St. Michael the Archangel

Michael appears in Scripture as the great prince who stands watch over Israel, the warrior archangel whose name means Who is like God — both a name and a question, and the question is itself the answer to every rebellion against the Most High. Three scriptural passages name him: the battle with the prince of Persia and Greece in Daniel, the dispute over the body of Moses recounted in the letter of Jude, and the war in heaven in the Apocalypse where Michael and his angels fight the dragon. The angelic question deserves careful theological seriousness — what tradition and reason say about the nature and order of angelic beings should be taken seriously without claiming more precision than the sources allow.

Michael is prince of the heavenly host, champion against evil, guardian of the people of God. The feast took its name and origin from the dedication of a basilica in his honor on the Salarian Way near Rome, a church that served for centuries as the principal Roman center of his cult. The proliferation of chapels and oratories dedicated to Michael on high places across Europe — Mont Saint-Michel off the Normandy coast, the sanctuary at Gargano on the Adriatic, high chapels in England and Germany and the Alps — reflects something of the logic of a watchpost in the mountain location. The tradition of invoking Michael as protector against evil, and particularly against the ancient adversary, runs from the earliest centuries of Christian prayer through the whole of the medieval period and beyond.