Donald Trump Has a Prayer

“Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20) even in the heart and soul of a sinner like Donald Trump. It is that which he has in common with most of us. Everyone else is just pretending.

[The following fine op-ed by Raymond J. de Souza is reprinted from the Opinion Page of The Wall Street Journal on October 11, 2024]

Pious Christians often cringe when Donald Trump talks about religion. Earlier this year the former president got into the Bible business, hawking a $60 “God Bless the USA” version that includes the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, correcting that long-lamented lacuna in the New Testament. Yet a pleasant surprise came on Sept. 29, the feast day of St. Michael the Archangel, when Mr. Trump shared, without comment, a well-known prayer to the great saint.

It’s a formidable prayer, one of my favorites, written by one of my favorite popes, Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 through 1903. My parish prays it together after every Mass, pleading for the protection of a martial saint: “St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”

The history of the prayer is remarkable and may well appeal to politicians who see evil on the march. It certainly appeals to Christians under persecution, and its return to prominence in recent years signals a desire for devotions suitable for a combative time.

The prayer’s origin isn’t well-documented, likely because it involves a pontiff’s vision, and the Vatican gets nervous when anyone has visions, let alone the pope. One telling of the tale is that on Oct. 13, 1884, Leo heard voices in his chapel. It was the devil challenging Jesus, evocative of the first verses of the Book of Job. Satan said he could destroy the Catholic Church and demanded a century in which to try. Leo then had a mystical vision of the horrors of the 20th century and felt faint. On recovery he went straight to his desk and wrote the St. Michael prayer.

Whatever the inspiration, in 1886 Leo mandated that it be said at the conclusion of “low” Masses — less elaborate ceremonies before Sunday’s principal “high” liturgies — all over the world. Generations of Catholics thus grew up learning the prayer by heart.

In the liturgical reforms of the 1960s, the prayer was dropped. It seemed too militant for the times, even though the imagery is straight out of the Scriptures. St. Michael appears in Revelation 12:7, with “his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.”

By providential arrangement, Leo’s vision took place exactly 33 years before the final apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the shepherd children of Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. Those apparitions fired the Catholic imagination, taking on an anticommunist fervor as they spoke of the “conversion of Russia.” Mary took over martial intercession from Michael; all the more so when St. John Paul II survived an assassination attempt on the anniversary of the first Fatima apparition, in 1981.

Only after the Cold War did the prayer return to prominence. In 1994 John Paul asked that it be recited “in order to obtain help in the battle against the forces of darkness and against the spirit of this world.” The pope was then thwarting the Clinton administration’s attempt to make abortion a worldwide human right at the United Nations’ Cairo conference on population. Having deployed the Virgin Mary to vanquish the communists, perhaps John Paul thought St. Michael could conquer the Clintons.

The prayer is now optional and thus not nearly as well-known. Yet it is becoming more widespread, promoted by those who desire a more combative Catholicism to match a combative cultural and political moment.

Pope Francis speaks of the devil much more than his predecessors did, so it follows that he would turn to St. Michael. In 2013, months after his election and at his first public appearance with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Francis entrusted the protection of Vatican City to the archangel, unveiling a statue of him in the Vatican Gardens. In 2018 he asked Catholics to pray the rosary every day in October, adding the St. Michael prayer “to protect the church from the devil, who always seeks to separate us from God and from each other.”

When I arrived at my current parish in 2022, we added the prayer at the end of every Mass. St. Michael is the patron saint of Kyiv, where a prominent statue of him adorns a central square. It seemed particularly fitting as Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion unfolded. Russia still needs conversion.

It’s possible that Mr. Trump learned something of St. Michael from the New York City Police Department, as many Catholic police officers take him as their patron. A larger-than-life statue of St. Michael, cradling a fallen officer, was brought to Harlem’s 32nd Precinct in 2022.

Mr. Trump’s post provoked criticism from the easily agitated, who suggested he was likening his political rivals to the devil. But the prayer, which is as ancient as the Scriptures and as new as the 19th century, is about something much older than American politics. Evil abounds, and the battle against it needs joining. St. Michael leads the charge.

Father de Souza is a priest in Kemptville, Ontario.

+ + +

Comment on the WSJ original by Father Gordon MacRae:

The Catholic observance of The Nativity of Mary was eclipsed in the liturgy by a Sunday observance this year. Nonetheless, on the morning of September 8, I awoke to find in my Inbox a beautiful image of Our Lady of Guadalupe with the simple message, “Happy Birthday, Mary.” It was attributed to Donald Trump. I retained the image because it bears a power of its own much more positive than anything else we are seeing in this election season where the negative is simply overwhelming. So on the morning of September 29, I was less surprised to find the image of Saint Michael the Archangel in my Inbox also attributed to Donald Trump. I deeply appreciate the history of this image and prayer that Father de Souza has presented so well, and that The Wall Street Journal has opted to publish. So many, including Kamala Harris, would simply scoff at all of this and at the source of these images. As Father de Souza points out they provoke criticism from the easily agitated "who suggested he was likening his political rivals to the devil." I assure you, if that is so, that Mr. Trump is not the only one to come to that conclusion. Evil abounds! And as Saint Paul has written, “Grace abounds all the more” even perhaps in the heart and soul of a sinner like Donald Trump. It is that which he has in common with most of us. Everyone else is just pretending.