One of our Servite Friars, now long deceased, was firmly opposed to celebrating the special Mass for Thanksgiving Day found in the altar missal. If the date of Thanksgiving fell on the Feast of St. Clement or St. Cecilia, he would celebrate the Mass of the saint rather the special Mass prescribed for the people of the United States for Thanksgiving. As an historian he knew that the Pilgrims were strongly anti-Catholic and, therefore, believed that they should not be honored by the Catholic Church. There was nothing wrong with being thankful and nothing wrong with settling down to a good meal, but leave the Pilgrims out of it.

From the perspective of church history, he was certainly correct.  Among the English Christians, the Pilgrims were among the most extreme. They considered the members of the Church of England to be a bunch of slackers for holding on to so many Catholic traditions. It was the Pilgrims who aggressively tried to destroy the remnants of Catholicism in England by throwing rocks through stained glass windows and beheading statues and wiping out other examples of “human vanity” parading as something sacred.

It now turns out that we may be right in ignoring the Pilgrims for another reason. In the beginning, our American celebration of Thanksgiving had little or nothing to do with Pilgrims and Indians sitting down to dinner together. In President Lincoln’s Proclamation establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863, he made no mention of them. His point was a simple one:  In spite of the tremendous loss of life during the War Between the States, the people of the United States still have much to be grateful for, and we should stop and thank God for the way God has richly blessed the land in which we live.

So, how did that meal shared by the Indians and Pilgrims become the model for our Thanksgiving feasts? A few years ago, David Silverman wrote a comprehensive account of the troubled history between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in the Plymouth Colony called This Land Is Their Land. Silverman devotes only a few pages in his five hundred page book to The First Thanksgiving, because, in the context of everything that went wrong in Plymouth Colony, it was a minor event and not a landmark occasion. In fact, he claims, the shared meal between the Pilgrims and the Indians came about by accident. It seems that the Pilgrims, now able to sustain themselves after a year in their new world, decided to hold a big harvest feast in the fall of 1621. This would not have been a thanksgiving event, because in the Pilgrim tradition, thanksgiving would have focused on prayer and fasting. Rather, it was a big party, with food, drink, and recreation. As part of the fun, some of the men engaged in target practice. Nearby Wampanoags heard the gunfire, thought that violence had broken out (perhaps an invasion by their enemies, the Narragansetts), and arrived with their weapons loaded. According to Silverman, there was just enough trust between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags at that point in history that all parties were willing to lay down their arms and for one day share a feast.

How did this minor incident reach legendary proportions and serve as the inspiration for countless school pageants, with children dressing up as Pilgrims and Indians? Silverman says that the Thanksgiving Story was largely the invention of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants in the North in the late nineteenth century. The focus on friendly Indians and hospitable colonists was meant to serve as a criticism of the way that Indians were being treated in the West and former slaves were treated in the South. Worried about the influx of Catholics and Jews from the European mainland, the Thanksgiving Story was a way of asserting the cultural and religious superiority of the original English settlers and a warning about the new immigrants, who, because of their religious beliefs and lack of sophistication, represented a threat to traditional American values. Not surprisingly, the Indian Nations have become increasingly vocal in their objections to way we have interpreted the origins of Thanksgiving Day.

Thus, while some of our American legends may be just legends, this takes nothing away from our need to be thankful, and not just on one day of the year but on every day of the year.  An attitude of gratitude and being thankful to God is at the heart of our faith and is the inspiration for much that we do in service to others. So, join us if you can, for Mass on Thanksgiving Day and then chow down gracefully and gratefully to God, who has blessed us in this life and has invited us to the eternal thanksgiving banquet of heaven. As President Lincoln reminded us in 1863, even in the worst of times, we have reasons to be grateful.

                                                                  Fr. Joe