Who is St. Michael the Archangel?
Michael is not a man who became holy. He is an angel, and the Church calls him saint because he is holy. His name is a Hebrew question, "Who is like God?" Scripture names only three angels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, and Michael appears in three books.
In Daniel he is "one of the chief princes" who comes to help the angel sent to Daniel (Daniel 10:13), and "Michael your prince," the guardian of Israel (10:21). The book ends with him: "But at that time shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people" (Daniel 12:1). The Epistle of Jude recalls "Michael the archangel, disputing with the devil," contending "about the body of Moses" (Jude 9), and even there he does not curse his enemy but leaves the rebuke to the Lord. Revelation gives the scene Catholics know best: "And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels: and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world; and he was cast unto the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him" (Apocalypse 12:7-9, Douay-Rheims).
From these passages Christian tradition drew four offices for Michael, which the Catholic Encyclopedia lists: to fight against Satan; to rescue the souls of the faithful from the enemy, especially at the hour of death; to be the champion of God's people, Israel under the Old Law and the Church under the New; and to call souls from earth to judgment. Where he stands among the angels, the Fathers did not agree. Some Greek Fathers put him over all the angels, St. Thomas made him prince of the lowest choir, and the Roman liturgy follows the Greeks.
Devotion to him is the oldest devotion to any angel. Franciscan Media dates it to the fourth century in the East and says the Western Church began keeping a feast for him and the angels in the fifth. The early Christians, the Encyclopedia says, gave Michael the care of the sick rather than victory in war, with healing springs in Asia Minor, Colossae among them, and a healing shrine near Constantinople. In the West the story runs through an apparition on Monte Gargano in southern Italy, dated to the fifth or sixth century, and through Rome. The Encyclopedia's earliest Roman witnesses are the old sacramentaries: the Leonine gives a basilica dedication on September 30, the Gelasian of the seventh century has a feast of St. Michael, and the Gregorian Sacramentary of the eighth century records on September 29 the dedication of a basilica to him on the Via Salaria. That basilica has vanished. The date stayed. In the Middle Ages September 29 was a holy day of obligation, and at Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy sailors took him as their patron.
Why Catholics pray to St. Michael for protection
No pope assigned Michael his patronages. They follow from what he does. If he fought the dragon once, Catholics reason, he will fight for me now; if he receives souls at death, I want him at mine. The Encyclopedia says he was patron of the Church and of the knightly orders in the Middle Ages, and Franciscan Media lists the archangels today with police officers, first responders and the dying. All of these are traditional. None is declared.
The modern form of this devotion is a prayer. At the end of the nineteenth century Pope Leo XIII introduced a special prayer to St. Michael throughout the Church. It is no longer said at the end of Mass, but it has not been forgotten. On April 24, 1994, speaking at the Regina Caeli about the woman and the dragon of Revelation 12, St. John Paul II said that Leo XIII certainly had that scene before his eyes, and then added, in words the Vatican still publishes: although 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.
That is what a Catholic asks Michael for. Not luck against bad luck, but help in a battle that is real: against temptation, against despair, against whatever presses on a house at night, and a safe passage at the end. The prayer on this page is a different one from Leo XIII's, gentler, indulgenced by Pius IX, and it asks the same thing.
How to pray to St. Michael
His feast is September 29, shared since 1970 with Gabriel and Raphael, and the nine days before it are the natural time for a novena. The old Raccolta, the Church's book of indulgenced prayers, lets a novena to St. Michael be made with any approved prayer. It also carries the Angelic Crown, a chaplet of nine salutations to the nine choirs of angels, each asked through Michael's intercession, which Pius IX indulgenced in 1851. The prayer printed below is the antiphon that closes that chaplet.
Say it slowly, once, and then name what you are afraid of. Michael's work, in the tradition, is the battle you cannot win alone. Your work is the ordinary means. If someone in the house is in danger, call the police. If the fear is in your own mind and will not lift, see a doctor, and tell a priest in Confession whatever part of it is guilt. The Church gave Michael to the sick long before it gave him to soldiers, and there is no shame in asking him for both kinds of help at once.