About Paulo Malleum Deus

I was born on the first Saturday of Easter Week, 1967 — at noon, as cloistered sisters were chanting the Regina Caeli. April Fools' Day on the birth certificate. Make of that what you will.

I am the middle child of seven. My eldest sister, the firstborn, was a breach delivery. She lived long enough to be baptized and entered Heaven within hours. Two sisters I grew up with — one born in 1965, one in 1969 — both fought stage 4 breast cancer until it took them. My brothers and my youngest sister are still with me. I have known since childhood that life is serious, death is real, and eternity is not a metaphor.

I have watched the unraveling of Christian civilization in real time — from the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, through the changes to Holy Week in the 1950s, removing the St. Michael Prayer and Last Gospel at the end of The Mass by 1965, to vernacular language in 1967 to the hideous, hippy Luv of the 'new order' in 1969. Along with the Blizzard of '77 in Buffalo, the space shuttle catastrophes, Desert Storm, the USS Cole, and September 11th. Each one a marker. Each one a signal that something had gone badly wrong in the world — and in the Church.

When the men in Rome committed what I can only call apostasy and blasphemy along with keeping the 'uncle Teddies' covered up, I thought perhaps I was losing my mind. Then I discovered Our Lady of Good Success, who appeared in Quito, Ecuador in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and described with breathtaking precision exactly the crisis we are living through. I wasn't crazy. The Faith I had been practicing was simply a new version — and a new version of Catholicism isn't Catholicism. The Faith is what has been believed by everyone, everywhere, at all times. Not since the late 1950s. Not since the 1960s and their aftermath. Always.

Paulo Malleum Deus — Paul, Hammer of God. St. Paul was no soft academic. Small 't' Tradition tells us he competed in gladiatorial games after his conversion, not against men but beasts — average in height perhaps, but chiseled like a piece of granite. It was after that encounter on the Damascus road that he swung the 'hammer' differently — not to stop the spread of Christianity but to be like unto the Master Sower. Thus, he became the most ferocious intellectual and spiritual warrior the Church has ever known. This store is named for that Paul. The one who got knocked down and came back swinging for the Truth, using the two edge sword of that very Truth Itself.

This store exists because sacred art and patriotic conviction are not decorations. They are weapons. They are conversation starters. They are the visual declaration that you have not surrendered — to the world, the flesh, or the Devil.

If you found this store, you probably already know what I'm talking about.

Welcome.

Paulum Malleum Deus — A Little Hammer of God