I'm not sure if it's anti-Catholic, at least on the American side. They like (or liked to, in the South when I was growing up) teach that Columbus is a Real American Hero(tm) and that the Kings and Queens of England were dumb-dumbs who tried to tell him the world was flat, but he was a man of principles, ideals, and knowledge and did not listen.
The reality is that they knew the world was round, but because there was no known land mass between Europe and Asia on their current maps circumnavigating via the Atlantic would have been borderline suicidal using navigation technology of the time. Columbus doesn't sound as heroic when you say he stood up to conventional wisdom that there would be nowhere to park along the way, though.