The Catholic roots of Christian culture in the USA

The other week I was writing in these pages about the cultural meaning of the advent of printing in North America, which began not with the English puritans but with the Spanish clergy.

This focused my mind on the fact that the national myths of the USA, but not of Canada or Mexico, manage to exclude any particular narrative if it was not puritan.

What the Mexicans call the ‘US Intervention in Mexico’ in 1845-46 remains in the memories of some Americans as the beginning of the US ‘role in the world’. But the earlier history of Latino culture in the territory of what is the United States today plays no part in popular memory. The pilgrim fathers came to New England in 1620 – which is late in the day again compared with Mexico and Canada. Jamestown in Virginia was founded in 1607. An earlier effort was made in 1585 at Roanoke, North Carolina.

Dates

Contrast these dates with those of the Latino areas of the USA. The city of St Augustine in Florida was founded on September 8, 1565 by Spanish admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, Florida’s first governor.

By some two decades, St Augustine is the oldest continuously-inhabited European-established settlement in the United States, and was the capital of Spanish North America for some 200 years.

This long gap between the arrival of Columbus in the West Indies and founding of Jamestown is acknowledged by only a few Americans as ‘our forgotten century’.

The city was once captured by the British, but then returned to the Spanish. It was finally annexed by Andrew Jackson in 1819 – it is all too easy these days to forget the reality of the force of arms by which the USA was created.

Ignored

Earlier American civilisations were at this time ignored for the most part, as neither the English nor the Spanish set much store by the history and cultures of the Native Americans.

The point which should not be overlooked is that the better known and celebrated English settlements were preceded by some two centuries and more of Catholic culture in a band across the southern states from Miami on the Atlantic to Santa Monica on the Pacific.

Yet this has no role in the national myth. As one writer, Joseph Judge, put it in 1988: “Was ever a tale writ in blood. Or more put away in memory…for little remains but bone and parchment.”

But there is a great reluctance to make this era a part of ‘the American story’ in any way at all. Which seems very strange in some ways, though not perhaps in these islands, where the reluctance to accept other people’s stories as part of ‘our story’, is a well-established mode of thought.