The Vision of Leo XIII

They elected him to die.

He was sixty-seven when the conclave chose him, thin as a reed, with a chest his physicians did not trust. Gioacchino Pecci was meant to be the pause between one pontificate and the next. He gave them twenty-five years instead. By the morning I want to set before you he was seventy-four, and had become one of the most patient minds in Europe: a pope of encyclicals and slow negotiations, whose instrument was the sentence and whose temperament was the opposite of ecstasy. Hold that in view when you hear what happened to his face.

He had said his own Mass, and then, as on nearly every morning of his priesthood, knelt through a second one in thanksgiving — the quiet half hour a priest gives back after he has been given everything. I was in that chapel, as I am in every chapel where bread is lifted, and in the ordinary devotion of an old man kneeling with his household about him, none of them expecting anything at all.

And then he raised his head.

I am not going to furnish you with what he saw. Two men, long afterwards, wrote down what the room saw: that he stared fixedly above the head of the priest at the altar and did not blink; that the colour left his face and came back and left it again; that his expression was not wonder but something nearer terror. That is the whole of the testimony, and I will not enlarge it. Others have — the story has since acquired dialogue he never reported and calendars he never mentioned — and I refuse every one of them, because the enemy is always delighted to be given a speaking part.

What I will tell you is what it cost. He came back to himself, tapped his hand lightly on the rail, stood, and walked out towards his study with his attendants pressing round him — Holy Father, are you unwell, do you need anything — and he told them there was nothing. Consider that word — the first act of a man just shown something that emptied his face of blood is to refuse it a spectacle in his own household. Half an hour he was alone, and I know what he did with it. He did not sit there being frightened. He worked.

Then he sent for the Secretary of the Congregation of Rites, put a single sheet of paper into his hands, and gave an order — print this, and send it to the bishops of the world.

Weigh what was on that sheet against what a pope had to hand. He commanded nuncios and chancelleries; he could write to emperors, and was very good at it. What he wrote instead was four lines long. Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. A prayer a child finishes in one breath, in whatever language the child happens to have.

I have never once strengthened my Church by making her weapons heavier. Weight is not the same thing as power; it never was. What I arm you with, I arm you with so that you can carry it while doing something else — while walking, while frightened, while dying, while holding a baby who will not sleep. A prayer that must be looked up is a prayer that will not be there on the night you need it. So the old man, who had every eloquence available to him, chose the shortest thing he could make, and I confirmed the choice: against what he had glimpsed, the counterweight is not argument, but a name, said by the poor.

By 1886 the circular was in the bishops' hands, fastened to the prayers already said kneeling when the Low Mass was over. In Bavaria and in Bahia, in Cork and in Cebu, priest and people went down at the end and asked one archangel to stand between them and a malice they could not name. Four years later he composed the long exorcism, used it himself, often, and urged his bishops and priests to do the same — that heavy instrument stayed in trained and commissioned hands, where such things belong. The small one he gave away to everybody.

It travelled further than he did. Forty years on another pope hung the conversion of Russia on those same kneeling prayers, and the schoolchildren saying them were never told what they carried. I put enormous things into small vessels, and hand them to people who never learn what they held.

Then, in the reform of the liturgy, the kneeling prayers were quietly set down. No one argued them away; they simply stopped. But the words had long since left the sanctuary — they were on holy cards and in pockets, in the mouths of mothers at bedsides and of men twenty years from their last Mass who could still, when the room went wrong, remember how it began.

They are said now in Tagalog and Polish, in Yoruba and Spanish and Arabic, in hospital corridors at three in the morning, in cars outside houses no one wants to enter, by children who cannot yet read, by the frightened and the merely faithful, millions of times a day — out of one minute in a Roman chapel, when an old man looked up, and could not say what he had seen, and went to his desk instead and wrote something small enough for you to carry.

The Record

Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci (1810-1903) reigned as Leo XIII from 1878 to 1903, the third-longest pontificate in history. He is remembered principally for Rerum Novarum (1891) and the revival of Thomistic studies, and secondarily for his interventions in the spiritual battle: the short prayer to St Michael and the long Exorcismus in Satanam et Angelos Apostaticos.

The prayer and its promulgation. The prayer beginning "Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio" was composed by Leo XIII and reached the ordinaries of the world by circular in 1886. It was joined to a set of prayers Leo had already prescribed to be said kneeling after Low Mass — three Hail Marys, the Salve Regina and a collect, ordered in 1884 for the liberty of the Holy See after the loss of the Papal States — and the whole set became known as the Leonine Prayers. They were suppressed by the Sacred Congregation of Rites in the instruction Inter Oecumenici (26 September 1964, n. 48j), which took effect on 7 March 1965. No replacement was provided and no reason was given. John Paul II encouraged the faithful to continue reciting the prayer privately in his Regina Caeli address of 24 April 1994.

The vision, and what can actually be documented. No contemporary record of the episode survives. Everything rests on two mid-twentieth-century texts, both published some sixty years after the fact:

1. Fr. Domenico Pechenino, writing in La settimana del clero on 30 March 1947 (reprinted in Ephemerides Liturgicae, 1995), describes what he says he witnessed: Leo XIII, having celebrated his Mass and while attending a Mass of thanksgiving, suddenly raised his head and fixed his gaze without blinking on a point above the head of the celebrating priest, his face changing colour and expression; he then withdrew to his study, told his concerned attendants that nothing was the matter, and about half an hour later summoned the Secretary of the Congregation of Rites and handed him the text to be printed and sent to all the ordinaries. Pechenino states explicitly that he does not remember the year, and the article gives no source for its account beyond his own recollection.
2. Cardinal Giovanni Battista Nasalli Rocca, Archbishop of Bologna, in his Lenten pastoral letter of 1946, attributes to the repeated testimony of Mgr Rinaldo Angeli, Leo XIII's private secretary, the statement that the pope had truly seen in a vision demonic spirits gathering upon the Eternal City, and that the phrase about the evil spirits who roam the world seeking the ruin of souls derives from that experience. Nasalli Rocca also records having heard Leo XIII recite the prayer aloud in St Peter's, and notes that the pope himself composed the exorcism later included in the Roman Ritual and urged bishops and priests to use it.

The date of 13 October 1884, universally repeated in devotional literature, appears in neither of these accounts; it is a later tradition, and its coincidence with the final Fátima apparition of 13 October 1917 belongs to twentieth-century retelling rather than to the sources. Popular versions of the story that supply a dialogue between Christ and Satan, or a span of years granted to the devil to try the Church, are later embellishments; they have no basis in Pechenino or Nasalli Rocca and cannot be verified. What can be established documentarily is the promulgation itself: the prayer exists, Leo XIII composed it, and the circular went out in 1886.

The exorcism of 1890, and who may use it. Leo XIII personally composed the long Exorcism against Satan and the Apostate Angels, inserted into the Roman Ritual (Title XII, ch. 3 in the 1954 edition; revised 1902), and recited it frequently himself. Its use is restricted. Canon 1172 of the 1983 Code reserves the exorcism of the possessed to a priest holding express and individual permission of the local ordinary, granted only to priests of piety, knowledge, prudence and integrity of life. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the letter Inde ab aliquot annis of 29 September 1985 addressed to all ordinaries, stated that no member of the faithful may use the formula of exorcism against Satan and the fallen angels extracted from the text made law by Leo XIII, still less the text entire, and asked bishops to make this known. The short prayer to St Michael carries no such restriction: it is a devotional prayer, free to all, and this distinction between a deprecatory private prayer and a sacramental exorcism performed by a delegated minister is the substance of the Church's discipline (CCC 1673).

Later advocacy. Fr. Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016), exorcist of the Diocese of Rome from 1986 and founder of the International Association of Exorcists, regarded the silent disappearance of the prayer after the liturgical reform as a loss for which nothing was substituted, and argued for its restoration. Bishop Andrea Gemma of Isernia-Venafro decreed in a pastoral letter of 29 June 1992 that a short act of renunciation of Satan, an invocation of Our Lady and the prayer to St Michael be recited in his diocese at the end of the Eucharistic celebration, before the blessing. The prayer's wider survival, however, has been popular rather than legislative: it persisted on holy cards, in family devotion and in private recitation throughout the decades in which no rubric required it.