This has been a bad week for Indian–Catholic relations. On Friday, Jan. 18, activist Nathan Phillips of the Omaha tribe confronted students from Covington Catholic High School of Kentucky during the March for Life in Washington, D.C., setting off a nationwide controversy.
Two days later, the president of Notre Dame University announced that his school would no longer display a mural depicting Christopher Columbus in its main hall, out of sensitivity to its “demeaning” depiction of Native Americans. The 12-panel mural cannot be removed without demolishing the walls on which it is painted, but it will henceforth be “covered by woven material consistent with the decor of the space.”
The murals were completed in 1884, a year when Geronimo was still killing civilian settlers in the Arizona Territory. Since 1997, the display has been accompanied by a brochure intended to contextualize the paintings by noting their “troubling” portrayal of Native Americans “in stereotypical ways and in subservient roles.” This week’s decision to scrap the murals entirely was praised by the school’s Native American Student Association as “a good step toward acknowledging the full humanity of those Native people who have come before us.”
Notre Dame’s gesture of reconciliation is unlikely to satisfy Phillips, whose attempted sacrilege at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on Jan. 19 included reading aloud a list of demands such as “that the Catholic Church hold itself responsible for the hundred-plus years of genocide that indigenous peoples have endured.” Congregants were held inside the basilica for 30 minutes until security guards declared it safe to leave.
Rather than cringing before activists such as Phillips, compassionate Catholics should follow the example of the university president who commissioned the Notre Dame Columbus murals in the first place, Father Edward Sorin, who allowed neither freezing weather nor risk of martyrdom to prevent him from traveling forth from South Bend, Ind., to preach the gospel to the Potawatomi. That self-confident missionary faith, which Columbus shared, truly “acknowledges the full humanity” of Native Americans. Political correctness acknowledges only their victimhood.
