Michael, Gabriel, Raphael: Allies in Spiritual Battle

On September 29, the Church honors the three named angels of Sacred Scripture, the Archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and on October 2, the Guardian Angels.

September 29, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae

“He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways.”

— Psalm 91:11

The September 29 Feast Day of the Archangels of Sacred Scripture has been an important event in the life of this blog and in my life as a priest and prisoner excluded from justice among earthly powers. To honor that sacred day we are posting a day early this week. Our post extends from this date until October 2, a date reserved in 1670 by Pope Clement X to honor our Guardian Angels in close proximity to Michaelmas.

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The Japanese novelist, Shusaku Endo, was a Catholic convert best known for his acclaimed novel, Silence, which I read in my early years in prison. It had an enormous impact on me. It is a small book, about 200 pages, first published in Japanese in 1969. The focus of much of Endo’s writing reflected his struggles, as one translator described it, “with the anguish of faith and the mercy of God.”

I read it at a time when I, too, was struggling with both. It is sometimes less of a struggle, and therefore a temptation, to simply not believe. There is a scene in this powerful book that left me spellbound. The story is about a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Sebastian Rodrigues, who entered Japan in the 16th Century at the height of Christian persecution at the hands of the Shogun. That is the Japanese name for the military dictatorship that ruled Japan over seven centuries from 1192 to 1867. The name “Shogun” is a contraction of the Japanese “seii tai shogun” (barbarian-hunting warriors).

Father Rodrigues was among the “barbarians” hunted by the Shogun military, the samurai, under a constant threat of public torture and death. The scene that made me shudder most was a description of how Father Rodrigues entered Japan. Foreign ships were barred from its ports so the ship that bore him secretly approached a remote part of the 16th Century Japanese coast in the dark of night. The priest jumped ship and swam to shore in the pitch blackness with nothing but the clothes on his back and no idea of where, or to whom, he would go. The fear of the dark unknown and the courage it took to overcome it was vivid and staggering.

Darkness is itself a character in this highly symbolic novel. Father Rodrigues spent a good deal of time in a brutal Shogun prison in a constant state of darkness and near starvation. At one point, in an intense scene of fear and despair, he asked — and it is from this that the book takes its title — “Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent?”

I have asked that same question many times in the dark of prison. For the character of Father Rodrigues, however, the silence of God was finally broken. He was tortured by the Shogun in order to force him into publicly trampling on the “fumie,” the Japanese term for a sacred icon. It was a crucifix. Despite the torture, Father Rodrigues refused and endured. Then he was forced to watch while 30 Christian converts were lined up one by one to take his place for torture unless he trampled on the crucifix. An inner voice came to him:

“Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know the pain of your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross!”

— Silence, p.171

Father Rodrigues trampled upon the crucifix.

Spiritual Battle

Upon first reading, that excerpt may seem a betrayal. However, digging a little deeper into the words that came to the priest unveils a profound soteriology, the theology of salvation. The priest bore his own suffering, but by his actions he redirected the suffering destined for his converts onto Christ. “It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”

I was surprised to learn that Shusaku Endo left this life leaving behind the life of his fictional tormented priest, Sebastian Rodrigues — on the Feast of Michaelmas. That was the old English name for the feast day of what was once called Saint Michael and All Angels on September 29. In the Catholic calendar it is now the Feast Day of Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, the only angels in the biblical record whose personal names are revealed.

The September 29 date was established in the Sixth Century when on that same date the Church of Saint Michael and All Angels was dedicated on the Salarian Way in Rome. The feast day was called “Michaelmas,” meaning “the Mass of St. Michael.” In British custom, it was one of the “quarter days,” traditionally marked by the election of magistrates and the beginning of the legal and university terms. This may have been because — or the cause of — the designation of Saint Michael as the Patron of Justice.

It was on another date — the Feast Day of the Guardian Angels on October 2 — that I discovered in prison that the silence of God is but an illusion. God has spoken volumes throughout all of human history, and His megaphones are Scripture, Tradition, and the ongoing revelation of grace in our lives. Justice is also not just an elusive and singular event, but a cosmic guarantee, and Saint Michael is its manifestation.

This is a difficult concept that I will try to convey to whatever extent I understand it myself. Scripture suggests to us that the conflicts we face and the struggles we endure in our lives on Earth have an unseen spiritual dimension. The Catholic Biblical scholar, Scott Hahn, also a convert, expressed this in his terrific little book, Angels and Saints: A Biblical Guide to Friendship with God’s Holy Ones‍ (Image Books, 2014):

“St. Michael is mighty among the angels. The Book of Revelation (12:7ff) depicts him as the commander of the heavenly host of angels as they battle Satan and the rebellious spirits .... We know how the battle ends, and we know Michael is victorious (12:10). Still, the war will rage on until the final consummation of history.”

— Angels and Saints, p. 84

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have invoked Michael as a guardian, patron, and leader in spiritual warfare. Our troubles and struggles in this world are not always simple anxieties over material discomforts, painful relationships, or the tragedies that occur in our lives. They are also manifestations of spiritual battle, and should be seen and resisted as such. People of deep faith recognize the spiritual battles within themselves and their environments, and they rely on faith and spiritual allies to defend against them.

I have suggested previously that priests especially are targets of spiritual warfare, inundated by constant temptation in a culture locked in spiritual combat between Heaven and hell. I have cited a Holy Week post of mine that exemplifies the most active goal of Satan: to prevent our reception of the Eucharist and undermine its truth. Every time I write about this, it is followed by days or weeks of spiritual struggle and painful events all around me. This is clearly a story “someone” does not want exposed. The post in which I first exposed this is “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light.”

The Art of War Requires Allies

For 23 years, I had been living in the Hancock Building in this prison complex. For the first six, though I had done nothing to warrant it, I was forced to live in a place with eight men per cell. Words cannot express the assault on the psyche and spirit that life in such a constant environment produced. Just about everyone living there was given an opportunity to move to better housing within a year. I was there for six years.

In that same six years, my friend, Pornchai Moontri, was in the neighboring state of Maine living in the spiritual madness of endless solitary confinement. We lived with polar opposite prison anxieties, and each was in its own way devastating mentally and spiritually.

In 2000, I was finally moved to a saner place with two prisoners per cell. In 2006, Pornchai Moontri arrived. For the next 11 years we lived in the same cell. Then, in 2016, both of us, along with 94 others, were forced in a mass migration back into the place with eight prisoners to a cell. It was because of a development in the prison that had nothing to do with us. We were promised a return to a better housing situation in a matter of weeks. One year later, we were both still there.

In mid-July, 2017, I was summoned from my job as the legal clerk in the prison law library and handed a few trash bags. After 23 years in the dreaded Hancock Building, I was given one hour to unravel from it and move to another unit on the opposite end of this prison complex. I was told that Pornchai would be joining me there on the next day. After my arrival in the new unit, another officer told me that Pornchai was supposed to come with me, but some unseen and nefarious hand changed that order and Pornchai was to be sent somewhere else.

The next day, from a top floor stairwell outside the prison law library where I work, I saw Pornchai in the distance looking forlorn as he wheeled a cart in the opposite direction from where I now lived. I thought I would never see him again. It was a crushing blow for us both. I knew he would be facing deportation in a few years and now would face it alone. I cannot make sense of what happened next.

The outcome of this spiritual battle was stunning, but became so only when I sought help from our allies in spiritual warfare. I knew in my heart that I was called to bring some justice and hope to the burdens Pornchai carried. I described them recently in “Pornchai Moontri and the Things We Carry.”

Three weeks after our parting, I returned from work one day to find the person living in the bunk above me gone, and in his place was Pornchai Moontri. This never happens here. We were shocked, perplexed and overjoyed.

There were later signs that our allies summoned other allies behind the scenes who had come to know of us. On the day we were reunited, they were in just the right place at just the right time saying just the right things to just the right people. It was the most unlikely symphony of actual grace. It was incredible!

This computer generated image depicts the constellation Triangulum and galaxy RD1, 12.2 light-years billion from Earth, formed in the early period of the Universe after the Big Bang.

3:00 AM in a Dark Prison Cell

I apologize if this gets a little strange. Just before all these clouds gathered on the horizon and our chaotic upheavals took place, I had a mysterious dream. It was early in the morning of October 2, 2016, the day the Church honors our Guardian Angels. Had I ever really believed in them? I do now.

I found myself at 3:00 AM standing and staring into a small stretch of sky that I could see beyond my barred cell window. There was an older man standing with me. I could see Pornchai fast asleep in his upper bunk. The older man was very familiar and someone I felt I implicitly trusted, but I cannot remember what he looked like. That part of the dream was erased when I awakened. He pointed to the sky and asked, “What do you see?”

I said, “I only see the prison lights.” “Look beyond the prison lights,” said the mysterious man. Then in the dream my vision suddenly changed. I was able to see far, far away into the vast darkness, and there in the center of my field of view I saw a constellation, a triangle of three stars. Within the triangle, the stars were joined by streams of glowing light. “It looks like neon,” I said stupidly in the dream. As I have stated elsewhere, we do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. Then the companion said, “Michael dwells within the light.”

It seemed that I stood for a long time, mesmerized by this vision. Then I awakened in my bunk. It was very dark. I got up and walked to the window wondering whether it was a dream or real. I saw only prison lights, but I have since learned to look beyond them. I could not forget the simple statement that “Michael dwells within the light.” I get chills even now thinking about it. Later that morning, I called a friend to search an astronomy database to see if such a triangular constellation even exists. This was what was sent to me:

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“1998 — The Most Distant Object Yet Discovered: Astronomers have stumbled upon the most distant galaxy ever found, an object 12.2 billion light-years from Earth. It was announced on March 12, 1998. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. So a light-year is a distance of 5.88 trillion miles. The distance of this object in miles is that times 12.2 billion. [Good luck with the math! And please don’t ask me to convert this to the metric system.]

“A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Arjun Dey of Johns Hopkins University, was analyzing the light from a distant galaxy inside the Constellation Triangulum when they noticed the spectral signature of a faint and far more distant galaxy at its center. By taking longer exposures with the Keck-II telescope they were able to identify the new galaxy which is 90 million light-years farther away than the previous most distant galaxy ever discovered.” [They called it RD1.]

“Based on knowledge that the universe is approximately 13 billion years old, “RD1” was formed soon after the Big Bang gave birth to the universe. By studying it, astronomers hope to learn how and when the earliest galaxies formed. Little is currently known about these early galaxies. A report on the discovery was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

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This, of course, rocked my world. You might recall from my recent post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang,”‍ cowritten by me and priest and physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, that the Church and science are on the same page about the origin of the Universe in an instant, “out of nothing.”

I have recently undertaken a study of Saint Agustin’s 1,200-page treatise The City of God. A major feature in it is Saint Agustin’s revelation of Creation and the Angelic Realm. In the Fifth Century, Saint Augustine proposed that in the Genesis story of Creation, God’s declaration of “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) was the moment the angels were created. In the next verse (Genesis 1:4), God separated the light from the darkness. For Augustine, this was the moment the fallen angels were driven from Heaven by Saint Michael in the battle of the Heavenly Hosts.

This all left me with a profound sense that our stories are not just our own, nor are our struggles or pain. We are a collective part of an immense fabric God has woven toward a specific end. And we have allies who connect with us within the threads:

Prayers to the Archangels in Times of Spiritual Battle

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TO MICHAEL

Most glorious prince of the heavenly armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness. Corne to the assistance of man whom God has created to His likeness, and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and protector. To you the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of peace to crush Satan beneath our feet, that he may no longer hold us captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us. Take hold of the dragon, that ancient serpent which is the devil and Satan. Bind him and cast him into the abyss so that he may no longer seduce the nations.

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TO GABRIEL

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, we beseech you to intercede for us at the throne of Divine Mercy. As you announced the mystery of the Incarnation to Mary, so through your prayers may we receive strength of faith and courage of spirit and thus find favor with God and redemption through Christ our Lord. May we sing with the angels and saints in Heaven forever the praise of God our Savior through your Annunciation: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”

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TO RAPHAEL

O Raphael the Archangel, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us. Raphael, Angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for. May all our movements be guided by your light and transfigured with your joy. Angel, guide of Tobias, lay the request we now address to you at the feet of Him whose unveiled face you are privileged to gaze. Lonely and tired, crushed in spirit by the separations and sorrows of life, we feel the need of calling to you and pleading for the protection of your wings so we may not be as strangers in the province of joy. Remember the weak, you who are so strong, you whose home lies beyond the region of thunder in a land that is always at peace, bright with the resplendent glory of God.

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To learn more about the Angelic Realm Beyond These Stone Walls please visit these related posts:

Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel 
and the Scales of Hesed

St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Our Salvation

The Annunciation: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us

Book of Tobit: The Angel Raphael on the Road with Pornchai Moontri

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

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The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Saint Michael the Archangel Contends with Satan Still

The innocent in prison live in an incubator of dark dreams and nightmares. A recent terror was a confrontation with an evil presence that evoked an Angelic Advocate.

September 25, 2024 by Fr Gordon J. MacRae

I have had my share of nightmares and dreamscapes as an unwilling guest of the State, but I have been hesitant to write about most of them. Our dreams reflect the reality of our conscious lives — both our hopes and our fears. Few of mine are worthy of note, but those few also feel a bit risky to write about. I am not certain that I want to let anyone wander willy-nilly into the chasms of my psyche, a place where even I do not wish to wander alone. It is not because there is anything nefarious to be found there. It is because people who do not have actual evidence to throw will weaponize just about anything to justify their causes. We have seen this at work most recently in the weaponized lawfare in our politics.

To wander “willy-nilly” is an interesting term. It comes from 17th Century New England, a time and place when concerns about the devil dominated the literature and thought of the period. The term is a derivative of “Will I, Nil I,” meaning, “whether I wish it or do not wish it.” That is really the essence of dreams. They enter our psyche through no conscious will of our own while everything in them reflects our perception of ourselves and our place in this world, “our hopes and fears o’er all the years.”

Most of our dreams are quickly forgotten. This has more to do with biology than the content of our dreams. They are experienced differently from other mental processes and are thus not encoded in memory in the same way as conscious experience. A minority of our dreams are frightening and unforgettable. I had one of those recently, and I cannot forget it despite wanting to. It haunts me still. So I will take the plunge and just narrate it without judging either its reality or its sanity. I can only assert that the dream is true.

What made this particular dream most unusual is that I was dreaming that I was asleep and having a dream within the dream. I know this is convoluted but bear with me. In the dream, I was awakened in the night by something unknown. I arose from my bunk and took a walk. I was walking through doors that my conscious mind knew to be always locked. This is, after all, a prison. Outside the locked doors on a walkway at the top of the four-story prison building where I live, I descended alone down the 52 stairs to the ground level. And it was night.

That last sentence is important, and I write it with foreboding. Those same words appeared in another post of mine that described the presence of the Evil One. In “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light,” I wrote of the Gospel account of the betrayal by Judas Iscariot that led to the Crucifixion: “After eating the morsel, he went out. And it was night” (John 13:30). My awareness of night reveals the spiritual setting of my dream. To live in wrongful imprisonment is to live in perpetual night.

At the bottom of the 52 stairs are a few steel doors that are storage areas. They are always locked, but in the dream one door was ajar. As I approached it in the night it opened, and I stepped in. Outside was a hot summer night, but in this room I could see my breath even in the dark. The door slammed shut behind me leaving me in pitch blackness. The room was filled with castoff debris, and lurking among it in the far left corner was what I can only describe as sheer terror. I could feel it more than I could see it.

I could not flee, so I prepared to fight. “I am stronger than you,” I said boldly, but stupidly. We do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. In this one, those were the only words spoken, but they were not the only thoughts. I felt panicked terror from the Presence I was in. I felt this unseen thing overtake me in the dark, and I feared that my soul would be ripped from me. I invoked Saint Michael in the dream, and then I passed out.

The Devil’s Best Trick

And then I was again in my bunk in my cell on the top floor of the building. I was awake. Was I awake then too? I do not know. It took awhile for the terror to leave me. I looked at my alarm clock. It was just a little after 3:00 AM. I did not sleep again that night, and I did not want to be in the dark. So I went out of the cell into a day room. There are four prisoners who sleep out there due to overcrowding and a shortage of cells. I sat there until sunrise.

For the rest of the day and for many days to follow, the dream shadowed over me like a dark cloud. At the other end of that day, at mail call around 6:00 PM, I received my copy of The Wall Street Journal. I usually turn first to the Journal’s Editorial Page, a habit likely born from the fact that I was in it several times. The Journal has a daily, and prominent, book review on the top right of its main Opinion Page. On this day (May 28, 2024) the Review was by Micah Mattix entitled, “In Search of the Unseen Evil.” It was a review of a book by Randall Sullivan entitled, “The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared.”

The review was thoughtful and considerate, and perhaps only slightly skeptical of the subject matter. After my experience of the early morning hours of that same day, I was not skeptical at all. But there are many other factors that diminish my skepticism about the existence of personified evil. The image on our Home Page, reproduced atop this post, makes that as clear as it can be.

Randall Sullivan is no stranger to the Catholic mystical. A previous book, The Miracle Detective (2004) is reported to have profoundly changed him. His current book cited above, opens with a question: “Does the Devil exist, or is he a figment of our imagination?” The second question follows: “If he is real, who or what are we describing when we refer to ‘the Devil’”? Sullivan concludes his book with a statement of personal conviction: “There is a Devil, a force of evil that human beings can best comprehend by personifying it. To acknowledge this, he says, is to throw open the door “the Devil hides behind.”

That certainly got my attention. I was stunned to read this in the WSJ on the same day as my haunting dream. Replaying the dream in my mind, one of my first thoughts was to wonder whether the location of the Evil entity — a “far left” corner — was actually a metaphor for a present trend in our culture. It is a trend I wrote about in my recent post (published just a week before my dream) “Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age.” There is a lot there that I imagine the Devil would prefer you and I did not ponder.

Today many people no longer believe in the Devil — Randall Sullivan gives it an uppercase “D” throughout — and many of those also no longer believe in God. This is a cultural phenomenon that the Devil finds most promising. It’s the theme of a psychological masterpiece by C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters. I wrote of it in Holy Week this year in a post that I am certain the Devil would also prefer that you did not see. In his book, C.S. Lewis laid out the long, subtle descent upon which humans travail a slippery slope away from God:

“It does not matter how small sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge a man away from the Light and out into the Nothing... . Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

— The Screwtape Letters, pp. 60-61

Getting you to look away by altering your belief system to discard his very existence is, as Randall Sullivan entitled his book, The Devil’s Best Trick. Don’t fall for it. We have seen the face of evil many times as it overtakes human beings lured to act on its behalf. Two recent and vivid examples are “Tragedy at Uvalde, Texas: When God and Men Were Missing,” and Pornchai Moontri’s striking “Elephants and Men and Tragedy in Thailand.”

Angelic Justice

I'm sorry if this gets a little weird, but at 3:00 AM on another dark night — this one in 2016 — I had a prequel to this mysterious dream. It was preceded by all manner of dark clouds gathering on the horizon of my life in a time of chaotic upheavals. It was early in the morning of October 2, 2016 the day the Church honors our Guardian Angels. Had I ever really believed in them? I do now.

In the dream, I found myself gazing out the small barred window in the prison cell in which I lived then with Pornchai “Max” Moontri. It was four years before his deportation to Thailand. A small stretch of sky was all that I could see beyond our cell window. There was an older man standing with me. I could see my friend, Max, fast asleep in his upper bunk. The older man was eerily familiar and someone I felt I knew, but in recalling the dream I could not recall what he looked like.

He pointed to the sky and asked,“What do you see?” I replied, “I see only the prison lights.” “Look beyond the prison lights,” said the Guardian. Then in the dream my vision suddenly changed. I was able to see far, far into the vast darkness, and there in the center of my field of view I saw a constellation, a triangle of three stars. Within the triangle, the stars were joined by streams of glowing light connecting them. “It looks like neon,” I said stupidly in the dream. And again, we do not own the stupid things we say in dreams. Then the Guardian said just one sentence before departing my dream: “Michael dwells within the light.”

I stood there for a long time, mesmerized by this vision. Then I awoke in my bunk. It was very dark. I got up and walked to the window wondering whether it was a dream or real. I saw only the invasive prison lights, but I have since learned to look beyond them. I could not forget the simple statement that “Michael dwells within the light.”

Later that morning, I called a friend. I was embarrassed to relate the dream, but I asked her to search an astronomy database to see if a triangular constellation actually exists. This was what was sent to me:

“1998 — The Most Distant Object Yet Discovered: Astronomers have stumbled upon the most distant galaxy ever found, an object 12.2 billion light-years from Earth. It was announced on March 12, 1998. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. A light year is thus a distance of 5.6 trillion miles. [It’ s a difficult calculation, but the distance of this object in miles is 12.2 billion times 5.6 trillion. Good luck with the math!]

"A team of scientists led by astrophysicist Arjuna Dey of Johns Hopkins University was analyzing the light from a distant galaxy inside the Constellation Triangulum when the team noticed the spectral signature of a faint and far more distant galaxy at its center. By taking longer exposures with the Keck-II telescope they were able to identify the new galaxy as being 90 million light years farther than the previous most distant galaxy ever before discovered. They dubbed this discovery, ‘RD1.’

“Based on knowledge that the universe is approximately 13 billion years old, [knowledge first discovered by famed physicist and mathematician, Father Georges Lemaitre] Galaxy RD1 was formed soon after the Big Bang gave birth to the Cosmos. By studying it, astronomers hope to learn how and when the earliest galaxies formed. Little is currently known about these early galaxies. A report on the discovery was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

This, of course, rocked my world. You might recall from our post, “Fr Georges Lemaître, the Priest Who Discovered the Big Bang,” co-written by me and Oxford priest-physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, that the Church and science are on the same page about the origin of the Universe born in an instant, “out of nothing.”

In the early Fifth Century, Saint Augustine proposed that in the Genesis account of Creation, God’s declaration, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) was the moment the angels were created. In the next verse (Genesis 1:4), “God separated the light from the darkness.” For Saint Augustine, this was the moment the angels fell and were driven from Heaven by Saint Michael in the battle of the Heavenly Hosts. Is this all metaphor or is it real? On a spiritual level it is very real.

This all left me with a profound sense that our stories are not just our own, nor are dreams or our struggles or pain. We are individuals, but we are also a collective part of an immense tapestry God has woven toward a specific end. And within the threads, we can find allies. I could no longer face the darkness without them.

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From The Prayer of Pope Leo XIII against Apostate Angels :

“Most Glorious Prince of the Heavenly armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness. Come to the aid of man whom God has created to His likeness, and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and protector. To you the Lord has entrusted the souls of the redeemed to be led into heaven. Pray therefore the God of peace to crush Satan beneath our feet, that he may no longer hold us captive and do injury to the Church. Offer our prayers to the Most High, that without delay they may draw His mercy down upon us. Take hold of the dragon, the ancient serpent which is the devil and Satan. Bind him and cast him into the abyss so that he may no longer seduce the nations.”

— An Excerpt from the Prayer of Pope Leo XIII, 1878-1903

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. We hope you will also visit these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls. And please subscribe if you have not already done so. It’s free, and we usually only haunt your inbox once per week.

A Devil in the Desert for the Last Temptation of Christ

Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light

Angelic Justice: Saint Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed

Michael, Gabriel, Raphael: Allies in Spiritual Battle

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Thank you. May the Lord Bless you and keep you .

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”