Saint Catherine

This morning I taught an English grammar lesson to an adult student, about the use of can, could, and be able to. The exercises in the textbook included these sentences:

5. I can't understand Michael. I've never ____________ understand him.

6. I can't see you on Friday, but I ____________ meet you on Saturday morning.

7. Ask Catherine about your problem. She might ____________ help you.

These days any reference to Michael gets my attention, as that archangel has been in the sync stream a great deal. Seeing the name Catherine just two lines later made me think of St. Catherine and reminded me that Michael, Margaret, and Catherine were the three saints who appeared in vision to Joan the Maid.

In fact, I had already been primed to think of Catherine as a saint because of something I had read yesterday evening, while teaching a different unit from the same book to different students. The unit was about the correct use of the (which is much more complicated than most native speakers realize!), and the point was being made that the definite article is not used with people's titles -- that, for example, we say "the sergeant" but not "the Sergeant Pepper." The following examples were given:

Mr. Johnson / Doctor Johnson / Captain Johnson / President Johnson

Uncle Robert / Saint Catherine / Princess Anne 等。（並非 the . . .）

This got my attention even at the time because, although I suppose most people have heard of St. Catherine, hers hardly seems like the first name that would come to mind if you just wanted a random example of "Saint so-and-so."

Anyway, returning to "Ask Catherine about your problem," an exercise on the next page had the question, "When should I call Angela?" with a prompt intended to elicit the answer, "You could call her now." Angela, a female angel, was close enough to the female saint I had just been thinking about, that it made me think I was perhaps being nudged to pray to St. Catherine.

Angela also made me think of my recent dream, in which a Spanish girl had said "No me llamo Marcela. Me llamo Gabriela." -- Angela and Gabriela being conceptually similar names. After the class, on a whim, I Googled marcela gabriela to see if the two names had any special connection, but I just got random people's social media pages. Then I Googled the whole Spanish quotation. This turned up a children's book called Me Llamo Gabriela, about the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. I looked her up on Wikipedia but found nothing of interest. I did note, though, that Gabriela Mistral was a pseudonym, and that her real name was Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga. It struck me as typically Spanish that her name included not just María but the full title María del Perpetuo Socorro.

I then turned to looking for prayers to St. Catherine, and what kept coming up was the St. Catherine of Alexandria Novena. Never having been Catholic, I had only the vaguest idea of what a novena is, so my next stop was the Wikipedia article for "Novena." The illustration at the beginning caught my eye.

Isn't it obvious that Our Lady of Perpetual Help is identical to María del Perpetuo Socorro?