Christopher Columbus, Hero or Villain next on Catholic Answers Focus.

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 re-evaluate 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.

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 in author whose 2011 book, Columbus and the Delaney. Thank you very much for being with us. I'm glad to be here. Thank you. So how does a cultural

anthropologist end up writing the book on Christopher Columbus? 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 yes and I came across a quotation from Columbus that he was also very

much involved in that kind of 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 a 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. So your title quest for Jerusalem is probably shocking to a lot of people in a way with

because he's going the wrong direction if this is a quest for Jerusalem.

So but it really is a question. He has a deep profound concern for Jerusalem which to the 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,

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