By Robert Royal.

In 1776, the year that America became independent (and San Francisco was founded), two Franciscan priests, Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, traveled from what would become Santa Fe, New Mexico, through Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, aided at several points by native guides, until circumstances forced them to turn back in Orem, Utah, the very place where, last week, Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Their mission, as strange as the path may seem to us today, was to find a shorter route from Santa Fe to the Franciscan mission in Monterrey, California - and no doubt to prepare the way for evangelization of native populations, who were scratching out an existence on the hard Southwestern ground.

Most people today have little idea of how Catholicism came to the lands now part of the U.S. Southwest. But it's quite interesting to read the detailed records, with maps and observations on local peoples, that the explorers kept for the Franciscan Order, which have been published in English as The Dominguez-Escalante Journal.

I've been traveling through Utah the past week, at times along some of the paths they forged, which eventually turned into the Old Spanish Trail. It's some of the most simply stunning land on God's earth.

Except for a flat tire in the middle of the desert (which took hours to find help), it was a reminder that in spite of the evil we visit on one another, God's overarching Creation - with its transcendent beauty, goodness, and truth - cannot be cancelled and is perpetually there for us, if we have eyes to see.

At the same time the ruggedness and sheer vastness of the region, which photos can only begin to convey, witness to the toughness and determination of those missionaries in pursuing a nearly impossible task.

But perhaps they were borne up on their way. Zane Grey is sometimes mocked, when he's even remembered, as a corny old Wild West writer (his books aren't in Utah bookshops). But like Paul Horgan, the great Catholic novelist of the Southwest, he too was deeply aware of the eternal in these lands, which is easier to see in places like Zion Canyon, even amidst human vicissitudes. (I'm writing this in Zion and am taken with Grey's words about the wind here):

Always it brought softly to him, strange sweet tidings of far-off things. It blew from a place that was old and whispered of youth. It blew down the grooves of time. It brought a story of the passing hours. It breathed low of fighting men and praying women. (Riders of the Purple Sage)

It's not only the canyon's winds that whisper of larger spiritual and human things. The Milky Way alone here, an arching river of light in the clear night air, is something few people living in the light pollution of towns and cities now have a chance to appreciate. You don't need a telescope or specialized scientific knowledge to understand the grandeur of all that here. All you need to do is to look up, as our ancestors did for thousands of years, with receptive eyes.

For me, the rock formations (pitifully inadequate terms) here in Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Moab are revelations. The working of wind and sun and water on stone has carved huge forms that remind you of cathedral pillars (hoodoos) and flying buttresses, lonely towers and castles on multiple promontories, high sculpted outcroppings like the enchanted hilltop cities you see sometimes in dreams.

What was it that turned Kirk's assassin, Tyler Robinson - by all accounts a notably intelligent boy and young man - from such high and uplifting things?

One of the telling tragedies about him is that he grew up in St. George, Utah, near Zion, in a solid family (his father spent decades as a sheriff's deputy) and amid these stunning natural vistas. He somehow detached himself from all that - knowledgeable people say the messages he wrote on his ammo indicate memes common in online "gaming communities." And then there's his connection to that strange modern phenomenon we call the "trans" movement v...