Preparing for spiritual battle with St. Michael Chaplet

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council. Regardless of one’s opinion of the Council itself, it is undeniable that its aftermath saw a severe decline in the devotional life of Catholics, at least in the developed West. Things that once had been seen as defining practices of Catholics—the Rosary, Friday abstinence from meat, chapel veils, etc.—were seen by many to be relics of another era that could be jettisoned while everything else changed. There was a period when many of these practices appeared to have been lost forever.

Yet there is a growing sense today of real hope based on the fact that it is possible to regain the pious practices of the past. It perhaps started with Pope St John Paul II and the Rosary, but there are more and more resources available for re-learning how to celebrate the traditional devotions, fasts, and feasts of the Church and people striving to regain a sense of Catholic culture. I see people talking about chapel veils all the time online, and even topics as foreign to the modern world as Rogation Days and Ember Days. One can find YouTube recordings of dozens of chaplets. Popular apps such as Hallow and Exodus90 are helping people rediscover things like St Michael’s Lent.

While not a true liturgical season like the Lent before Easter, St Michael’s Lent is a pious practice popularized by St Francis of Assisi and the Franciscans, where one observes a period of prayer and penance analogous to Lent in the period between the Feast of the Assumption (August 15) to the Feast of St Michael (September 29). It was during one of these periods of fasting toward the end of his life that St. Francis had a vision of a Seraph and received the stigmata. Since his time, people have followed Francis’ example to use this post-Pentecost season to strengthen their resolve to wage spiritual warfare daily by drawing strength from Our Lady, Queen of Angels, from St Michael, and from all the Heavenly Host.

Those wishing to take on St Michael’s Lent may want to consider a work by speaker, author, and journalist Marge Steinhage Fenelon, entitled Defend Us in Battle: The Promises of St. Michael and the Heavenly Angels. While one can read the book for the information it provides on St Michael and the traditional nine choirs of angels, the book is meant more to be used as a starting point for prayer. In fact, the author calls the work a “living novena”.

Fenelon structures her work around the St. Michael Chaplet, a devotion based on the reported private revelations to an eighteenth-century Carmelite nun. The heart of the chaplet is nine sets of prayers, each invoking St Michael and one of the nine choirs of angels, so Fenelon’s book consists of nine chapters. Each chapter has three points for reflection and meditation: 1) it reflects on one of the angelic choirs and its place in creation and salvation history; 2) there is a consideration of a particular virtue in light of the chaplet’s invocation of the choir; and 3) the author reflects on one of the seven deadly sins against which one might invoke the angelic choir’s assistance. The chapters each conclude with some reflection questions to help the reader consider the material more deeply, suggestions for resolutions that combat the particular vice under consideration, and a prayer to the angelic choir.

For example, chapter one focuses on the choir of seraphim, considering the etymology of the word seraph, looking at the cleansing seraph in Isaiah 6, and summarizing the tradition on the role the seraphim play in God’s order. From there,. Fenelon reflects on the invocation in the St Michael’s chaplet: “By the intercession of St Michael and the celestial choir of seraphim, may the Lord make us worthy to burn with the fire of perfect charity.” Because of their closeness to God, the seraphim reflect love like no other choir. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the vice of envy and how envy cuts us off from love, by focusing on what others possess instead of on who they are in relation to God.

Step by step, Fenelon walks us through her reflections on the nine choirs and nine vices the Enemy uses to attempt to kill the life of grace in our souls (the seven deadly sins plus despair and fear). If one meditates and prays the book as the author intends, these nine days become a kind of mini-retreat, a chance to use the intercession of the holy angels for insight into one’s current spiritual state and to form a plan of attack for combating what must be corrected.

Thus, one might use it with great profit during St Michael’s Lent, either at the beginning as a way of focusing one’s penitential efforts, or at the end, as a novena leading up to St Michael’s feast on September 29. Even the author’s call to pray the chaplet may be a worthwhile practice to consider for St Michael’s Lent, another practice drawn from the treasury of the Church to draw closer to God during this time.

Defend Us in Battle: The Promises of St. Michael and the Heavenly Angels
By Marge Steinhage Fenelon
Marian Press, 2024
138 pages