacing. North and South America, for all their differences, share a cultural inheritance profoundly shaped by Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. That inheritance has not erased Indigenous traditions, nor does recognizing it require us to deny the injustices of colonization. It does, however, help explain the cultural world in which the Americas developed, a fact some people reject. (See here.)

We also continue to labor under the mythology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage”: the idea that Indigenous peoples lived in a state of natural innocence until the arrival of Europeans upset their paradisiacal existence. The actual histories of Indigenous societies were considerably more complicated. They included cooperation and conflict, peace and warfare, just as European societies did. From a Catholic perspective, the doctrine of original sin applies to all humanity, not merely to Europeans. Indigenous peoples were no more exempt from the universal human condition than those who crossed the Atlantic.

A week after Columbus Day, the Church in the United States commemorates the North American Martyrs. These Jesuit missionaries were brutally killed during their evangelizing work in the seventeenth century, including in territories that are now part of upstate New York and Canada. Some suffered extraordinary tortures; accounts of the violence include the mockery of baptism through the use of boiling water. Their deaths remind us that the encounter between Christianity and Indigenous peoples cannot be understood simply as a story of European power imposed on passive victims. It was also a story of religious conviction, sacrifice, resistance, and, for some Indigenous converts, profound personal commitment. Those who want to explore this history further would do well to seek out Francis Talbot’s Saint among the Hurons, an older but worthwhile account of the missionary world in which these events unfolded.

I mention Rousseau because not a few American jurisdictions now seek to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. The change often accompanies the fashion for land acknowledgments, in which institutions and individuals ceremonially recognize the Indigenous peoples who inhabited a place before European settlement. There are certainly serious questions about dispossession, historical injustice, and the obligations of those who inherit its consequences. But ritual declarations are not the same as restitution, and symbolic gestures can become exercises in self-congratulation. One might reasonably ask how many of the more affluent land acknowledgers are prepared to surrender their own desirable waterfront properties.

The point is not that history should be reduced to a contest in which one civilization must be declared innocent and another guilty. It is that the fashionable moral simplifications of our own age are no better than the older Protestant prejudices that marginalized Catholic contributions to American history.

Columbus Day offers Catholics an opportunity to recover a fuller account of their country’s past: one that begins before Plymouth Rock, takes Spanish and French America seriously, remembers the missionaries who traversed the continent, and recognizes the Christian roots of much that North and South America share. Such a history need not whitewash colonial abuses or deny the suffering of Indigenous peoples. It simply refuses to make those abuses the sole lens through which the entire encounter is judged.

Catholics, therefore, should not apologize for Columbus merely because his name has become a fashionable target, nor should they apologize for the Christianization of the Americas as though evangelization were itself a crime. They should know their history, acknowledge its complexities, and defend the truth that their faith helped shape the civilization of the Americas. A people who forget their own contribution to their country’s history will eventually accept someone else’s account of it.