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Villain Columbus?

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Is it time to give up on Columbus? In the light of modern scholarship, should we view Columbus with suspicion? The author of the highly acclaimed book Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem joins us for a look at the real man and at what he meant to do with his voyages of discovery.


Christopher Columbus, hero or villain? Next on Catholic Answers Focus.

Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome again to Catholic Answers Focus. I’m Cy Kellett your host and we’re living at a time of tearing down statues, covering up murals as people reevaluate our connections to certain figures of the past. Among those images that are increasingly offensive to some folks are the images of Christopher Columbus right here in California. They’ll be taking the statue of Christopher Columbus out of the State House soon.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Oh, no.

Cy Kellett:
So we ask a simple question today whether Christopher Columbus deserves this treatment. Have we been wrong all these centuries in honoring Columbus? Does the current rejection of Columbus represent kind of awakening to the fact that he was in fact, a criminal, a slaver, maybe, as some have called him, the rapist of a new land and a vulnerable people?

To help us answer those questions and bring the real Christopher Columbus into focus, we’re very pleased to welcome cultural anthropologist Carol Delaney. Dr. Delaney is a renowned scholar and author whose 2011 book Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem was chosen as one of the best books of 2011 by the Times Literary Supplement. Dr. Carol Delaney, thank you very much for being with us.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I’m glad to be here. Thank you.

Cy Kellett:
So, how does a cultural anthropologist end up writing the book on Christopher Columbus?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, like a lot of people at the time, I didn’t know very much about him either. I was teaching a class in the fall of 1999 called Millennial Fever to look at the turn of the millennium. Everybody was getting so scared and everything. And I came across a quotation from Columbus that he was also very much involved in that millennial thinking that the world was going to end because the Black Death had decimated Europe.

Many of them, Genoese where he was from, and Genoese, living in Constantinople and they blocked the trade route which they were used to going on. And so I got really intrigued since a lot of my work has sort of been about religion. And the more I got into it, the more I realized I had to do something more about it.

Cy Kellett:
So your title Quest for Jerusalem is probably shocking to a lot of people in a way. He’s going the wrong direction if this is a quest for Jerusalem. But it really is a quest. He has a deep, profound concern for Jerusalem, which, to the mind of his time, would have been the center of the world. And it would have represented as, I’m getting this material from you, by the way, the place where Christ would return.

So if you are of a millennial mindset, you think things are coming to their conclusion. You’re expecting Christ to come back to Jerusalem. It would be really good if Jerusalem was in Christian hands. So that’s the foundation of his thinking.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
That’s absolutely the whole motive. And he had even figured out how many years were left before the end of the world, he figured out that twice. And he felt he had a mission to go. We know he was planning to go meet the Grand Khan of China to set up a trading post like Marco Polo had. And the gold or the money or whatever was to be used to finance a crusade to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims.

It’s in all of his writings. It’s in his agreement with Queen Isabella. People just don’t read his works or his agreements with Isabella, but that was his whole plan was to get the money, finance the crusade to take Jerusalem away from the Muslims so Christ could come again and save all the people in the world. Or all the Christians anyway.

Cy Kellett:
Right. Exactly. But he wanted to make a Christian of the Great Khan of China.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
No, that was not his quest. He wanted to make all the people he met when he went to the New World, which he didn’t know was the New World at the time.

Cy Kellett:
Sure.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
But anyway, he kept asking for priests, for Isabella to send over lots of priests to teach the people and baptize them. First of all, baptized people could not be enslaved. And anyway, he was hoping to go and meet the Grand Khan to get the money to finance their crusade.

Cy Kellett:
So this is really truly a religious mission. And I think that it’s hard maybe for a modern person, and I think this is what a cultural anthropologist does is to say, “Get out of your mindset. Get into the mindset of the other person.” But our mindset is about profit, about control, these kinds of things. But that was not his mindset.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Not at all, not at all. It was very deeply a religious motivation for the whole voyage. For the voyages, the four voyages, yeah.

Cy Kellett:
And he was very patient as well. This wasn’t a thing where he got the idea and then sailed. He went to kings and queens of Europe, asking for support. None were very interested in supporting him until he met Queen Isabella.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
That’s right. And she finally decided she would support it and sent over just the three ships. And people probably don’t realize that on the first voyage over, the Santa Maria went aground when they reached Hispaniola. I mean, they stayed there for a while. He made friends with Guacanagari, the chief. They were always good friends. He liked the natives. They were very friendly. He was learning the language.

But he realized he was going to have to go back to Spain to get a ship to rescue the men he had to leave behind. So when he went back on the second voyage, he had to leave 39 men behind and he left strict laws or messages. “Do not go marauding around, do not go raping, do not go killing and everything.” And I’ve seen those. They were written and he also said them.

And so he sailed off, he took six of the natives with him. He said six more wanted to go. When they got to the queen, they were all baptized. Baptized peoples can not be enslaved. One of them became his godson and traveled with him on his other voyages.

When they got back to Hispaniola, all of those men were dead. And the men with him wanted to kill Guacanagari and the people there. And he said, “Absolutely not.” He had nothing to do with it. He believed Guacanagari who said the men had gone to another village and did the raping and marauding and so forth. And those men came and killed them all.

Cy Kellett:
So we can’t then look at the story of Christopher Columbus then entirely. I suppose there’s one way that would want to react against the current view of Columbus as a villain. There are villains in the story. It’s not a story without villains. That’s fair to say.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Right.

Cy Kellett:
But your contention is that Columbus himself is not one of those villains, he’s far from it.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Far from it. Yes. He was friendly with the natives. He liked them. What can I say? And they became friends.

Cy Kellett:
Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what he thought of the people that he encountered there in his first encounters in the New World. Because we don’t really have, as far as I know, you may have to correct me on this, there are descriptions of him. But how does he describe them?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
He said that they were very kind, very sweet, very outgoing. They talked a lot. I mean, as much as they could at first. He felt they were very friendly and he remained friends with them.

Cy Kellett:
So when you say this, I imagine when you speak to people on college campuses or you give this as part of a lecture, people, they just welcome this and say, “I’m so happy to have this correction about Christopher Columbus,” or what’s their reaction?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I think most of them don’t believe it. I think most of them don’t believe it. They want to see him as a villain.

Cy Kellett:
Well, I suppose if a person like me, I mean, I’m a Catholic person who probably has some attachment to wanting to think well of Christopher Columbus. Why would people assume that you were being ideological and not telling them the truth?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I don’t know. I don’t know.

Cy Kellett:
Oh really?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Because I’m not Catholic. I’m not even religious. I’m interested in religion. I’ve actually written a critical book Abraham on Trial. But I know that those were his true motives. It comes across in everything he writes.

Cy Kellett:
Well, there is the fact, too, that his encounter with the people in the Americas brings following encounters. And I’m sure more villains and more heroes and all of that. But it does introduce disease that is really destructive of the Americas. How do you make a moral calculation about that? Maybe you can. Maybe it’s just an amoral fact.

Because I do think a lot of people will say, “Well, there’s all these millions of native people all up and down the Americas before Columbus comes, they’re fine.” A 100 years later, a whole bunch of them are gone. Maybe the majority of them are gone. That looks like-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
First of all, they were not all friendly. I mean, because partly Columbus was helping Guacanagari against his enemies.

Cy Kellett:
The Carib.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
The Carib, yeah. And so he was on the side of Guacanagari. So they were having fights all along. Yes, they did introduce diseases partly because the men went marauding and raping, against his orders and people died. But in response, they also got syphilis.

Cy Kellett:
So, syphilis was introduced to Europe.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yeah, through them.

Cy Kellett:
Yes.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Through the men who came back. Yeah. So I thought that was a good response, probably.

Cy Kellett:
Well, I suppose there’s a certain way in which Columbus’ initial descriptions of the native people he meets, and these would be in what we would now consider the Caribbean islands, those are the people.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Hispaniola.

Cy Kellett:
So his early descriptions, especially from the first journey in particular, are so laudatory of these people as peaceful, as kind that for a Christian in a certain way, that must have been challenging because they don’t have the gospel. They don’t. So why are they so Christian, in a sense, if nobody’s brought them the gospel?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
That’s a good question. I don’t know. That didn’t really occur to me to think about something like that. They were already very peaceful, mostly peaceful people.

Cy Kellett:
So you can, I suppose, get an image that fits with a certain modern narrative that the person in the native state is much better off than the person of these Christianized technological societies. Because the person in the native state lives in peace and harmony with the land and here comes Christopher Columbus, this rapacious capitalist, or whatever he is portrayed as. There is a way in which the first encounters with Columbus do kind of support that imagery.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, I’m not sure when you say the natives were all peaceful. Yes. In that one little group, but apparently there were other groups that were fighting against them.

Cy Kellett:
I see what you’re saying.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I think they had problems too.

Cy Kellett:
So as you move out from those outer islands that he first encountered inward towards Cuba, and then towards the mainland, you do encounter real violence, including enslavement, including castration of boys, including incursions of murder and war and all of that you find.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, he never set foot on what we call America. He was mainly in Hispaniola and other islands right around there. And then he went on one of the voyages as far as Panama and a little bit on the North coast of South America. But I don’t know about seeing all these murderous other people, but except for the ones that came and killed his own men who had already done horrible things against them. So-

Cy Kellett:
My understanding … Oh, I’m sorry. It was just that my understanding was on the second voyage, he encountered the Carib and that the Carib were doing these things. I mean, I-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
That’s right. But the Carib were the ones that his friendly natives were fighting against back and forth. The other thing I want to mention that when Columbus went back after the men were killed, when he went back, the second voyage to Spain, he became a Franciscan monk. Nobody knows that.

Cy Kellett:
No.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Nobody knows that. He was always friends with the Franciscans. He always stayed with them when he was in Spain. And when he went, probably in remorse for what his men had done to all the natives that they had raped and murdered. And it said that he wore the robes for the rest of his life and was buried in them.

Cy Kellett:
So, there is a sense of regret in him then later about not what he had done, but what had been done.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yes. Oh yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Cy Kellett:
So then how do you come down on Columbus now? You go in as a scholar, you go in as an anthropologist, I assume that means you wanted to understand his worldview first.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yes.

Cy Kellett:
As a man of his worldview, it sounds like you actually came to admire him.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I did. And I would like to meet him.

Cy Kellett:
I see.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I wish I could.

Cy Kellett:
See, now, I’m a Catholic, so I think you will someday.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I know, I sort of think that way too.

Cy Kellett:
Good. Good. So why do you admire him? What is it about the man that you, as a scholar in the 21st century, came to admire?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I guess the way he, at least originally, had treated the natives, the way he was friendly with Guacanagari and believed him and wanted to make friends with them. I mean that was his goal. He didn’t go into murder them or take over the land at all. It was trying to set up that training post. And so as far as I can tell, he was friendly with them. And he had a hard time with the men that he brought over, all of these men that Queen Isabella kept sending over. They were horrible and continued to be so.

Cy Kellett:
Why did you think they’re just sending a lower kind of … I mean, they’re maybe sending men who are young, unsettled, are violent and bold in their approach to life anyways. That’s why they’ll go on these voyages.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
And I think they wondered what they were doing there and why couldn’t they get some of the gold and apparently some of them did try and secrete some of it.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Capture the golden stuff.

Cy Kellett:
So what would you say then to the person who’s … I mean, during the introduction, you seemed genuinely disappointed that Columbus is going to come down from the State House here in California. As a scholar who really doesn’t have an ideological dog in the fight, but came to admire Columbus, how might you approach the people who say, “No, we just got to take him down. He’s a symbol of all these bad things.”

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, I’ve been writing letters every time. I mean, statues have been desecrated in Providence, in Boston. I’ve been writing to the Globe, to the Providence paper and saying, “People just don’t know anything about the man and they’re blaming him for things he didn’t do.” And why are they taking down these statues? It’s terrible. I think it’s terrible.

Cy Kellett:
Well, had he not come, do you think history would have been significantly different had maybe … I suppose that’s counterfactual. I don’t know if you’d even want to engage in that but-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Somebody else would have come soon after.

Cy Kellett:
And then syphilis would have made its way to Europe. And smallpox would have made its way to the Americas.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Probably.

Cy Kellett:
I do think there are men like Columbus. Is it possible that he’s so pure in his motive that he’s naive about other people’s motives and that he may, if we want to say he’s guilty of anything, he’s guilty of not fully accounting for the venality of the people he brought with him to the Americas.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, I think that’s certainly true. I mean, I must say that afterwards … The men had collected a lot of people as slaves. Columbus said, “Don’t do that and everything.” But they collected them. What is he supposed to do with them? So he ended up sending some back as slaves, but he was not the one who initiated that, did not want that, but there was nothing he was able to do. He’s a one man against all his own men.

Cy Kellett:
Indeed. So and he becomes among his men later in his-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Oh yeah.

Cy Kellett:
Because of his-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
One of them sent him back in chains.

Cy Kellett:
Oh, tell us about that. What happened to him?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, I can’t remember now, but I should have looked it up in my book. But I think it was on the third voyage and they were just getting … The men. I shouldn’t even call them his men but the men there were just angry with him because they wanted slaves. They wanted concubines, they wanted the gold, they wanted all these things. And he kept saying, “No, no, no.” So they grabbed him, put him in chains and sent him back on one of the ships.

Cy Kellett:
So he gets sent back to Spain. I guess I should ask you too about the culpability of the Spanish crown then because the picture you paint also of Queen Isabella is that she’s something like Columbus in that she’s a Franciscan, she’s a serious Catholic. She’s not just a grabber and a marauder herself, but how do you evaluate the role of the Spanish crown in all of this?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, I wish she had listened to him and sent over more priests which is what he kept asking for so that he could teach the people, they could be baptized. None of them could be enslaved. And she didn’t send any. I mean, there was one or two, I think. But she didn’t continue to send anymore and she should have done that, I think.

Cy Kellett:
And the ones she sent were notably unimpressive clerics. She wasn’t sending the creme of the crop. What about the Pope? What’s his role in all of this?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, the Pope. That’s the reason Columbus sailed west is the Pope had divided the Atlantic down the middle and gave the other side to the Portuguese because they had gone around that way to China. So the only way Columbus could go was west.

Cy Kellett:
Oh, because he’s-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
So that- … He’s the one, yeah.

Cy Kellett:
He’s working for the Spanish crown. If his goal is that he would like to liberate Jerusalem and the way he wants to do that is by trading with the great Khan of China, the normal way to do that would have been to go around Africa.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Right.

Cy Kellett:
But that’s close to him because he works for the Spanish crown. He has to go west.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Right.

Cy Kellett:
Why not take the overland route?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
He’s a sailor.

Cy Kellett:
But why is everybody going around Africa, why are the Portuguese going around Africa?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, maybe I think they didn’t. They owned, oh, not owned but they controlled some of the countries around that way. And that was the way they decided to go. And a lot of people weren’t sure about going across the ocean, I guess, where you’d end up. But Columbus assumed that he was going to get to China. Nobody knew of the American continent, of course, in the way. And so he just thought, “Oh, I’ll go the other way.”

Cy Kellett:
How many total trips, how many trips does he make to the Americas?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Four.

Cy Kellett:
He makes four trips to the Americas and he has to deal with a great deal of difficulty and people behaving badly. But you don’t think that, in the course of doing that, he tainted himself. You think he maintained his kind of Franciscan demeanor throughout all of it.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I like to think so. I mean, I continue to still feel that way. But as I said, eventually, slaves were sent back. He didn’t want to do that, but they were sent back and who knows how he felt about it. But I think, yes. And I think he ended up as still maintaining, being a Franciscan.

Cy Kellett:
You mentioned that he took six people himself back.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yeah.

Cy Kellett:
What do you make of that as a moral choice on his part, taking people from the New World on his ships back to the Queen of-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, that was the first voyage. And he said, “Lots of them wanted to go. They were all very excited.” They’d been on the ship and looked it over and everything. And since he only went back with one ship, he couldn’t take a whole bunch of them. So we took six and he said, he wrote in his diary, “More wanted to go.” So I believe that and they were all baptized.

And as I said, one became his adopted son. And they came back. Then they came back. Well, no, two of them decided to stay at the Court. And one of them became his adopted son and the others came back. One of them died at sea on the way back. But that was not his fault.

Cy Kellett:
In listening to you talk about it, you get a sense that this could have gone a different way, that it could have been a different encounter had Isabella sent priests. And, again, as a Catholic, I always want to defend the priests that they would have done better. But it’s nice to hear a scholar saying it would have been better to send priests than soldiers.

But had it been done the way Columbus wanted it done, it actually could have gone much differently.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Much better.

Cy Kellett:
Been different history.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yeah. It could have been.

Cy Kellett:
Well, I guess so we’re left now with the … Do you have a sense that people just actually aren’t really interested in the real history? They just want to be mad.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I don’t think they’re very interested in finding out anything about him. Like me, I think they know nothing except that he landed in 1492 and they know that bad things happened. And I don’t think they really want to learn.

Cy Kellett:
It seems like you would have to make distinctions that people don’t want to make. I mean, you have to make distinctions between you know what? He was Italian himself, Genoese, but the Spanish who came, there was lots and lots of bad people who did bad things among them, but that is not the whole story. And you’d have to make distinctions if you want to know the real story.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
That’s right. Right. And he continually tried to stop them and tell them not to do this, not to do that. But he couldn’t control all those men. After he went back that first time, when he returned, 17 ships and several thousand men.

Cy Kellett:
Right.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I mean, it was ridiculous. And then they see all the gold. Well, they didn’t see lots of gold, but they knew there was gold there. And then they see these women and they just went marauding and raping. It was horrible.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
And I think he had a hard time controlling that many people. And half of the time, he’s off sailing, still trying to find the Grand Khan. Some of the time he’s not even there.

Cy Kellett:
Oh, he’s still … I hadn’t thought about that. Right. But he thinks he’s looking for Japan and he’s looking for China.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
He’s looking for China. He’s looking for China. And so half of the time, he’s off sailing, trying to find it. Where is China? And eventually, they end up, as I said, at Panama and then they have to come back.

Cy Kellett:
Do you think, does he ever in his life realize that he has not run into the Asian continent, that he has found a fourth part of the world?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I don’t know about that. I wonder myself whether he ever quite realized that. He must’ve realized something was obviously wrong and maybe he thought South America, they could go around it. But they were not about ready to do that. He didn’t know how big it was.

Cy Kellett:
No. Right. And the information that he had on Asia was very, very limited. I mean, he had, what, Marco Polo?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yeah.

Cy Kellett:
Is that basically where he got his?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I think so, mostly.

Cy Kellett:
And Marco Polo himself had never made it all the way to the east coast of Asia. So there was a lot of guesswork here. Where am I?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
It was a lot of guesswork.

Cy Kellett:
What have I bumped into? Dr. Delaney, I think we’re just about out of time with you. I wonder if you could give me some encouragement that there are many, many more like you in academia who are open to knowing the truth. Please tell me that that’s the case that it has not just become ideological everywhere.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I think there are lots of academics who are open to truth, but I’m not sure how many of them know about Columbus.

Cy Kellett:
Sure.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Or have read my book. But my original field work was in Turkey. And so you want to find out, what do these people think? How do they believe? How do they act? And that’s what an anthropologist does. So I would think that other anthropologists do the same thing.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And it strikes me that you did that for Christopher Columbus.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Oh yes.

Cy Kellett:
You didn’t just want to know. I think you said at one point it’s not just he’s like us just wearing different clothes and sailing different ships. He’s a different kind of person than me.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yeah. And lived way, way back then and came from Genoa, as you said, and then is in Spain and then the New World. Of course, it was such a different time. You have to try and get yourself into that mindset and that world set and what they did and didn’t know.

Cy Kellett:
Right. Yeah. And for him, one of the points that you also make is that religion for us, the way we understand religion, is that it’s a part of each person’s life. Your religion is a part of your life. That’s a 19th century idea of religion. It doesn’t apply to the 15th century at all where actually, Columbus wouldn’t have had even a concept of there are a variety of other religions. His concept would have been there is the one true faith. And then there’s a lot of things that need to be corrected.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yeah. I agree. I agree. That was his worldview. That was his belief. Well, he might’ve known that there were Buddhists or something, but that’s beside the point. I mean, for him, the Christian worldview was the only correct worldview.

Cy Kellett:
And he wanted to give it, he wanted to share it. He wanted other people to have it.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yeah, exactly. So that they could be saved.

Cy Kellett:
Before Christ came, which was coming soon.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Yeah. I mean, that was the whole thing. That he wanted people to be saved. So to get Jerusalem back from the Muslims, nobody knows that about Columbus.

Cy Kellett:
No, right.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Nobody knows that. And that was the total motivation for all of his journies and all of that trouble was to finance the crusade to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims so Christ could come again and save everybody before the end of the world.

Cy Kellett:
Wow. I’m so glad to have you because you just hear so many conflicting things and I really appreciate that we have a scholar, a very able scholar who can actually look at things dispassionately and with a professional eye of an anthropologist and say, “Who were these people? What were they doing?” And then fit Columbus into that image. So I want to recommend your book to people, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, a 2011 book. As I said, named one of the best books of 2011, by the Times Literary Supplement. I hope it will have increased success-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Can I hold it up?

Cy Kellett:
Yeah, hold it up, sure, sure. Definitely. Hold it up. There he is, the man himself. I almost think it’s therapeutic for you even to name the Indian chief or, I shouldn’t say Indian chief, but the native American chief that he became friends with. Because I sometimes think people think this is so far in the past that we can’t really know these details. But they are there if you to avail yourself of finding out about them.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
And he was trying to learn the language. And he said that people in his household should learn the language. I mean, he was sort of like being an anthropologist in a way.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah. And a gentle holy soul. And if things had gone the way he wanted them to go, a whole different history.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
It would have been totally different. Yeah. Totally different.

Cy Kellett:
And that’s why it’s probably not such a bad idea to just leave his statues up. I mean, Notre Dame University covering murals of him. A Catholic university, covering up murals.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Well, I wrote to them too.

Cy Kellett:
Oh, did you?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
When they did that, oh yeah. I’m just very appalled at what’s going on. It’s so stupid. They should try and learn more about him is what they should be doing.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah. It’s stupid in the sense of being divorced from reality. This person in reality is not what you are claiming he is. Is it?

Dr. Carol Delaney:
The one that they think he is is not the real person.

Cy Kellett:
Yes, that’s what I meant.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Not at all, yeah.

Cy Kellett:
All right. Again, I will thank you, Dr. Carol Delaney. Really appreciate you taking the time with us and introducing us to the truth about Christopher Columbus and introducing us to Columbus himself. I think it’s wonderful that you said you’d like to meet him because there’s such a lack of curiosity or interest in it. It would be just so great if people took an interest of hey, I’d like to meet that person and know what actually is the truth about them. Columbus-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
And he wrote a lot of books. He wrote a book of prophecies and he wrote a diary and people should read some of his stuff and get a better sense of him.

Cy Kellett:
I am so grateful for you. You’re sure you don’t want to be Catholic because we will take you if you-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
I don’t want to be Catholic.

Cy Kellett:
Well, it would be good because you get to meet Columbus.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Hopefully I’ll meet him anyway.

Cy Kellett:
I hope so, too. It’s a good hope, but I hope it with you. Again, our guest has been Dr. Carol Delaney. The book is Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem. I hope you will find it. And I hope you will encourage the Columbus hater in your orbit to consider at least a reconsideration of Christopher Columbus. And maybe we can convince the legislature here in the state of California to do likewise.

This is Catholic Answers focus. I am Cy Kellett, your host. If you like this podcast, if you wouldn’t mind giving us that five stars wherever you get your podcasts, that helps this podcast to grow and to get to more people. And if you are able to make a financial contribution to help us keep doing what we’re doing and bringing you a program of this quality, you can go to givecatholic.com and make your donation there. Again, Dr. Carol Delaney. Thank you so much. I hope we’ll get the chance to speak again.

Dr. Carol Delaney:
Me too. And also, can you tell me who I should contact in California about the statue?

Cy Kellett:
I’ll tell you what-

Dr. Carol Delaney:
You can email me.

Cy Kellett:
Yeah, we’ve got your email. So I’ll email you who. Thank you very much for an active defense, not just a passive defense. An active defense of Christopher Columbus. So thank you very much for that. I really do hope we get to talk with you again, but we got to go now. So thanks again for listening to Catholic Answers Focus. We’ll see you next time right here, God willing.

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