The Catholic Frequency

Calling your wife the boss is not humility. It is a small public surrender of the headship Saint Paul names. Ask her. Do not crown her so you can duck the job.

On January 2, 1492, Christopher Columbus watched the banners go up on the Alhambra. He wrote the voyage down in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. On October 12 he named the first island San Salvador. Years later, home in chains, he wrote that God had made him the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, and he gathered the Scriptures into the Book of Prophecies.

The angel does not start with her name. Hail, full of grace is a title, naming what God has already done in her. It is not flattery. It is news. God got there first.

Last week in Metz, Pope Leo XIV named Saint Benedict and said European civilization as we know it would not exist without the monastic tradition. We cannot speak of Europe without mentioning Christianity. Tom Woods already wrote the book that proves it.

Oscar Wilde told a crowded room that a book cannot be moral or immoral. Then he wrote The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant, stories where charity knocks the wall down and a Child stands in the garden with the wounds of the Cross. On November 29, 1900, a Passionist priest conditionally baptized him on his deathbed in Paris. The nails stay on the little hands. Wilde left them there.

A lot of Christians were taught that prayer to Mary is a medieval add-on. Then you look at Rylands Papyrus 470, the Sub tuum praesidium: We fly to your protection, O holy Mother of God. Christians were already saying that in Greek, on papyrus, in Egypt, using the title Theotokos. Age is not the same thing as truth. But it does kill the story that nobody honored Mary until some pope got bored in the Middle Ages.

There is an old rule of the moral life that the modern world keeps pretending it has outgrown. One righteous man frightens the unrighteous. Michael Desronvil sat on a jury with eleven others and refused to treat three murdered children as a footnote to their mother's suffering. Mercy for the sick does not require the pretense that the dead are incidental. One man who will not move is already a restoration.

John Lennon's Imagine is treated like the unofficial hymn of decent people. It has a creed, a congregation, and a missionary close. It just will not name the god. The first verse clears out heaven and hell and calls it kindness. Charles Péguy, in 1911, made hope a little girl who still expects God. One of those paths is hope. The other is a hymn against it.

The Church names Mary after Israel's holiest furniture because Luke keeps replaying Samuel and Exodus: fear at the arrival, a leap, a three-month stay, a covering of glory. The first chest carried stone, bread, and a priest's staff. She carried a Person. That is not a goddess claim. It is a refusal to handle the Lord's mother as packing material.

On Michaelmas the Church names Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael together. Their names already answer the airport sales pitch: become divine, author your own message, fix yourself. Harari put that hunger in a bestseller. John Paul II would recognize the diagnosis and refuse the throne. A creature does not get the Creator's chair.