In 1929, with the world at peace, G.K. Chesterton wrote a prayer to St. Michael, the warrior archangel. For Michaelmas, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski read "To St. Michael in Time of Peace" and ask what Chesterton saw coming that made him call on Michael then—and why he still counted Gabriel, stooping to greet a peasant girl, the more glorious angel.

In This Episode:

• The Pope Leo XIII backstory behind the poem: his Prayer to St. Michael, and a famous 1884 vision no one has traced to a source
• Why G.K. Chesterton prayed to the warrior archangel in a year of peace: he sensed what he called Prussianism returning
• The poem's image of St. Michael at the Crucifixion, hand on the hilt, holding back his legions until Christ said "It is finished"
• Chesterton's warning against a peace kept by money
• A 1926 G.K.'s Weekly passage where Chesterton, arguing against Nietzsche, calls St. Gabriel stooping to greet the peasant girl more glorious than St. Michael striking down the traitor, and how Joe connects it to the single feast the three archangels now share

Resources Mentioned:

• To St. Michael in Time of Peace by G.K. Chesterton
• Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton
• Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
• "A Word with Dr. Oscar Levy" by G.K. Chesterton, G.K.'s Weekly, October 16, 1926

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Chapters:

• 00:00: Michaelmas and the Feast of the Archangels
• 01:43: Oxford's Michaelmas term and the darkening of the year
• 05:17: St. Michael through the centuries
• 08:19: Leo XIII and the Prayer to St. Michael
• 13:38: The 1884 vision: a legend without a source
• 16:42: "To St. Michael in Time of Peace" (1929)
• 21:23: St. Michael at the foot of the Cross
• 25:56: Why invoke St. Michael in time of peace
• 31:30: Why the archangels belong together
• 34:14: Michael, Gabriel, and the Sacred Heart
• 37:09: Humility, Tobit, and the Annunciation
• 40:18: Michaelmas in Tolkien

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Episode art image credit: "St-Michel-Mont-Mercure, Vendée", original photo by Pom', 26 July 2023; on Flickr; CC BY-SA 2.0

A seminarian once wrote Fulton Sheen asking to write a master's thesis on his work, and Sheen wrote back telling him to write on G.K. Chesterton instead. Ahead of Sheen's beatification, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski trace what the American broadcaster took from the English journalist—down to two passages read aloud here that turn out to be Chesterton with an American accent.

In This Episode:

• The 1925 request that started it: Sheen asked G.K. Chesterton to write the introduction to his first book, received "I know nothing about philosophy" in reply, and got the introduction anyway
• What Sheen wrote in his autobiography about where his style came from: Chesterton above all, with C.S. Lewis arriving later
• A priest's letter, published years afterward, recalling that Sheen told him to drop the thesis on Sheen and write on Chesterton
• Two passages read in full—one on why a child says "do it again," one on a drop of gutter water lifted into snow—and what in them comes straight out of the ethics of Elfland
• Sheen's distributism: the American extension of a critique he took from Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, collected in a volume of his 1930s writing on communism

Resources Mentioned:

• God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy by Fulton J. Sheen, with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton
• Treasure in Clay: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen
• Chesterton's Marriage Proposal
• Justice & Charity by Fulton J. Sheen
• St. Austin Review

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Chapters:

• 00:00: A Chesterton podcast for the week of Fulton Sheen's beatification
• 01:09: How each host came to Sheen
• 04:14: Illinois, 1895: a quick bio of Fulton Sheen
• 09:20: An hour of preparation for every ten minutes of speaking
• 12:30: "I know nothing about philosophy": the 1925 meeting in London
• 15:25: What is actually known about Sheen at Chesterton's funeral
• 17:01: Treasure in Clay names Chesterton the greatest influence
• 21:37: Justice & Charity and Sheen's American distributism
• 24:40: A priest's letter: "Chesterton's the man"
• 28:39: "Do it again": Sheen on the eternal appetite of infancy
• 33:07: A drop of gutter water and the one thing saved for heaven
• 36:28: Musical lineage and the communion of saints

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Somebody once wrote a fairy tale where the quest that wins the princess was to find a single newspaper that didn't contain an article by G.K. Chesterton. Dr. Susan Hanssen wrote her doctoral dissertation on him and now teaches history at the University of Dallas, and she argues he's the hinge of what Adam Schwartz called the third spring of English Catholicism. She ends the episode reading Lepanto aloud.

In This Episode:

• Why G.K. Chesterton reached readers the Catholic converts before him never could. John Henry Newman was an Oxford man writing for an educated elite, and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote poetry too esoteric for the common reader. Chesterton never went to university at all.
• The claim behind G.K. Chesterton's range: that he could start from any subject whatsoever, Victorian china shepherdesses included, and bring you back to a Christian understanding of the human person.
• Why nearly every movie preview is about the end of the world now, and how G.K. Chesterton was already correcting both Hegel's coming utopia and Oswald Spengler's inevitable decline.
• The essay in Heretics with the dull title that Dr. Hanssen calls the absolute cure for family troubles.
• What "the English-speaking world" actually meant in 1910, and why an illustrated London paper could put G.K. Chesterton in front of Gandhi in Calcutta and an oil widow in Texas.

Resources Mentioned:

• Dr. Hanssen's talk at this summer's Chesterton conference
• What I Saw in America by G.K. Chesterton
• Lepanto by G.K. Chesterton
• Heretics by G.K. Chesterton
• Literary Converts by Joseph Pearce

Chapters:

• 00:00: Introduction
• 00:30: Meeting Susan Hanssen, and a dissertation on Chesterton
• 02:53: The English-speaking world goes silent after the Reformation
• 07:35: Newman's second spring, and the third spring that followed
• 11:09: Belloc, the Latin south, and Chesterton as the Dickens of his age
• 14:30: High characters, middle characters, and the low characters Dickens let in
• 15:41: When the Mediterranean was the whole world, and then it wasn't
• 21:02: The illustrated papers, and writing for absolutely everyone
• 23:02: Three volumes that only list what he published
• 24:38: The fairy tale quest to find a paper without Chesterton in it
• 33:39: Chesterton the painter, and why his essays read like wet canvas
• 46:01: Lepanto, read aloud

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Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios