toSaint Michael the Archangel: Who Is Like God?
The arrow that came back
Picture southern Italy at the end of the fifth century, on the rocky spur that juts out from the back of the boot. A man named Garganus has gone up the mountain there looking for a bull that strayed from his herd. He finds it standing in the mouth of a cave near the summit, and it will not come down.
He takes out his bow and shoots an arrow at it. The arrow turns around mid air, flies back towards him, and wounds him in the foot.
He goes to the Bishop of Siponto, Saint Lawrence Maiorano, and tells him what happened. The bishop orders three days of fasting and prayer. At the end of them Saint Michael appears to him.
“I am the Archangel Michael, and I am always in the presence of God,” he says.
The cavern is sacred to him, and the bishop is to dedicate it to Christian worship.
Years later the bishops of Apulia walked up the mountain to do it, and found an altar already standing inside, and a footprint in the rock. So the grotto was never consecrated by any bishop, because the Church accepted, on Michael’s own word to Lawrence Maiorano, that it had been consecrated already. Mass has been offered inside it for fifteen hundred years. The mountain took the name of the man whose arrow came back, and Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Pope Saint John Paul II all climbed it. Francis judged himself unworthy to go inside, and stopped at the entrance to cut a Tau into the stone.
The Church proposes those apparitions for our devotion as she proposes any private revelation, and Catholics are free to hold them as they will. Fifteen centuries of people have climbed that mountain to ask an archangel for help. What they relied on is in his name.
The question that is his name
In Hebrew his name runs mi-ka-el. It is a question, and he is the one who asked it.
Who is like God?
Saint John saw the occasion of it.
“And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels” (Apocalypse 12:7).
Lucifer was the highest of the angels, and he refused God. Saint Jerome renders his refusal from Jeremias in two words. Non serviam. I will not serve. Behind them lay a claim, that a creature could stand where God stands.
The Church has always read Michael’s answer in the name itself, which in English takes four words.
Who is like God?
Where Scripture names him
Michael is named five times in Scripture, across three books. He speaks once.
Twice he is named inside a single vision of Daniel’s, and not by Daniel. An angel comes to the prophet after twenty-one days and explains what delayed him:
“the prince of the kingdom of the Persians resisted me one and twenty days: and behold Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me” (Daniel 10:13).
A few verses on, the same angel says he has no helper in any of it but “Michael your prince” (Daniel 10:21). A battle fought where no man could see it, over the fate of a kingdom, and the help that comes is Michael.
The same angel is still speaking two chapters later, at the end of all things.
“At that time shall Michael rise up, the great prince, who standeth for the children of thy people” (Daniel 12:1).
Saint Jude names him in a stranger scene, and gives him the only words Scripture puts in his mouth. Michael disputes with the devil over the body of Moses and refuses to answer him in kind.
He “durst not bring against him the judgment of railing speech, but said: The Lord command thee” (Jude 9).
He will not insult Satan. He refers the matter to God.
Saint John gives the fifth, in the battle already quoted. Michael fights, he stands guard over God’s people in life and at the end of the world, and he declines to dispute on the devil’s terms.
Why we call him prince of the heavenly host
Daniel gives him a title as well as a job. One of the chief princes, and then the great prince.
In the ordering of the angels set out by Saint Thomas Aquinas, following Dionysius, there are nine choirs in three hierarchies (Summa Theologiae I, q. 108, a. 6). The Seraphim stand closest to God. The archangels are second from the bottom, above the ordinary angels and below everything else.
Michael is an archangel. Saint Jude names him as one. And yet the Church puts him at the head of the whole host and asks him in her prayers as prince of all of them, the choirs above him included.
If you learned the prayer to Saint Michael as a child, you have been calling him by that title your whole life. O prince of the Heavenly host. It reached the churches of the world through one Pope, in two decrees, eight years after he was elected.
What moved Leo XIII to write the prayer
Rome had already fallen when he was elected.
In 1870 the army of the new Kingdom of Italy breached the walls at Porta Pia and took the city. The Papal States were gone, religious houses were suppressed and their property seized. The Pope who lost all of it was Pius IX. Cardinal Pecci, who would become Leo XIII, was Archbishop of Perugia at the time and watched it from there.
He was elected in February 1878, the first Pope since the eighth century to hold no territory of his own at any point in his reign, and he did not set foot outside the Vatican for the whole twenty-five years of it.
What he had left was the Mass, offered every morning in every country on earth. On 6 January 1884 he ordered that a set of prayers be said at the end of every Low Mass in the world: three Hail Marys, the Hail Holy Queen, and a prayer for the Church.
Two years later, in 1886, sixteen years after the walls came down, he added Saint Michael and changed the prayers around him so that they asked for the conversion of sinners and for the liberty and exaltation of Holy Mother Church.
Eighty years at the end of Mass
For the better part of a century after that, every Catholic at a Low Mass anywhere in the world knelt when the priest came down from the altar and asked Michael to defend them.
At Fatima in July 1917 Our Lady spoke of Russia and said she would come to ask for its consecration to her Immaculate Heart. She made that request to Sister Lucia at Tuy in 1929, and the year after that Pope Pius XI directed that these same prayers be offered for the people of Russia, that the freedom to profess the faith might be restored to them.
On 26 September 1964 the instruction Inter Oecumenici was published. Among its provisions was one line: the Leonine Prayers are suppressed. It took effect on 7 March 1965.
Catholics went on saying it on their own. Thirty years later, on 24 April 1994, Pope Saint John Paul II spoke at the Regina Caeli and came back to it.
“Although this prayer is no longer recited at the end of Mass,” he said, “I ask everyone not to forget it and to recite it to obtain help in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world.”
Michaelmas is 29 September
In the older calendar the day is called the Dedication of Saint Michael the Archangel, and it commemorates a basilica raised in his honour on the Salarian Way outside Rome. The cave on Monte Gargano keeps a feast of its own, the Apparitio Sancti Michaelis on 8 May. In the calendar of 1969 the day was given to all three archangels named in Scripture, so Michael now keeps it with Gabriel, who came to Our Lady at Nazareth, and Raphael, who walked to Media with Tobias.
Michael is the archangel who weighs souls, and the oldest images of him hold a set of scales as often as a sword. In England and in Ireland his feast was one of the four quarter days: rents fell due, servants were hired, and the accounts of the year were settled under his patronage. Many of the Catholics who came to this country brought that calendar with them, which is why Michaelmas terms and Michaelmas daisies turn up in places that have never seen a Michaelmas goose.
The battle you are already in
If you were at Mass in this country before 1965, you never had to sit down and learn the prayer to Saint Michael. It came at the end of Low Mass, said by the whole church together, and for a great many Australian Catholics it is still there word for word. If you came later you met it elsewhere, on a holy card, or from a priest who asks the congregation to stay behind and say it.
Either way, the thing Leo XIII was answering has outlasted the politics he was answering it in.
There is usually somebody. A son who has stopped coming to Mass and will not say why. A brother whose drinking nobody at home will name out loud. Someone carrying a grief he has never put down, or a habit he cannot break and cannot confess to his family. The chains are invisible and the house is comfortable and nobody uses large words about any of it.
The prayer does. It asks God to rebuke the devil. It names what is at work as wickedness and snares, and as evil spirits who roam through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Those are not gentle words, and they were chosen by a Pope who had watched the Church stripped of everything she owned and who did not think the trouble was political.
The last thing the Church asks him
That is the prayer for the living. The Church says his name at one more moment, and it is easy to have heard it without noticing.
In the Offertory of the Mass for the Dead she prays that the souls of the faithful departed may be delivered from the lion’s mouth, and asks that Saint Michael the standard-bearer bring them into the holy light which God promised of old to Abraham and to his seed.
She has asked that of him over her dead for centuries, and asks it still wherever that Mass is offered. Daniel called him the one who stands for the children of thy people, and the Offertory takes Daniel at his word.
What you can do
Say the prayer. At the end of Mass if you can, or at the end of the day before you sleep.
Teach it to a child or a grandchild. It takes an afternoon to learn and it will still be there in seventy years.
Pray the Chaplet of Saint Michael, nine salutations for the nine choirs of angels, each with an Our Father and three Hail Marys.
Ask him for someone who is dying, and for your own death when it comes.
Keep Michaelmas at home. It is the old day for settling what you have been putting off, so settle one thing.
Thank your own Guardian Angel, whose feast falls three days from now, on 2 October. And say the prayer the Angel of Portugal taught three children at Fatima in 1916, a year before Our Lady came:
“My God, I believe, I adore, I hope and I love Thee. I ask pardon of Thee for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope and do not love Thee.”
A prayer
Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in the day of battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray and do thou, O prince of the Heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits, who roam through the world, seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.
Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.
References
[1] Who Is Like God: Six Things Every Catholic Should Know About Saint Michael the Archangel — PCh24
[2] Saint Michael the Archangel, Model of the Perfect Knight — Mijn Onbevlekt Hart
[3] Saint Michael, Prince of the Heavenly Host — Instituto Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
[4] Saint Michael the Archangel — America Needs Fatima
[5] Prayer to Saint Michael, in Prayers, Meditations and Devotions — Australia Needs Fatima
[6] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, question 108, article 6, on the orders of the angels
[7] Sacred Congregation of Rites, Instruction on Implementing the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (Inter Oecumenici), 26 September 1964, number 48 (j)
[8] Pope Saint John Paul II, Regina Caeli address, 24 April 1994
[9] Sister Lucia, Memoirs, on the apparitions of the Angel at Aljustrel in 1916 and at Tuy in 1929
[10] The Book of the Apparition of Saint Michael (Liber de apparitione Sancti Michaelis), and the Sanctuary of Saint Michael at Monte Sant'Angelo, on the three apparitions
[11] Roman Missal, Offertory of the Mass for the Dead (Domine Iesu Christe)
[12] Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562, oil on oak panel, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
Last updated: 28 September 2026 10:29