The Return of the Prayer to St. Michael

Modern philosophy is full of all sorts of absurd theories about the illusory nature of existence and the unreliability of everything we know to be true. But the boots on the ground, living, breathing, day to day philosophy of even the most angst-ridden German nihilist or the most wild-eyed French existentialist has to be common sense realism. Even German and French philosophers must eat, sleep and conduct themselves in civil society.

There’s great consolation in the reliability of the law of gravity and the fact that it means something specific to me or anyone else when you say dog, cat, house, person, good, true and beautiful. But the last three of those words; good, true and beautiful, and maybe even person, do enjoin some philosophical reflection. They are the basis for making sense of right and wrong, obligation, prohibition and so on. Philosophy isn’t just a waste of time.

Catholicism is deeply philosophical and also deeply mystical and of late the mysticism of the Catholic world view has been confronting me with great force, and confronting the minimalist common sense realism I had more or less taken for granted.

Our parish and a number of Catholic churches I’ve been to recently have begun saying the St. Michael prayer after Mass. It is a breathtaking departure from the modern psychological deconstruction through which I have made sense of my own mental states and those of others. Pride, envy, sloth, greed, lust, gluttony and wrath are not merely maladjustments, but rather they are the snares of a spiritual being who seeks the ruin of souls. They are our weaknesses within our wounded souls, but they are also passions from outside of us, which act upon us, against which we must not be passive, or we will be swept away.

The idea that there is a spirit of pride, envy, sloth or any of the other deadly sins which can emanate from people, entertainments or places—or from the devil—is an enchanted, mystical, ancient Catholic view. Since the 1200’s the Tridentine Mass invoked St. Michael in the Confiteor as a protection against evil. Ours is a faith shot through with struggles between powers and principalities, angels and demons.

The resurgence in the St. Michael Prayer reclaims much of the domain seized by Freud, Jung, Adler and their redactors in outlining the landscape of the soul. And it rings true. We are not merely struggling to harness internal engines of the soul like the desires for sex, meaning and power. We are not merely hot-house orchids, isolated, hermetically sealed, gazing upon the tempests which rage within our spiritual navels. We are also the objects of a cosmic struggle between the forces of God and the Devil.

Scott Hahn explained the sign of the beast, 666, the mark of the devil referred to in Revelations, as the spiteful declaration of spiritual war by Satan. It was rooted in Satan’s offended pride and envy. According to St Thomas Aquinas, angels have perfect knowledge of that which they know, and at the instant of creation, saw all that would unfold throughout history, including the fall of man and the incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus Christ. According to Hahn, that God would become a lowly man was such an affront to the vastly superior angels that Satan rebelled in disgust, and 6, the day upon which man was created, was repeated as a cuss three times, as a mock of the Trinity and a declaration of rebellion. The fall of the angels was directly linked to their envy of man because God took on lowly humanity in the Person of Jesus Christ. So from the beginning, the principle objective of the fallen angels has been the seduction and ruin of human souls. According to Catholic theology we are hunted by the devil and his minions but also protected by hosts of angels, including angels specifically assigned to the protection of each one of us.

Now there is good reason to have pause. Most sane Catholics stiffen up at some point in the discussion of devil sand angels. We live in an age of progress and practical solutions and the idea of an intractable struggle between invisible forces of good and evil seems pre-modern and nutty. And this is so among good Catholics who have closely adhered to the Church. In fact Vatican II officially suppressed the then widespread practice of praying the St. Michael prayer after Mass in the Instructio Prima. And the denuding of the churches of frescoes, statuary and all but the most abstract stained glass windows signaled a strong de-emphasis on the theology of powers and principalities. This has been the moment in the Church in which we have grown up. If one were to propose a spectrum extending from dismissal of the devil as a pre-scientific mythological representation of the psychologically and physically unexplained all the way over to a constant awareness of external forces both attacking and defending us, most of us would locate far closer to the former.

But in the past few years things have changed both among Church hierarchy and in the pews. In 1994 Pope John Paul II urged Catholics to recite the prayer again. And it has become increasingly evident to a growing number that abortion, pornography, same-sex “marriage” and no-fault divorce are not just isolated evils but part of a broad, concerted effort. Anthropologists accept it as axiomatic that we are religious by nature, always seeking to make sense of the meaning and purpose of our lives and creation. As these things have become more and more prevalent in our culture, their soul-transforming effects have given them a somewhat symbolic quality. It looks more and more like these evils are sacraments of darkness, rites aggressively promoted in a massive spiritual struggle for souls. Witness revelations of abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s practice of keep hundreds of tiny feet from the babies he killed in plastic bags in his freezer. More and more, ordinary Catholics think in terms of the ancient Catholic understanding of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, God and the devil.

At the April convocation of Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Barry’s Bay, Thomas Cardinal Collins gave the keynote address. He began with Chesterton’s observation that we love The Iliad because life is a struggle, we love The Odyssey because life is a journey, we love the Book of Job because so much of what befalls us is incomprehensible. To this he added a fourth; we love the Book of Revelations because we want to know how it all ends. He then said that we do know how it all ends—and these were the truest words he spoke that day.

If all the madness we face were merely phantasms in our tortured souls we could have no confidence in the triumph of God. From all the times we have made earnest resolutions and then fallen again, each of us knows that we can’t trust ourselves and so we know that we could not be certain that we would choose good over evil in the end if it were only up to us. The struggle between good and evil would be too much to bear if it were left up to us. We could have no confidence in how it all ends. But mercifully it is not only up to us.

After the cardinal had spoken, after the final blessing at the end of the convocation mass at St Hedwig’s church, several hundred voices and the cardinal recited the prayer to St. Michael. He then said that he had already printed up thousands of copies of the prayer and he planned to promulgate it in the archdiocese of Toronto as soon as opportunity allowed. As the storm gathers and the division between good and evil becomes more stark, the unfolding of history is providing that opportunity.

Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel

St. 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 though o prince of the heavenly host
By the power of God cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl the world
seeking the ruin of souls.

Just take it to the Lord in prayer. Asking other fellow humans to ask God as well, is of course appropriate.

Beautiful explanation of intercessory prayer! Not only do those in heaven pray with us, they also pray for us. In the book of Revelation, we read: "An angel came and stood at the altar [in heaven] with a golden censer; and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne; and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God" (Rev. 8:3-4).

And those in heaven who offer to God our prayers aren’t just angels, but humans as well. John sees that "the twenty-four elders [the leaders of the people of God in heaven] fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints" (Rev. 5:8). The simple fact is, as this passage shows: The saints in heaven offer to God the prayers of the saints on earth.

The only scriptural case, of enquiring the help of a deceased person, was King Saul wanting the witch to bring up Samuel. That turned out REAL bad for Saul.

No one prays to dead saints, because those in heaven are more alive than we are. The Lord is God of the living, not of the dead. The fervent prayer of a righteous man is very powerful (Jas 5:16). Those in heaven are surely righteous, since nothing unclean can enter heaven (Rv 21:27). Those in heaven are part of the Mystical Body of Christ and have not been separated from us by death, but surround us as a great cloud of witnesses (Heb 12:1). They stand before the throne of God and offer our prayers to him (Rv 5:8) and cheer us on as we run the good race. Intercession among members of the body of Christ is pleasing to God (1 Tm 2:1-4) and even commanded by him (Jn 15:17). Those in heaven have a perfected love, so how could they not intercede for us? Christ is the vine, and we are the branches; if we are connected to him, we are inseparably bound together as well. Can the eye say to the hand, "I need you not"? Neither are we to say we don’t need the prayers of our brothers and sisters (alive here or in heaven), because salvation is a family affair.

Tobit is part of the Septuagint used by Jesus and his Apostles.

Excuse me, but reliance upon textual indications of "Jesus and his Apostles" having been aware of and/or even had quoted from Greek language versions of passages from the OT -- does not equate to the book of Tobias or Tobit as that is known to have been regarded as canonical by those whom you mention.

The evidence is strongly the other-way-around, meaning that --- they likely knew of Tobit and other written works which eventually made their way into the collection of literature known as Septuagint -- yet did not use those works themselves, either at all (depending upon which book of OT Apocrypha/deutercanon) and certainly not quoting from ANY of them as they did cite elsewhere from Scripture.

It is not well known which books of whqt is now referred to as dueterocanon, at the time of Christ, were or were not present among scrolls of the the remainder of that which makes of Greek Septuagint.

Even if the copies of book of Tobit be somewhere among the scrolls of expatriate Jews (such as those living in Alexandria), first --- to result in that presence actually indicate that work be rightfully Hebrew religious canon, then one must show that the presence alone of that work (and others) is equal to canonicity, and
THEN ---- show that those same diaspora Jews did not hold mistaken views as to what rightfully composed their canon, and what didn't.

Did not the earliest Christians, have among themselves for a time, written works that were erroneously regarded by themselves as being canonical? That did not make those books into being real and actual 'holy writ', now did it? A writing is either infallible inspired from above -- or it is not. I do not believe that is like a light switch or water spigot -- that once is turned on, lit up, or opened to flow -- can ever properly then be undone, shut off, turned off, made not inspired, unless it was never sufficiently inspired -- in the first place.

Perhaps yet another question here should be also asked -- should we consider the written works which we accept as canonical to be accurately representative as Word of God? Or is some of it merely helpful literature?

Among the Jews, from their own history, during their own Exodus from Egypt --- they were instructed through their prophets to write the Law as given to them ---upon their own hearts, as even the very word of God to them.

As it is, even "Catholic" sources cannot establish that Jesus and his Apostles cited any of the Apocryphal writings as Scripture, perhaps most particularly in narrow regard to Tobit, being as that book itself is being here referred to by yourself ---while citing it also as having been regarded as Scripture to Christ and the Apostles themselves specifically -- when none of the above quoted from that one, at all.

Or else, you could show me where they did so?

Even http://www.scripturecatholic.com/septuagint.html appears to have ceased from their previous claims that Christ and the Apostles quoted from Apocrypha/dueterocanon at all. Hallelujah. Thank God for small miracles. Someone must have raked John Salza over the coals real good and proper for the "listing" he used to publish, to have now been [cough-cough] adjusted. bwaahahhaa! too funny! I'm lovin' it.

Can you prove your contentions, other than a brief hand-waving towards "Septuagint"?

After all this time on this forum, yourself having begun countless HUNDREDS of threads which touched upon and have at times delved moderately deep into issues as per these disputed writings of which Tobit is a part ---- do you still not know that simple waving towards deuterocanon, does_not_work?

The book of Tobit itself has some textual problems --internal errors as it were, mistaken statements shown to have confused identities.

As for deuterocanonical issues, there is the significant problem of challenge of Philo (25 BC- 50 AD) that man an erudite Jew from Alexandria having written of and quoted extensively from most all of the rest of OT Scripture --- but --- having not done so in regards to the disputed writings now known as duetercanon.

Then, there is the witness of Josephus from 75 AD, who's own numbering of "books" which were considered by the Jews as canon --- once the numbering is seen in light of how Jews of that age arranged things --- does not include the OT Apocrypha.

Can one somehow squeeze past those witnesses well enough to now say that Jesus and the Apostles regard for these disputed works as being what they themselves viewed as being Scripture? --

Here, in your own citing of Jesus and the Apostles (thank you for that, in this context) underlines how important this issue can be.

There are various indications that Christians, by Melito of Sardis's era (180 AD) had ongoing disputes among themselves as to what should have been or was OT canon, is yet more reason to reasonably conclude that those disputed writings were not among Hebrew OT canon, AND ALSO--- was not well enough established by earliest Christian traditions TO THE CONTRARY, with the Christians of that age having either; become confused by inclusion of books such as Tobit among some diaspora Jews within collections of Greek texts, or lack of clear expression from these same Greek speaking Jews for well enough expressing differentiation in their own considerations towards books such as Tobit--- compared to Torah, the Prophets, and the other Writings otherwise known to be accepted by themselves as Scripture, which had helped cause the confusion.

That apparent confusion has been here of late --blamed on the Jews of that age-- as IF they would actually remove books from their own canon sometime near to 90 AD (council of Jamnia) ---just to spite Christians.

Imagine that. Jews --- those whom would know best as to what was properly canonical to themselves and what was not --- tearing out books of their own Bible, as it were? That is unthinkable. That would have raised such a tumult among them, I'd say that anyone who would thinks otherwise does not know or understand religious Jews -- much at all.

The re-instituting in 90 AD of Jewish religious schools (in what is now Israel) of which there is not much dispute among scholars to have occurred (even as there IS dispute as to whether it was "a Council") bears witness as to what they regarded as canon --- and that agrees with Josephus's description.

Flavius Josephus was born in the year 37 AD. Among his own writings which include details his own life, he mentions that hen 19 years of age he was put under the tutelage of a religious teacher, who lived alone in the desert, and was of the Pharisee sect.

37, plus 19 equals 54. Which suggests that somewhere near the year 54 AD, at the latest, Josephus first learned of the contents of 'canon' of religious writings, of the Jews. At least -- those Jews foremost in recognized religious authority.

But now, today...LOL...the same people who pound the tables around here while speaking of "Tradition" think they can by their own later arising Traditions, overthrow the contents of that earlier Hebrew tradition as to what made up the collection of writings considered sanctified and 'holy'-- enough to put writings into the mouths of Jesus Christ himself and his Apostles also, that which was not recognized as Scripture by the very individuals whom during time of Christ -- considered themselves to then occupy the 'seat of Moses'???

I can't help it man...I've got to take a break, this is busting me up...I'm sitting here LMAO -- no kidding! You guys are too much. Pull the other leg!

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