Why G.K. Chesterton Thought St. Gabriel More Glorious Than St. Michael
Release Date: 09/29/2026
Why G.K. Chesterton Thought St. Gabriel More Glorious Than St. Michael
Uncommon Sense
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...
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Why Fulton Sheen Called G.K. Chesterton His Greatest Influence
Uncommon Sense
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...
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Chesterton is the Antidote to the Illness of our Age
Uncommon Sense
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...
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G.K. Chesterton's Devotion to the Mother of God
Uncommon Sense
G.K. Chesterton spent his life writing about Our Lady, and the poems are still doing their work. Maria Romine, drama teacher at Chesterton Academy of St. Louis, traces her entry into the Catholic Church to a rosary handed to her in a gift shop, and her love of Chesterton to a poem about the Mother of God. On Our Lady's birthday, the conversation covers the Frances Chesterton Rosary League, saints on the high school stage, and Gilbert and Frances Chesterton as a model for married life. In this Episode: Chesterton's Marian poems, "A Little Litany" above all, did what no argument had: they sent...
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Chesterton's Thoughts on Mistakes in Modern Education
Uncommon Sense
G.K. Chesterton gave an entire quarter of What's Wrong with the World to what he called the mistake about the child, and his verdict was blunt: the schoolmaster works not for the parent but against him. In this solo back-to-school episode, Joe Grabowski follows that argument through to the line Chesterton offers as the whole purpose of teaching—to pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life—and asks what it would take to recover the childlike wonder Chesterton insisted was education's only real aim. What's in This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton opened What's Wrong with the World with...
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G.K. Chesterton's Conversion and its Augustinian Parallels
Uncommon Sense
On the feasts of Saints Monica and Augustine, Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski trace G.K. Chesterton's long road into the Catholic Church, beginning with his 1903 newspaper battle with Blatchford and McCabe and ending at the sacramental hesitation that held him back until 1922. They show why Chesterton refused to hang his belief on one or two arguments, and why a man for whom every daisy was already a miracle found it hardest to meet God in one particular priest. The takeaway is a habit any reader can practice: reading the world for connections, on the saints' feasts and on every other day...
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G.K. Chesterton vs. Communism and Socialism
Uncommon Sense
In 2016, Danish politician Ida Auken described the year 2030 as a happy place to live: no car, no house, no appliances, no privacy, and a living room lent out for business meetings whenever she steps away. Joe Grabowski and Grettelyn Darkey read Ida Auken's essay beside G.K. Chesterton, who had already named the bargain nearly a century before it was offered—that privacy is the mark of property, and that a people stripped of both are being fitted for a hive instead of a home. In This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton tied privacy to property, and why he said the Englishman's castle was too...
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Why G.K. Chesterton Defended the French Revolution—and Why His Critics Still Misread Him
Uncommon Sense
Grettelyn Darkey and Joe Grabowski take up the most neuralgic subject in G.K. Chesterton scholarship: his defense of the French Revolution. Working through a 1921 Illustrated London News column, a 1905 Daily News essay setting the French and Russian revolutions side by side, and a 1918 New Witness piece that turns without warning to Prussianism, they trace his distinction between the ideals of a revolution and its working out, and his insistence that what a revolution exists to restore is the rights of man and not the wrongs of man. In This Episode: Why G.K. Chesterton distinguished the...
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What G.K. Chesterton Said about St. John Vianney
Uncommon Sense
For the memorial of St. John Vianney, Joe Grabowski reads a rarely reprinted G.K. Chesterton essay—The Challenge of the Curé d'Ars—written as an afterword to F.J. Sheed's 1929 translation of Henri Ghéon's The Secret of the Curé d'Ars. Chesterton's portrait is not the gentle village priest most readers expect but a militant one, a walking contradiction who denied everything his century most confidently affirmed. You'll hear why Chesterton thought the critics who file the Church under the medieval past have misread her entirely, and why the Curé's holiness shone brightest in the full...
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G.K. Chesterton on the Death of Literacy
Uncommon Sense
A new Atlantic cover story argues that America is sliding into a postliterate age—but G.K. Chesterton diagnosed the same collapse in 1928, years before Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman raised the alarm. Joe Grabowski goes solo to walk through Rose Horowitch's statistics on the death of reading, then turns to two Illustrated London News essays in which Chesterton describes a public that has stopped reading connected prose and now only kisses books it has never opened. What emerges is a practical challenge for anyone who wants to recover the habit Chesterton simply assumed his own...
info_outlineIn 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
Produced by Saint Kolbe Studios
Episode art image credit: "St-Michel-Mont-Mercure, Vendée", original photo by Pom', 26 July 2023; on Flickr; CC BY-SA 2.0