The History of Catholic America
Epilogue

The Catholic men and women, who helped to settle North America and to found the United States, contributed to this nation's incredibly swift growth. The Church has taken gigantic strides to keep pace with American culture, even as it seeks to preserve the faith that has nourished its followers over the centuries. Clergy, religious orders of men and women, and the laity continue to participate in church activities and in the effort to remain a vital part of an ever-changing American society.

Traditions and ceremonies of the past are still cherished, even as clergy and laity join forces to create new forms of worship. Church leaders are beginning to realize the followers of Christ must now stretch forth their arms and extend their hands to other Americans who follow Him according to their own traditions. And in the spirit of global ecumenism, the church can strengthen those common spiritual values that we share with Jews, Buddhists, Moslems, and peoples whose spiritual paths lie outside the dominant religions.

We rejoice as we greet the future with renewed dedication, despite the fact that human understanding will never know what the future will be. Only God knows that. For ourselves, we can merely look back and evaluate where we have been and where we have come, and use whatever wisdom we derive for our journey into the future.

In the 1780s, the Abbe Guillaume Reynal, a French philosopher and historian, also looked back over the then-relatively short history of European settlement in the Western Hemisphere, and posed a provocative question to the learned members of the Academy of Lyons. It is a question we are still asking over 200 years later. "Was the discovery of America," Reynal asked, "a blessing or a curse to humankind?"

Various French scholars wrote essays on this question, but perhaps Reynal's offers the most insight. On the positive side, he noted great strides in the physical sciences, including medicine and natural history, and an influx of "splendor, power, and wealth" for the European states that profited from settlement.

On the negative side he cited the "spirit of fanaticism" for "making discoveries," the urge to find "continents to invade... islands to ravage... people to spoil, to subdue, and to massacre." He particularly deplored the thriving African slave trade, and the "endless wars" fought by the nations supplied with treasure from the Western Hemisphere.

Now 500 years since Columbus made his momentous voyage, cultures continue to collide, and we are just beginning to realize that one of the victims in the collision of cultures is nature herself.

Over 140 major animal and bird species have become extinct since 1492, including certain species of whales, bears, buffalo, otter, elk, bighorn sheep, passenger pigeons, owls, and wrens. Rainforest area in the Western Hemisphere was originally 3.4 billion acres, it is now only 1.6 billion. Forestland in the present United States was over a billion acres when Columbus arrived, it is now only 500 million commercially designated acres. Nearly 30 billion tons of topsoil in the United States is depleted or lost through run-off each year.

Several thousand plant species are threatened with extinction. Two hundred plants native to the United States became extinct just in the last five years. In 1492 the territory that would become the United States had 2.2 billion acres of wilderness, today we have 90 million protected acres and 50 million unprotected acres.

The greatest tragedy has been the loss of people and the rich Native traditions that thrived for centuries before European settlement. It is now generally accepted that, before Columbus, the total population of the New World was between 60 and 120 million people (while that of Europe, excluding Russia, was about 60-70 million). In North America lived 40-56 million people, a thriving population which, due to war, disease, and devastating social conditions, has declined to only 20 million today.

When we consider this tragic loss of life - human, animal, and plant - we are deeply struck by the need for Catholics, as well as all men and women of good will, to turn their eyes to the future with a renewed dedication to affirm the earth and its communities of life. We join our prayers with those of Church leaders who believe and hope that it is still possible to establish lifestyles that will not collide so ruthlessly with the natural environment. We pray that more Americans will come to value the insight that Native peoples so wondrously treasured: a personal sense of kinship with the natural world, and a profound respect for all living things, for all that God in His wisdom has created.