The Chaplet of St. Michael

This is the chaplet word for word as EWTN prints it. Every prayer in it is addressed to God, asking through the intercession of St. Michael and each choir of angels, or to St. Michael, asking him to pray and to protect; nothing in it addresses an evil spirit.

1. Begin on the medal or the first bead with “O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me,” and a Glory Be.
2. First salutation, to the Seraphim, then one Our Father on the large bead and three Hail Marys on the three small ones.
3. Repeat for the other eight choirs in order, Cherubim to Angels: each time the salutation, one Our Father and three Hail Marys. That is nine groups of four beads.
4. Four more Our Fathers on the four beads nearest the medal: in honour of St. Michael, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael and your guardian angel.
5. Close with “O glorious prince St. Michael…”, the versicle “Pray for us, O glorious St. Michael…”, and the prayer “Almighty and Everlasting God…”.

Without a chaplet, use an ordinary rosary: the Our Father bead and the first three Hail Mary beads of each decade serve for one choir, and five decades and the pendant give you more than enough beads for nine groups and four closing Our Fathers. Or count on your fingers. The beads are a help, not a requirement. At an unhurried pace the whole chaplet takes about fifteen minutes.

Each salutation asks God, through St. Michael and one choir of angels, for one grace, and the order is not random. It begins with love, the Seraphim’s fire, and ends with the angels who guard us in this life and lead us home:

• Seraphim: perfect charity.
• Cherubim: to leave the ways of sin and follow the way of Christian perfection.
• Thrones: a true spirit of humility.
• Dominions: to govern our senses and overcome unruly passions.
• Powers: protection against the snares and temptations of the devil.
• Virtues: to be kept from evil and from falling into temptation.
• Principalities: a true spirit of obedience.
• Archangels: perseverance in faith and good works.
• Angels: their protection in this life and their guidance into heaven.

Read as a whole, it is a short course in the Christian life: love, conversion, humility, self-mastery, protection, obedience, perseverance, and the last things. That is why many people pray it daily. And it matches the Scripture it stands on: “For he will put his angels in charge of you, to guard you in all your ways” (Psalm 91:11).

The usual story, printed by EWTN among others, is that a Servant of God named Antonia d’Astonac had a vision of St. Michael, who asked to be honoured by nine salutations to the nine choirs. Many pages add that she was a Portuguese Carmelite and that the vision took place in 1751. We could not find a source for either detail.

The oldest account we could read is the English Raccolta of 1857, the official collection of indulgenced prayers. It calls the origin “a pious tradition”: that St. Michael told “a holy personage” that he would be pleased by these prayers. It then says that “a holy Carmelite nun, of the convent of Vetralla, in the diocese of Viterbo, who died with the reputation of sanctity in the year 1751, made it her delight to practise this method of prayer”, and that it was at the request of the nuns of her convent that the Pope indulgenced it. So the one firm date is her death, in Italy, and she is not named.

A vision like this, if it happened, is a private revelation. The Catechism is clear about how the Church holds those: some “have been recognized by the authority of the Church”, but “They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history” (CCC 67). No Catholic has to believe the chaplet began with an apparition. Its prayers stand on their own.

What is documented is that the Church adopted the prayer. By a decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites dated August 8, 1851, Pope Pius IX granted indulgences to those who prayed the chaplet, at the request of the Carmelite nuns of Vetralla. The grant is recorded in the 1857, 1878 and 1910 editions of the Raccolta. Those particular grants belong to the old Raccolta and were superseded when the Church revised its list of indulgences in 1968, so they should not be quoted as current.

That approval is an approval of the prayer: it is sound, it is Catholic, and the Church encourages it. It is not a confirmation of the vision or of the promises attached to the chaplet, and the Raccolta speaks only of “signal favours”, not of any of them.

As EWTN gives them, St. Michael promised that whoever practises this devotion would have, when approaching Holy Communion, an escort of nine angels, one from each choir, and that those who pray the chaplet daily would have his continual help and that of all the holy angels during life. One of EWTN’s two pages adds deliverance from purgatory after death for them and their relations; the other does not, and the 1857 Raccolta speaks only of “signal favours”.

These promises belong to the private-revelation account, not to the Church’s teaching. They can be held with devotion; they cannot be held as a guarantee. The Catechism names the risk precisely: to attribute the efficacy of prayers “to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111). Pray the chaplet for what it asks, charity, humility, perseverance and protection, and leave the rest to God.

Many people pray it through the nine days before Michaelmas as a St. Michael novena, or close it with the short prayer to St. Michael the Archangel of Pope Leo XIII.