Why are Catholics divided over the Prayer to St. Michael?

Did an American bishop really ban the recitation of the Prayer to St. Michael?

Of course not, even if you saw a headline or two (or a hyperventilating social media commenter) claiming just that. But a bishop did recently ask his priests to catechize their congregations on why it was important to move away from reciting prayers like the one to St. Michael “immediately before, during, and immediately after Mass.”

That request raises some questions for the larger church. What follows is an attempt to explain the prayer, the controversy and perhaps even the stakes for those with skin in this particular paraliturgical game.

The prologue

On Oct. 16, 2026, Bishop Mark Beckman of the Diocese of Knoxville, Tenn., wrote in The East Tennessee Catholic:

As I have traveled throughout the Diocese of Knoxville, I have noticed that in some of our parishes additional prayers, including the Prayer to St. Michael, the “Prayer of St. Francis,” a Prayer to the Holy Spirit, and others have been added regularly to the liturgy—recited together, sometimes before the entrance hymn, or immediately after the dismissal.

While acknowledging that some of these prayers “are indeed beloved by our people,” the bishop announced that he had “asked our priests to catechize the people of God as we move away from additional prayers recited together immediately before, during, and immediately after Mass.” In other words, Mass should have the pride of place intended in the “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy” (“Sacrosanctum Concilium”), promulgated by the Second Vatican Council, and one way to ensure that is to avoid unnecessary or confusing accretions to the Mass.

Bishop Beckman, who had served as a priest in the Diocese of Nashville for 34 years before being appointed the bishop of Knoxville by Pope Francis in 2024, wrote that “the regular addition of prayers to the liturgy, to my mind, is ultimately the decision of the Holy Father and something that pastors should not permit on their own.” He encouraged “our pastors and indeed all the faithful to find ways to incorporate these beautiful prayers into the devotional lives of our families and communities beyond the celebration of the liturgy.”

Unspoken in the bishop’s letter is another reality: The custom in many parishes that recite the Prayer to St. Michael after Mass is for it to be led by the priest, still in vestments, after the official dismissal but before the recessional hymn—reasonably leading to the assumption by many that the prayer is part of Mass. (That parish announcements are usually read before the dismissal is another matter.)

The history of the prayer

But what is the Prayer to St. Michael?

Michael the Archangel, of course, has a long tradition in Scripture and church history of being a militant defender of the church. One of three officially recognized archangels in Catholic tradition, along with Gabriel and Raphael, Michael is obliquely referred to several times in the Book of Daniel, where a Michael who is a “chief prince” protects the people. In the New Testament, he appears explicitly twice, once in Jude 1:9 (where he is called “the archangel”) and in Rv 12:7, where he leads God’s army against Satan and the fallen angels. Other references throughout Scripture to an archangel or a leader of God’s host are sometimes linked to him.

Historically, St. Michael has also been associated with powerful intercessions on the part of Christian communities in crisis, including an apparition in Rome in 590 A.D. during an outbreak of plague. During a prayer procession, Pope Gregory the Great saw him atop Hadrian’s Mausoleum—now Castel Sant’Angelo—sheathing his sword, a sign that God would bring the plague to an end. (It is commemorated today by a statue towering over the site, seen above.)

The Prayer to St. Michael has its origins in the papacy of Leo XIII (1878-1903), a period when the pope lost most of his temporal authority on the rapidly unifying Italian peninsula. In response to Italian Risorgimento campaigns against Vatican-controlled territories, his predecessor, Pope Pius IX, had mandated in 1859 that specific prayers be said at the conclusion of “low Masses” (typically shorter, stripped-down Masses that did not include music or ritual elaboration) in the Papal States for God’s intercession on behalf of the church. In 1884, Leo XIII expanded that mandate to the entire church, earning the sequence the eventual name of Leonine Prayers. Two years later, he added the Prayer to St. Michael to the roster.

Depending on whom you ask, Pope Leo was moved to do so by a terrifying vision he had one day in the 1880s after saying Mass. What had he seen? According to tradition (never have three words done more work), the pope saw an army of demons descending upon Rome and heard Satan challenging Jesus, telling him that if he, Satan, could have a century to influence the world, he could bring all of creation under his control. The pope went straight to his study and composed the Prayer to St. Michael:

Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in praelio, 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.

In English:

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 through the world seeking the ruin of souls.

Historians have found no record of Pope Leo XIII ever mentioning his vision during his lifetime, nor any mention of the vision before the 1930s. The spread of the prayer itself was quick, though, perhaps due as much to the fact that it was usually read in the vernacular as to its papal mandate.

(Fans of James Joyce’s Ulysses may remember that Leopold Bloom hears a slightly different translation of the prayer when he slips into Mass at All Hallows Church in “Episode 5: Lotus Eaters.”)

Suppression and revival

From 1886 until 1965, the Prayer to St. Michael was recited at the end of every low Mass as part of the Leonine Prayers. Those prayers were officially suppressed in the 1964 Vatican instruction “Inter Oecumenici,” which was implemented the following year among the liturgical reforms of Vatican II.

Though many traditionally minded Catholic communities continued to recite the prayer after Mass, it had generally fallen out of use in the church in the United States as a commonly known prayer. (Raised in the 1970s and 1980s, I knew it only from refrigerator magnets until a few years ago.) In recent years, however, it has experienced a resurgence both as a personal devotional prayer and as a paraliturgical one, and not just among traditionalist Catholic communities.

In a 1994 reflection in St. Peter’s Square before the recitation of the Regina Caeli (during the Easter season, this hymn replaces the traditional Angelus prayer), St. John Paul II included a mention of the Prayer to St. Michael. “Although this prayer is no longer recited at the end of the Eucharistic celebration,” the pope noted, “I invite everyone not to forget it, but to recite it to obtain help in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world.”

In more recent years, a number of bishops and priests have instituted or encouraged the practice in response to clerical sexual abuse or other crises facing the church. For example, in 2018, Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Ore., urged his priests to recite the prayer after each Mass and to encourage parishioners to say the prayer on their own. The church, he wrote, is in “distressing times with continued revelations about the failures of our brother priests and bishops” and that “the evil one has intensified his war” against the church.

In 2018, the Vatican announced that Pope