The St. Michael Prayer: Full Text, Latin, and What "Defend Us in Battle" Means
The prayer half the Church says after Mass, and the saint on the back of our hoodie.
The St. Michael prayer
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in 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, cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.
In Latin
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio
Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae caelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen.
What does "defend us in battle" mean?
The prayer treats the Christian life as a fight, because scripture does. Paul tells the Ephesians to put on the whole armor of God, since the struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces (Ephesians 6:11-12). Peter says the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). The St. Michael prayer takes both lines seriously and asks for the one angel scripture names as a warrior to stand in front of us.
It is not a prayer for the dramatic. It is for Tuesday. Temptation, discouragement, the quiet pull toward the thing you already decided not to do. "Defend us in battle" is the ordinary Catholic admitting that the ordinary day is contested ground.
Who is St. Michael?
Michael is one of three angels named in the Bible, with Gabriel and Raphael. His name is a question in Hebrew: Mi-ka-el, "Who is like God?" Tradition says it was his battle cry against Lucifer. Daniel calls him "the great prince who stands guard over your people" (Daniel 12:1). Jude describes him contending with the devil over the body of Moses (Jude 1:9). And Revelation gives him the scene every painting is based on: "Michael and his angels fought against the dragon," and the dragon was thrown down (Revelation 12:7-9). His feast is September 29, Michaelmas, shared with Gabriel and Raphael.
Who wrote the St. Michael prayer?
Pope Leo XIII, in 1886. He added it to the prayers said kneeling after Low Mass, which came to be called the Leonine Prayers. The story that gets told is that Leo had a vision of demonic forces being loosed on the Church and wrote the prayer in response. That account is tradition, not something the Vatican ever put on the record, but the prayer itself is documented, and it was said after Mass in every Latin-rite parish in the world for nearly eighty years.
Why do we say it after Mass?
The Leonine Prayers were dropped in 1964 as part of the liturgical reforms, and for a generation the St. Michael prayer mostly disappeared from parishes. John Paul II brought it back into the open in 1994, asking the faithful to pray it against "the forces of darkness." Since 2018 a lot of American parishes have added it back after Mass, often alongside the Hail Mary, and today you will hear it in roughly half the churches you walk into. It is not required. People just started saying it again.
The Sword of St. Michael
There is a line of seven sanctuaries dedicated to St. Michael that runs across Europe to the Holy Land: Skellig Michael off the coast of Ireland, St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall, Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, the Sacra di San Michele in Piedmont, the sanctuary at Monte Sant'Angelo on the Gargano, the monastery on the Greek island of Symi, and Stella Maris on Mount Carmel in Israel. Draw a line through them on a map and it is almost straight. Tradition calls it the Sword of St. Michael, the blow that sent the devil to hell. Three of the seven sit exactly where the sun sets on the summer solstice. Whatever you make of that, people have been building shrines to this angel on hilltops for fifteen hundred years.
On the back of the hoodie
St. Michael is one of the four saints on the Saints Go Hard back print, the one with the sword and the dragon under his foot, drawn by hand in Miami. He stands with St. George, St. Joan of Arc and St. Benedict, four people who took "defend us in battle" literally. Read the Saints Go Hard story for all four.
"Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not."Revelation 12:7-8