The prayer to Saint Michael

Read the middle of the sentence slowly, because that is where the theology sits. The Latin runs imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur: let God command him, we suppliants beg. English printings render that verb two ways, command and rebuke, and both leave the action with God. Michael is asked to act divina virtute, by God's power. He is a defender under orders.

The rebuke wording has an obvious echo. In Jude, Michael argues with the devil over the body of Moses and will not pass sentence himself. He says only, The Lord rebuke thee. The name carries the same restraint. In Hebrew mi ka'el is a question, who is like God. Scripture gives Michael one job and keeps him in it. He stands guard, he fights the dragon, and heaven wins.

Italian troops took Rome in 1870 and the pope lost the last of his territory. Leo XIII answered partly with prayer. A decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, dated the feast of the Epiphany, 6 January 1884, ordered three Hail Marys, the Salve Regina, and a collect at the end of every Mass celebrated without singing, in every church in the world. The decree opens by pointing back to 1859, when Pius IX had ordered much the same thing inside the Papal States.

The 1884 collect asked broadly for what the Church needed in its present necessities. Two years later the wording was sharpened to name the conversion of sinners and the liberty of the Church, and the Michael prayer joined the set. So a prayer people now reach for at two in the morning began life attached to an argument about territory. The Lateran Treaty settled that in 1929, and from 1930 Pius XI pointed the same prayers toward Russia. The words held still while the intention moved twice.

You will find the story on most pages about this prayer. Leo XIII, after Mass, collapses having overheard Satan ask God for a century to destroy the Church, then goes to his desk and writes. It is memorable. It is also absent from anything printed while he was alive. He died in 1903, and the earliest known account in print is a German Sunday paper in 1933.

A German priest, Fr. Bers, went looking for a source the following year and reported that the story was everywhere and the trace of it nowhere. Retellings put the vision shortly after 1880, or on 13 October 1884, or on 25 September 1888. That last date is the one prayer books of the period print under the prayer, as the day Leo XIII attached a three hundred days' indulgence to it. The documented history holds up fine on its own.

The instruction Inter Oecumenici, dated 26 September 1964 and binding from the first Sunday of Lent, 7 March 1965, changed the end of Low Mass in a single line. The last gospel is omitted, it says, and the Leonine Prayers are suppressed. That was the whole of it. Nearly eighty years of shared habit ended in half a sentence.

Suppressed means no longer required. It has never meant forbidden. John Paul II, at the Regina Caeli of 24 April 1994, asked people not to forget the prayer. In September 2018 Francis asked Catholics to pray the Rosary every day through October and to close it with the Sub tuum praesidium and this prayer. Many parishes say it after the final blessing, which keeps a devotion outside the text of the liturgy.

The New Testament does describe a real struggle, and it keeps the register low. Ephesians talks about armor and about holding ground. First Peter says stay sober and stay awake. Neither passage recommends dread, and neither one sends a reader hunting for demons in ordinary trouble. Vigilance in scripture looks a lot like steadiness.

This prayer is a devotion. Anyone may say it, anywhere, with no permission and no ceremony. A major exorcism is a separate rite that only a priest may perform, and only with the express permission of his bishop. Confusing the two is how people end up frightened of a prayer that was meant to steady them.

One thing worth saying out loud. This page describes a prayer and its paper trail. It carries no approval from any diocese, and the assistant on this site is software. Neither one can tell you what is happening in your house or in your head.

This is where a page like this one can do real damage, so here it is plainly. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that illness, and psychological illness in particular, is a different matter, that treating it belongs to medical science, and that it has to be ruled out before anyone talks about the presence of the Evil One.

Hearing voices, weeks without sleep, intrusive violent thoughts, terror that will not lift, a sense of being watched or controlled: these are common symptoms of conditions that respond to treatment. Talk to a doctor. Say the prayer as well if you want to. No priest, friend, or app should tell you that your illness is a demon.

The short prayer moved around in English from the start. A Baltimore prayer book of 1901 has the wickedness and snares, then rebuke him, O God, we suppliantly beseech Thee, and drive into hell. A Boston prayer book of 1899 has the malice and snares, then we humbly beseech God to command him. Benziger's My Prayer Book of 1908 prints the familiar wording in its prayers after Mass and the Boston wording later in the same volume, with no sign that anyone found this odd.

None of them is a mistake. There is one Latin text and English never settled on one translation of it, so the differences are matters of register. Whichever wording you were handed is the one to say.

A much longer prayer to Michael was printed in Acta Sanctae Sedis in 1890, on page 743, inside an exorcism formula issued by Leo XIII for bishops and for priests authorized to use it. It opens Princeps gloriosissime, most glorious prince, and quotes Ephesians 6 outright. Later editions of the Roman Ritual carried it, and by 1902 in a much shortened form. Copies circulate online under headlines calling it the real St Michael prayer. It is a different text for a different job.