In a growing number of parishes, when the last hymn is over and the priest has gone, somebody starts it and everyone joins in: Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
Ask around about where it comes from and you will hear a story. A pope collapsed at the altar in 1884, saw a vision of the coming century, overheard Satan bargaining with Christ for a hundred years to destroy the Church, and rose to write this prayer.
The documented history is different from that story, and on 29 September, the feast of Saint Michael, it is worth knowing which parts are which. The documented history is also, as it happens, the better one.
What the prayer actually was
The Saint Michael prayer did not begin life as a private devotion. It began as one item in a set of prayers that a pope made obligatory after every Low Mass in the world, and it was, in the plainest sense, political.
On 6 January 1884, Leo XIII ordered that certain prayers be said after Low Mass everywhere: three Ave Marias, the Salve Regina, a versicle and response, and a collect. He was extending and universalising something Pius IX had begun in 1859. The reason was the Roman Question. The Papal States had been swallowed by the new Kingdom of Italy, the pope was in practice a prisoner in the Vatican, and the prayers were prescribed for the liberty and independence of the Holy See. Every priest in the world, at the end of every Low Mass, was to pray about a specific political emergency.
In 1886 the set was revised. The stated intention was broadened to the freedom and exaltation of Holy Mother Church and the conversion of sinners, and a new prayer was added at the end, addressed to the Archangel Michael.
There is a second and much longer text that is constantly confused with this one, and the confusion is worth clearing up. In 1890 Leo XIII published an Exorcismus in satanam et angelos apostaticos, a full exorcism formula running to several pages. That is a different document, written for bishops and priests authorised to perform exorcisms. The prayer said after Mass is the short one from 1886. When people say the St. Michael prayer was “an exorcism,” they are generally thinking of the 1890 text, which was never said by congregations after Mass.
The set went on accreting. In 1904 Pius X ordered a threefold invocation added at the end, Cor Iesu sacratissimum, miserere nobis, which is the last piece of the sequence as anyone now remembers it.
Then the prayers were repurposed. The Lateran Treaty of 1929 had settled the Roman Question, and in 1930 Pius XI directed that they be offered instead for the afflicted people of Russia, that they might be free to profess the faith. A set of prayers that began in an Italian political emergency became a set of prayers about Soviet persecution, without a word of the text changing.
The vision, weighed honestly
Now the story. We should say clearly that it may have happened. Nothing in Catholic faith is at stake either way, and a private revelation to a pope would bind no one in any case. But if we are going to tell it, we should tell our readers what the evidence looks like, because on this site we would rather lose an anecdote than keep one we cannot stand behind.
The evidence is thin, and it is late.
Leo XIII left no writing and no recorded public statement about any such vision. He reigned for another nineteen years after the alleged event and left an enormous body of writing. Every account we have comes from someone else, and the two named ones arrive very late: a cardinal’s pastoral letter of 1946, reporting what Leo’s private secretary used to say, and a priest writing in 1947 who claimed to have been present and who opened by admitting he could not remember what year it happened. The earliest printed versions of the story, in German devotional periodicals, go back to the early 1930s, roughly half a century after the fact, and those do not contain the celebrated dialogue between Christ and Satan at all. That conversation has no attestation before 1947.
The versions also disagree with each other on nearly every detail that matters. The date is given variously as some point shortly after 1880, as 13 October 1884, and as 25 September 1888. The span Satan is said to have requested is variously fifty to sixty years, seventy-five to a hundred, and a century flat. Some versions have a conversation between Christ and Satan; others have only a vision of demonic spirits gathering over Rome.
It is worth being careful here about an argument that gets made too quickly, including in an earlier draft of this article. People sometimes object that the vision is dated to 1884 while the prayer was only added in 1886, and call that a contradiction. It is not. A vision in October 1884, followed by a prayer composed and then folded into the Leonine set two years later, is an entirely ordinary sequence. The datings that genuinely will not fit are the other two. A vision shortly after 1880 sits oddly with a prayer that appears six years on, and a vision on 25 September 1888 cannot have produced a prayer that already existed in 1886.
That 1888 date deserves a word, because it cuts against the sceptic as much as for him. It is not plucked from nowhere: 25 September 1888 is the date on which Leo XIII approved and indulgenced a much longer prayer to Saint Michael, a quite different text from the short one said after Mass. It is entirely possible that a real event attaches to that prayer and has been retrofitted onto this one. The confusion is a confusion of two Leonine acts, not necessarily an invention out of nothing.
Nor should we pretend nobody has done the work. Kevin Symonds has written a book-length historical study of exactly this question, which anyone who wants to argue about it should read rather than trading blog posts. Our position is the modest one: something may well lie behind the tradition, and the dialogue with Satan is the part that has no early support at all.
So a Catholic who repeats the hundred-years story as established fact is repeating something first written down two generations later by people who disagree about what it was. The prayer does not need it. A pope who had watched the Church’s temporal position dismantled, who was in practice confined to the Vatican, and who was facing an aggressively anticlerical politics across Europe, did not require a private revelation to conclude that the Church was under attack and that it would be prudent to ask an archangel for help. He could read a newspaper.
Why it stopped
For seventy-eight years the prayer was said after Low Mass across the Latin Church. Then, for most of it, it was not.
The instruction Inter Oecumenici, dated 26 September 1964 and in force from 7 March 1965, implemented the Council’s constitution on the liturgy. At n. 48 j it disposes of two things in one breath: “The last gospel is omitted; the Leonine Prayers are suppressed.” In the Latin the second clause is three words.
The instruction gives no reason, so anyone who offers one is inferring. The nearest thing to a stated rationale is the Council’s own instruction in Sacrosanctum Concilium 50, that elements which came in time to be duplicated, or were added with but little advantage, are to be discarded. On that logic the Leonine Prayers were a plain target: an appendage bolted onto the rite in the nineteenth century for a political emergency that had been over since 1929, and kept alive after that only by being repointed at a different country.
Two qualifications, and they matter.
The first is that the prayers never stopped everywhere. They belong to the 1962 books, and they are said after Low Mass in traditional communities to this day, week in and week out, as any reader who assists at one will have noticed some hours before reading this. What 1964 ended was the universal obligation across the Latin Church, not the practice as such.
The second is the part that is very widely misunderstood, including by people who are angry about it. Inter Oecumenici suppressed an obligation. It did not forbid a prayer. There has never been a moment since 1965 when a Catholic was not free to say the Saint Michael prayer, alone or with others, before Mass or after it or in the car. What ended was the requirement that it be said as a fixed appendage to the rite.
There is one real limit, and honesty requires naming it. A priest may not on his own authority insert the prayer into the Mass, because Sacrosanctum Concilium 22 §3 and canon 846 §1 forbid anyone, priest included, to add to or alter the liturgy on personal initiative. Saying it after the dismissal is devotion; writing it into the concluding rites is not his to do. That is a narrow limit, and it leaves the substance intact: the loss in 1964 was the universality, the fact that it was being said everywhere by everyone. It was not a suppression of the prayer, and describing it that way concedes far more to the reformers than the text actually says.
Why it came back
On 24 April 1994, at the Regina Caeli, John Paul II said this:
Although today this prayer is no longer recited at the end of the Eucharistic celebration, I invite everyone not to forget it, but to recite it to obtain help in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world.
John Paul II, Regina Caeli address, 24 April 1994 (translated from the Italian: “Anche se oggi questa preghiera non viene più recitata al termine della celebrazione eucaristica, invito tutti a non dimenticarla, ma a recitarla per ottenere di essere aiutati nella battaglia contro le forze delle tenebre e contro lo spirito di questo mondo.”)
Read that sentence slowly, because it is doing something unusual. A pope is acknowledging that a prayer was removed from the liturgy, is not asking for it to be put back there, and is asking the faithful to keep saying it anyway. He is not overturning Inter Oecumenici. He is telling Catholics that the rubric and the devotion were never the same thing, and that the second survived the first.
That is essentially what has happened. The prayer is back in a great many parishes, of every liturgical temperament, usually after Mass has formally concluded, sometimes by a bishop’s direction for his own diocese, sometimes at a pastor’s initiative, and very often because the people in the pews simply started saying it. What it did not require was any universal decree restoring it. Nothing was handed back. It returned from underneath.
What Michaelmas is for
There is a lesson here that cuts against a habit some of us have.
It is easy, when you love the older forms, to talk as though whatever was removed from the books was thereby killed, and as though the only possible restoration is an official one. The Saint Michael prayer is a standing refutation of that. It was imposed by decree and it was removed by decree, and neither decree turns out to have been the thing that mattered. What kept it alive was that Catholics wanted to say it. Seventy-eight years of obligation put it in their mouths, and sixty-one years without that obligation have not got it out.
Something similar is true of the Stabat Mater, and the real story there is better than the one usually told. It circulated for centuries and appeared in local medieval missals; the Missal of Pius V left it out; and it was only readmitted to the Roman books in 1727. Dropped and taken back. Things come into the liturgy from below as well as from above, and they survive outside it when they have to.
So on 29 September, keep the feast. The archangel whose name is a question, Quis ut Deus, Who is like God, has been answering it since before there were popes to prescribe prayers to him. And say the prayer, if you say it, for the reason Leo XIII actually gave in 1886, which was not a vision. It was the freedom of the Church and the conversion of sinners, and neither request has gone stale.
References
- Leo XIII, decree of 6 January 1884 prescribing prayers after Low Mass (extending the practice begun under Pius IX in 1859); the 1886 revision broadening the intention and adding the prayer to St. Michael.
- Leo XIII, Exorcismus in satanam et angelos apostaticos, published in Acta Sanctae Sedis (1890–91) — the longer formula, for bishops and authorised priests, distinct from the short 1886 prayer.
- Pius XI, 1930 direction redirecting the intention of the prayers to the persecuted faithful of Russia, following the Lateran Treaty of 1929.
- Pius X, 1904, adding the threefold Cor Iesu sacratissimum, miserere nobis at the end of the set.
- Sacred Congregation of Rites, instruction Inter Oecumenici, 26 September 1964, in force 7 March 1965, n. 48 j: “The last gospel is omitted; the Leonine Prayers are suppressed.” The instruction states no rationale; Sacrosanctum Concilium 50 supplies the Council’s own principle about discarding duplicated or little-advantage additions. On the limit against private insertion into the rite, Sacrosanctum Concilium 22 §3 and canon 846 §1.
- John Paul II, Regina Caeli address, 24 April 1994, Italian text at vatican.va. The English above is our translation of that text; the rendering that circulates online generally drops the word oggi (“today”) and reads “at the end of Mass” for “al termine della celebrazione eucaristica.”
- On the alleged vision: no account by Leo XIII himself is known. The named witnesses are late — Cardinal Nasalli Rocca’s pastoral letter of 1946, reporting Leo’s private secretary Msgr. Rinaldo Angeli, and Fr. Domenico Pechenino writing in 1947, who could not recall the year. The earliest printed versions appear in German devotional periodicals in the early 1930s and do not contain the Christ-and-Satan dialogue. Versions disagree on the date (shortly after 1880; 13 October 1884; 25 September 1888) and on the duration granted (fifty to sixty years; seventy-five to a hundred; a century). Note that 25 September 1888 is the date Leo XIII approved and indulgenced a separate, longer prayer to St. Michael. For a full-length historical treatment, see Kevin J. Symonds, Pope Leo XIII and the Prayer to St. Michael. We have not attempted to settle the question here, only to report the state of the evidence.
The text of the Prayer to St. Michael is on the site, as are the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar. For what else went in and out of the Roman Rite over the centuries, see What Was Lost: Prayers Removed from the Roman Rite.