The St. Michael Prayer

In 1886, Pope Leo XIII added a short prayer to St. Michael the Archangel to the prayers said after every Low Mass — and for almost eighty years, the whole Latin Church prayed it together at the end of Mass. It remains the most widely prayed Catholic prayer of spiritual defense, and in recent decades the popes have invited the faithful to take it up again.

The prayer asks God — through the prince of the heavenly hosts — for defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil. It is a prayer of humble petition, not confrontation: "May God rebuke him, we humbly pray." Below you will find the prayer, the longer form drawn from Leo XIII’s later text, narrated audio, a prayer card to keep or share, and then its history, what each line means, and what the Church does and does not say about it.

St. Michael the Archangel appears in Scripture as the defender of God’s people: in Daniel as “the great prince who stands for the children of your people” (Daniel 12:1), in the Letter of Jude contending with the devil, and in Revelation 12 leading the angels in battle against the dragon. The Church has invoked his protection since the earliest centuries.

Leo XIII’s prayer compresses that whole biblical picture into a few lines. Notice its shape: every petition is addressed to God or to Michael as intercessor — never to the enemy. "May God rebuke him, we humbly pray" echoes Jude 9, where even the Archangel does not rebuke Satan by his own authority but says, “May the Lord rebuke you!” That is the Church’s standard for the laity’s spiritual warfare: humble, deprecatory, confident in God’s power rather than our own.

The prayer is for everyone. It is not an exorcism, requires no authorization, and belongs in ordinary daily prayer — after Mass, at night, in moments of temptation, over your children.

• Daily — many Catholics pray it every morning or after Mass.
• In moments of temptation, fear, or felt spiritual attack.
• At night, with Psalm 91, as part of household night prayer.
• As a nine-day novena to St. Michael (September 20–28, or any time of need).

Pope Leo XIII. In 1884 he ordered a set of prayers to be said after every Low Mass throughout the world — three Hail Marys, the Hail Holy Queen and a closing prayer — extending a practice Pius IX had begun in the Papal States in 1859. In 1886 he added the prayer to St. Michael. Together they became known as the Leonine Prayers, and for almost eighty years a Catholic at a Low Mass anywhere in the Latin Church heard Mass end with these words.

Why then? Rome had been taken from the Papal States in 1870, and the Holy See was in open conflict with the new Italian state; the prayers after Mass were offered for the freedom of the Church and the conversion of sinners. Later popes changed the intention they were said for — in 1930 Pius XI asked that they be offered so that the people of Russia might again be free to profess the faith — but the words to St. Michael stayed the same.

The vision story. Many pages say Leo XIII wrote the prayer after seeing a vision of demons during Mass. The story is told everywhere, but it first appeared in print in a German newspaper in 1933, nearly fifty years later, and a German priest who tried to trace it the following year found no evidence for it. No first-hand account from Leo XIII has ever been produced. The prayer does not need the story: every line of it comes from Scripture, as the section on its meaning below shows.

It was not singled out. On September 26, 1964, the instruction Inter Oecumenici — the first instruction putting the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the liturgy into practice — listed changes to the Order of Mass, and article 48 ended: “The last gospel is omitted; the Leonine Prayers are suppressed.” The change took effect on March 7, 1965, the First Sunday of Lent.

The Leonine Prayers had been added onto the end of Low Mass rather than being part of the liturgy itself, and the reform was reshaping how Mass ends. The St. Michael prayer went with the rest of them. The instruction says nothing against the prayer, and no pope since has discouraged it.

What the popes have asked since. On April 24, 1994, at the Regina Caeli, Pope John Paul II recalled Leo XIII’s prayer and said: “Even if 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 be helped in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world” (our translation of the Italian). On July 5, 2013, Pope Francis, with Benedict XVI beside him, blessed a statue of St. Michael in the Vatican Gardens and consecrated Vatican City State to St. Joseph and St. Michael. On September 29, 2018, the feast of the Archangels, he asked the faithful of the whole world to pray the Rosary every day of October and to end it with the ancient Marian prayer Sub tuum praesidium and Leo XIII’s prayer to St. Michael, asking protection for the Church from the devil, “who always seeks to separate us from God and from each other.”

Can it be prayed after Mass today? In 2018 several U.S. bishops, Bridgeport’s among them, asked their parishes to pray it together again at the end of Mass, and some parishes still do. Whether yours does is for its pastor and bishop to decide; nothing stops you from praying it on your own after the final blessing.

The short form is the prayer at the top of this page, from 1886: about sixty words, prayed by the whole Church after Low Mass, and the prayer the popes have asked the faithful to pray. The Holy See printed it in Latin in 2018 as:

Sancte Míchael Archángele, defénde nos in próelio; contra nequítiam et insídias diáboli esto praesídium. Imperet illi Deus, súpplices deprecámur, tuque, Prínceps milítiae caeléstis, Sátanam aliósque spíritus malígnos, qui ad perditiónem animárum pervagántur in mundo, divína virtúte, in inférnum detrúde. Amen.

The long form comes from a longer text Leo XIII published in 1890, the Exorcism against Satan and the apostate angels (Exorcismus in Satanam et angelos apostaticos). That text has three parts: a long prayer to St. Michael; the exorcism itself, a series of solemn adjurations spoken to Satan and the fallen angels; and closing prayers to God. The long form printed on this page keeps only what is addressed to St. Michael and to God. It does not contain the exorcism.

That distinction matters, because many “long St. Michael prayer” pages online print the whole 1890 text, exorcism included, as if it were a devotion for anyone. In 1985 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith wrote to the world’s bishops that “it is not even licit that the faithful use the formula of exorcism against Satan and the fallen angels, extracted from the one published by order of the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII, and even less that they use the integral text of this exorcism.” The same letter adds that this should “in no way distance the faithful from praying that, as Jesus taught us, they may be delivered from evil.” So: the short prayer and the prayer to St. Michael, yes; the parts that speak to the devil, no.

Which should you pray? Most people pray the short form every day and the long form now and then — during the novena, at Michaelmas, or when things are hard. Both have the same shape: they ask God, through St. Michael, and never address the enemy.

No. The Catechism calls it exorcism when the Church asks “publicly and authoritatively in the name of Jesus Christ” that a person or object be protected against the power of the Evil One and withdrawn from his dominion. A simple exorcism is part of every Baptism; the solemn or “major” exorcism “can be performed only by a priest and with the permission of the bishop” (CCC 1673). The St. Michael prayer is neither. It is a petition: it asks St. Michael to defend us and asks God to rebuke the devil.

That is the point of its most-quoted line. “May God rebuke him, we humbly pray” echoes the Letter of Jude, where the archangel himself, contending with the devil, “dared not bring against him an abusive condemnation, but said, ‘May the Lord rebuke you!’” (Jude 9). If Michael leaves the rebuke to God, so do we. Every Catholic may pray it, children included, and it needs no permission from anyone.

Is there a warning about praying the St. Michael prayer? Some posts and videos warn that praying it invites attack, or that only priests may say it. The Church says neither. The cautions it actually gives are two. The first is the one above: the exorcism formula belongs to the priests appointed to it, not to the faithful. The second is from the Church’s Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, which warns against reading daily life “childishly”, so as to “ascribe all setbacks to the Devil and all success to the Guardian Angels” (§217). The prayer is not a charm, and it does not depend on being said a set number of times or in a set way. It is asking.

Where the warning comes from. Mostly from the 1985 letter quoted in the section on the short and long forms. It is a real warning, but its subject is the exorcism inside Leo XIII’s longer 1890 text, and many pages online print that text in full and call it “the long St. Michael prayer”. Repeated without that context, a caution about the exorcism turns into a caution about the prayer. The rest is the fear the Directory names: the idea that turning to St. Michael draws the enemy’s attention to you. Nothing in the Church’s teaching says so, and the popes who asked the faithful to pray it, John Paul II in 1994 and Francis in 2018, gave no such warning.

So the honest answer is short. The short prayer is for everyone, children included. The long form on this page is safe to pray because it leaves the exorcism out. If a version you have found speaks to Satan and the fallen angels and orders them to leave, that part is the one the Church reserves to priests.

“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.” The battle is real, and it is not against people: “our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world’s rulers of the darkness of this age, and against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). The Catechism calls the whole of human history a “dour combat with the powers of evil” (CCC 409).

“Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.” Snares, not force: the devil’s way is deception. “Your adversary, the devil, walks around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. Withstand him steadfast in your faith” (1 Peter 5:8–9). When we pray “deliver us from evil”, the Catechism says, “evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God” (CCC 2851).

“May God rebuke him, we humbly pray.” The deprecatory heart of the prayer (Jude 9, above). We ask; God acts.

“And do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts…” St. Michael is the “great prince” of Daniel 12:1, quoted above. In Revelation, “Michael and his angels made war on the dragon,” and “the great dragon was thrown down, the old serpent, he who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:7, 9). The prayer asks him to do for us what Scripture shows him doing.

“By the power of God.” Not his own. Satan “is only a creature”; his power is “not infinite” and “he cannot prevent the building up of God’s reign” (CCC 395). St. Michael is a creature too. The power in this prayer is God’s, which is why it can be prayed without fear.

“Cast into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.” The victory is already won: “Now the prince of this world will be cast out” (John 12:31), at the hour when Jesus gave himself up to death (CCC 2853). The prayer asks that this victory reach us today, which is what we ask at the end of every Our Father: “deliver us from the evil one” (Matthew 6:13).

Every day. Morning or night both serve. Many families say it at bedtime with the Guardian Angel prayer, and many people say it on the way out of the door.

In October, at the end of the Rosary. This is Pope Francis’s 2018 request: after the Rosary, the Sub tuum praesidium and then the St. Michael prayer. The Holy See gave the Sub tuum in English as: “We fly to Thy protection, O Holy Mother of God. Do not despise our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O Glorious and Blessed Virgin.” If you are new to the Rosary, how to pray the Rosary walks through it bead by bead.

From August 15 to September 29. St. Michael’s Lent, the forty days St. Francis of Assisi kept in honour of St. Michael from the Assumption to his feast, has this prayer at its centre.

September 20 to 28, and September 29. The St. Michael novena runs for the nine days before Michaelmas, the feast of Sts. Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, Archangels, on September 29. Three days later, on October 2, the Church keeps the memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels. For a longer devotion there is the Chaplet of St. Michael, and for his place in Scripture and tradition, St. Michael the Archangel.

Many families pray the St. Michael prayer together at bedtime, or say it quietly over a child who is asleep. You can pray Leo XIII’s words just as they are and hold the people you love in your heart while you say them, or use this family form, which keeps the prayer’s shape: it asks God, through St. Michael, and never speaks to the enemy.

People often come to this prayer at a frightening moment: dread at night, thoughts that will not stop, a sense that something is wrong in the house or in themselves. Pray it, and do not carry it alone.

The Church is careful here. Before it treats anything as the devil’s work, “it is important to ascertain that one is dealing with the presence of the Evil One, and not an illness”, because psychological illness “is a very different matter” and its treatment is “the concern of medical science” (CCC 1673). So talk to a priest, and talk to a doctor; neither is a failure of faith. If you are frightened for your safety, or are thinking of harming yourself, tell someone you trust today.