Every country tells stories about its beginnings. Some are so familiar to us that they pass into legend – like the men who gathered in Philadelphia 250 years ago. There is much we can learn from these stories, but sometimes also much that they obscure. The story of America didn’t begin in 1776, but much earlier, and long before the United States came into being there were Catholic figures whose stories shed light on how the larger story of this great nation developed.
When the Pilgrims stepped ashore from the Mayflower in the winter of 1620, their prospects were bleak. Their passage across the Atlantic had taken much longer than intended; what’s more, they managed to land in the wrong place, with insufficient provisions and with almost no knowledge of the country they had arrived in. Within just a few months, almost half of them were dead. Had events carried on their natural course, Plymouth might have been another failed attempt at founding a colony like Roanoke.
