St. Michael the Archangel

Feast 29 September · 8 May (the Apparition)

Whose name means Who is like God? The Church’s warrior, the weigher of souls, the one Leo XIII saw standing over a wounded Church. He has a cave in Gargano, a castle in Rome, a rock in the sea, and — if a Marine’s letter is true — a sword in the Korean snow.

Sacred art

Statues and images

The portrait kept with St. Michael the Archangel is the image this library has of Michael. The honour goes to the person, and through the person to God. It is not a machine, and it is not a substitute for the life written below.

The whole treasury

Scripture names him three times. In Daniel he is “the great prince who has charge of your people.” In Jude he does not rail against the devil but says, The Lord rebuke you. In Revelation he and his angels throw the dragon down. That is the whole biblical portrait: a prince, a restraint, a war.

Catholic devotion filled the rest of the house. He is patron of soldiers, of the dying, of police, of grocers, of the Church. The old Mass ended with his prayer because a pope believed the Church was in a fight committees could not win.

Apparitions of Michael are not articles of the Creed. The cave at Gargano, the vision over Castel Sant’Angelo, the command that built Mont-Saint-Michel — these are how a people remembered that heaven is not decorative. The Korean War letter is later, private, unverified. It is in this house because Catholics kept telling it, and because it belongs on his page, not hidden in a footnote.

Pray with Michael

The prayers

Signs that name Michael

If it belongs to Michael, it is here, with a door back into the story.

SaintLong veneration

The cave of Saint Michael

Monte Sant’Angelo, Gargano, Apulialate 5th century; the written legend is medieval

On the Gargano promontory, above the Adriatic, the town of Monte Sant’Angelo keeps a cave the Latin West has treated as Saint Michael’s own church since late antiquity. The medieval Liber de apparitione tells of a bull, an arrow that returned, a bishop of Siponto named Laurence, a battle dated to 8 May, and a consecration the Archangel is said to have performed himself. The cave, the stair, the bronze doors, and the pilgrimage are not a legend. They are still there. The bull and the arrow are the shrine’s founding story, written down centuries after the date it claims, and the Church has kept them as venerated tradition rather than as an article of the Creed.

SaintLong veneration

Michael over the plague

Hadrian’s Mausoleum, RomeEaster 590

In 590 Rome was burying its dead from plague after the Tiber flood. Gregory, just elected Pope, ordered a penitential procession through the city. That procession is in a contemporary history. The vision of Saint Michael on Hadrian’s mausoleum, putting a bloody sword back into its sheath, is how Rome later explained why the dying stopped — and why an emperor’s tomb has been called the Castle of the Holy Angel ever since. The bronze on the roof is eighteenth-century. The name is medieval. The plague of 590 is not a fable.

SaintLong veneration

The rock Michael asked for

Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandyc. 708

In the early eighth century Aubert, bishop of Avranches, is said to have been told in sleep, three times, to build a church for Saint Michael on the granite islet in the bay — in imitation of the cave at Monte Sant’Angelo. He delayed. The third time, the legend says, the Archangel’s finger left a hole in his skull. A pierced cranium has long been shown at Avranches. The abbey on the rock is not a legend. It has been a Benedictine house, a prison, a national monument, and, since 2001, a house of the Monastic Fraternities of Jerusalem. The gold Michael on the spire is the work of Emmanuel Frémiet, 1897.

SaintUnverified

The vision of Pope Leo XIII

The Vatican1884–1886

Pope Leo XIII ordered the Church to say the Prayer to Saint Michael after Low Mass. Catholics also tell of a vision in which he heard God and the devil, and of a century of license given to Satan. The prayer is certain. The conversation, in the form people now quote, is not.

MarianChurch-approved

Our Lady of Fátima

Cova da Iria, Fátima1917

In 1917, in a hollow of pasture called the Cova da Iria, near the village of Fátima in Portugal, three shepherd children — Lúcia dos Santos, ten, and her cousins Francisco Marto, nine, and Jacinta Marto, seven — saw a lady brighter than the sun, six times, on the 13th of the month from May to October. She asked for the rosary every day, for the conversion of sinners, for devotion to her Immaculate Heart, and that a chapel be built. On 13 July she showed them hell and spoke of war and of Russia. On 13 October, before a crowd of tens of thousands standing in the rain, including reporters who had come to mock, the sun appeared to dance. Francisco and Jacinta died in the influenza. Lúcia lived until 2005 as a nun. The bishop of Leiria declared the apparitions worthy of belief on 13 October 1930.

SaintUnverified

St. Michael in the Korean snow

A frozen ridge in Korea1950

In the winter of 1950 a wounded Marine named Michael writes to his mother. She had taught him a short prayer. On a ridge he met another Marine of the same name, who already knew the words. Seven rifles fired. He was hit. The other man became, in his telling, a figure of light with a sword. The officer who found him said there was no second Michael in the outfit, and that the seven dead had been cut down by a blade.

MarianNot affirmed as supernatural

Garabandal

San Sebastián de Garabandal, Cantabria1961–1965

Four girls report visions of an angel and of Mary, ecstatic walks, a promised great miracle, a warning, and a permanent sign. No Spanish bishop has approved the apparitions. Rome has allowed private devotion without authenticating the events.