Columbus Day: No Apologies [UPDATED]

Read Joe Hargrave's tribute to Columbus Day at The American Catholic:

Few days provide so great an occasion for an orgy of self-hatred (among the white elites) and faux moral outrage as Columbus Day. But long before communists, socialists, and their fellow-travelers seized control of our educational institutions and rewrote the history of the Western civilization – a revision which is force-fed to most students in our public reeducation centers – Columbus was celebrated as a great explorer and a daring adventurer who undertook great hardships to undergo the voyage that would lead to the discovery of the New World. Pope Leo XIII, on the 400th anniversary (1892) of that famous voyage, wrote of Columbus in Quarto Abeunte Saeculo:

By his toil another world emerged from the unsearched bosom of the ocean: hundreds of thousands of mortals have, from a state of blindness, been raised to the common level of the human race, reclaimed from savagery to gentleness and humanity; and, greatest of all, by the acquisition of those blessings of which Jesus Christ is the author, they have been recalled from destruction to eternal life.

Indeed, Columbus Day holds a special significance for Catholics, because it marks the beginning of the transformation of the Americas from a landscape of unbridled savagery, reaching its demonic apotheosis in the mass human sacrifices carried out by the Aztecs, to a hemisphere consecrated to Christ. Leo’s words also remind us of a truth that has been forgotten by some, rejected by others, and denounced in the modern and post-modern world, even by many Catholics: that without the light of the Gospels and incorporation into the mystical body of Christ (which is the Church), salvation is impossible to attain.

[Read the whole thing]

This pantload of PC crap was making its way around Facebook the other day:




UPDATE (12 October 2010)
See also Don McClarey's Columbus Day post at The American Catholic: Pope Leo XIII on Christopher Columbus