Without linkity-linking, I have observed over the past couple days the annual spat over who really held the First Thanksgiving.  It’s the usual three-cornered fight among Plymouth, St. Augustine and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation.

Now I don’t mind a little friendly jostling for bragging rights.  And I find interesting some of the discussion about how the telling of the historickal narrative has been altered by subsequent events (e.g., the ascendancy of the Pilgrims’ claim over that of the Virginia colonists after the Civil War as a manifestation of Yankee cultural dominance).

But I’ve also seen at a few fellow Catholic sites a number of posts that seek to turn the First Thanksgiving into an exercise in Anglican-bashing.  There seem to be three variations of this. The first is that if we remember that the Pilgrims were fleeing English religious persecution, we ought also to remember what Queen Bess and her ilk were doing to Catholics at the time as well.  The second is that there actually were one or more closet Catholics mixed up with the Mayflower, and that they or their Indian convert friends were somehow responsible for the colony’s survival.  The third is that we can forget the Massachusetts people altogether, because  the Spanish Catholics in Florida celebrated Thanksgiving first.

Again, I see nothing wrong with a little gentle brag, indeed find it amusing.  But it strikes me that arguing the comparative virtues of late 16th and early 17th Century groups in earnest is a mug’s game.   It was a hard time full of hard people, all of whom – Catholic and Protestant, English, French and Spanish – could and did do hideous things to each other when given half the chance.  As for their representatives in the New World, well it doesn’t strike me that there is really any “good” choice among brutal Spanish Conquistadores, ne’er-do-well English adventurers and crank Calvanist fanatics, plus the odds and sods that tagged along with them.  First wave colonization, historickally, is an ugly business and it’s very rare that anyone mixed up in it can be held up as a model of virtue.  (And no, I haven’t suddenly gone native – the Indians were just as savage, if not more so, both to the Europeans and to each other.)

As a matter of fact, of all the people wandering about the New World at that period, the group who are increasingly winning my own esteem are the Jesuit missionaries.  So far as I can tell, they were the only ones truly dedicated to bringing something to the country – Christianity – rayther than taking chunks of it for themselves or for sending back to Europe.  Truly remarkable body of men.