"'scholars always manage to dig out something belittling'"

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     "'But how could it have come here? It is Spanish, I suppose?''
     "'Yes, the inscription is in Spanish, to St. Joseph, and the date is 1356. It must have been brought up from Mexico City in an ox-cart. A heroic undertaking, certainly. Nobody knows where it was cast. But they do tell a story about it: that it was pledged to St. Joseph in the wars with the Moors, and that the people of some besieged city brought all their plate and silver and gold ornaments and threw them in with the baser metals. There is certainly a good deal of silver in the bell, nothing else would account for its tone.'
     "Father Latour reflected. 'And the silver of the Spaniards was really Moorish, was it not? If not actually of Moorish make, copied from their design. The Spaniards knew nothing about working silver except as they learned it from the Moors.'
     "'What are you doing, Jean? Trying to make my bell out as infidel?' Father Joseph asked impatiently.
     "The Bishop smiled. 'I am trying to account for the fact that when I heard it this morning it struck me at once as something oriental. A learned Scotch Jesuit in Montreal told me that our first bells, and the introduction of the bell in the service all over Europe, originally came from the East. He said the Templars brought the Angelus back from the Crusades, and it is really an adaptation of a Moslem custom.'
     "Father Vaillant sniffed. 'I notice that scholars always manage to dig out something belittling,' he complained.
     '"Belittling? I should say the reverse. I am glad to think there is Moorish silver in your bell. When we first came here, the one good workman we found in Santa Fe was a silversmith. The Spaniards handed on their skill to the Mexicans, and the Mexicans have taught the Navajos to work silver; but it all came from the Moors.'"

     Willa Cather, Death comes for the Archbishop I.4, "A bell and a miracle" (Willa Cather:  Later novels, (New York:  Library of America, 1990), 303).  On this supposedly Moorish origin of the Angelus, the DTC (1.1 (1903), cols. 1278-1281) is (apart from a late reference to the crusade against the "Turcs" near the top of col. 1280) utterly silent.  The same is true for the DS (sv Ave Maria.ii, vol. 1, cols. 1164-1165).  There, too, the only potential allusion to "Moors" is to the Angelus as a prayer for peace in the face of, in part, "the menace of a Turkish invasion."  But check out also the other sources cited at the Angelus in ODCC4 (2022).