Father Rutler: Saint Michael the Archangel

Father George W. Rutler

The selection of Saint Michael as our parish’s patron in 1857 certainly was inspired. Who could be a better champion in “Hell’s Kitchen” than that heavenly soldier wielding the sword, as the great statue in our church shows him? As angels are pure spirit and sublime intelligence, it is tempting for mortals of flesh and limited intelligence to pretend that they are fictions, but many times in meeting strangers we may “entertain angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

Michael, whose name means “no one is like God,” leads a combat that is even more violent for being spiritual and not merely political. Spiritual combat is virulent now, when virtually every social institution is confused and angry, and harshly so in the Church, which is more than a human invention and is in fact the “Body of Christ”—that is, his living presence on earth. Our Lord predicted “… that the Son of Man was destined to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes” (Mark 8:31).

In 1776 Thomas Paine wrote contemptuously of “the summer soldier and sunshine patriot” who flees when the going gets rough. Such are those who claim to have been baptized as Soldiers of Christ but who flee from spiritual combat when they are scandalized by news of sin. There is a parallel here with what a recent book, The Coddling of the American Mind, describes as a young generation living in a cultural bubble protected from psychological discomfort. They are so cushioned from the hard facts of life that they flee into “safe spaces” when traumatized by reality.

Saint Augustine said, “In addition to the fact that I am a Christian and must give God an account of my life, I as a leader must give him an account of my stewardship as well.” Church leaders who have been chortling glad-handers cannot give a good account because they have been summer solders and sunshine patriots. When the clouds gather, and battle lines are drawn, they are unable to confront what Belloc called Satan’s “comic inversion of our old certitudes.”

It has actually been suggested that Satan is exposing the sins of men in order to discourage the faithful. But the Prince of Lies exposes nothing. He has long been the cover-up artist. The Holy Spirit does the revealing: “For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither anything hid, that shall not be known and come abroad” (Luke 8:17). 

“Saint Michael the Archangel, protect me against the ruses and temptations of Satan. I consecrate to you all the faculties of my soul, my soul itself and all its potentials. Guard well the weaknesses of my poor nature, that the many battles that I may undergo will become as many victories and the eternal glory of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Father Rutler: The Enemies of Religion

At a Vigil Service before the burial of a friend who was a Knight of Malta, a comfortable attorney who was a self-styled “progressivist” took umbrage at a phrase I had read from the daily prayer of that Order: “Be it mine to practice and defend the Catholic, the Apostolic, the Roman faith against the enemies of religion. . . .” He said that there are no enemies of religion anymore. When our Lord sent his disciples out, he told them what to expect and disabused them of such dangerous naïveté. They would be lambs among wolves, and not lambs among lambs.
 
In little more than a dozen years, the Christian population in Iraq has dropped from 2 million to 300,000. In Syria, where Christians once were ten percent of the population, there are fewer than a million now, and many of them are being kidnapped and held for ransom at $100,000 each. The misery of enslavement, destruction of churches, crucifixions and beheadings was brought into sharp focus last March when sixteen people were gunned down in a nursing home, including four Indian religious sisters of Blessed Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity who were caring for them. That may have been the efficient cause for the U.S. State Department declaring, after long tarrying, that all this is deliberate genocide.
 
In Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad wrote: “. . . no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.” Artful denial is a common disposition among those who do not want to compromise their ideology with reality, lest they be discomfited by confrontation with evil.
 
The Turkish government persists in denying the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. Japan still denies the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War.  Not until 1994 did Russia accept full responsibility for the slaughter of 21,857 Polish officers, clergy, and academics in the Katyn forest. At the time, President Roosevelt blamed that on the Nazis and exiled to American Samoa the Navy officer, George Earle, who produced the facts.
 
In that same year of 1943, Roosevelt received in the Oval Office the Catholic layman Jan Karski who had heroically microfilmed evidence of the German concentration camps, but the President wanted only to talk about farm horses. Even Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter later wrote: “I did not say that (Karski) was lying. I said that I could not believe him. There is a difference.” George Orwell called the obliteration of conscience in the face of malice “doublethink.”  The psychological term is “dissociation.”
 
Our parish is blessed to have as its patron Saint Michael the Archangel, and his “defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil” is not the last resort but the first in the perpetual spiritual combat. That is why on Sundays we invoke him at the end of Mass. 

Father Rutler: The Spiritual Contest of Our Time

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

Winston Churchill said that history would treat him well since he intended to write it. Events are generally seen through the lens of the victors. That has long been the case with the French Revolution. Bastille Day, celebrated today with the elegance typical of France (I enjoyed those celebrations three times in Paris), does not mark the liberation of maltreated prisoners living in fetid conditions. The Bastille was a comfortable place, with tapestries and fine food. The psychopathic degenerate Marquis de Sade had been moved from it just ten days earlier. The Parisian rabble “liberated” an English lunatic who thought he was Julius Caesar, an equally mad Irishman, four forgers, and the Comte de Solages, an incestuous libertine incarcerated at the request of his own family. These were the “victims” freed by “The People” who went on to celebrate with orgies that included cannibalism.

While even the most biased historians have not been able to ignore the ensuing Reign of Terror, it is still deemed politically incorrect to mention the massacres of the Catholics in the Vendée who rose up against the revolutionaries. After 170,000 of them were slaughtered in the first modern genocide, the revolutionary general François-Joseph Westermann wrote to the Committee of Public Safety stating: “There is no more Vendée. . . . According to the orders that you gave me, I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women who, at least for these, will not give birth to any more brigands.”

Consider that Orwellian term, “Committee of Public Safety.” Tyrannies tend to excuse themselves in the name of liberty, and governments justify the taking of innocent lives in the name of human rights. A cynic himself, Edward Gibbon saw such cynicism as an engine of the decline and fall of Rome. The ordinary people thought all religions were true because they did not understand truth; the philosophers thought all religions were false because they did not fit into their philosophies; and the government of Caesar and the Senate treated religions as commodities to be exploited, or to be eliminated when they could not be.

On June 5, Pope Francis, in the rare company of Benedict XVI, dedicated a statue of St. Michael the Archangel in the Vatican Gardens. The Pope knows that the only victor who gets to write history at the end of time is the Lord of History, and so he invoked St. Michael because the crisis of our time, as in all ages that have defied God, is a spiritual contest:

“Michael struggles to restore divine justice and defends the People of God from his enemies, above all from his enemy par excellence, the devil. . . . Though the devil always tries to disfigure the face of the Archangel and that of humanity, God is stronger; it is His victory and His salvation that is offered to all men.”

Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel

From America Needs Fatima

This is the true story of a Marine wounded in Korea in 1950. Writing to his mother, he told her of a fascinating encounter he experienced in the war. Father Walter Muldy, a navy chaplain who spoke to the young Marine and his mother as well as to the outfit commander, always affirmed the veracity of this narrative. We heard it from someone who read the original letter and retell the story here in all its details and in the first person to better convey some of the impact it must have had when first told by the son to his mother.

Dear Mom,

I am writing to you from a hospital bed. Don’t worry, Mom, I am okay. I was wounded, but the doctor says that I will be up in no time.

But that’s not what I have to tell you, Mom. Something happened to me that I don’t dare tell anyone else for fear of their disbelief. But I have to tell you, the one person I can confide in, though even you may find it hard to believe.

You remember the prayer to Saint Michael that you taught me to pray when I was little: “Michael, Michael of the morning,…” Before I left home for Korea, you urged me to remember this prayer before any confrontation with the enemy. But you really didn’t have to remind me, Mom. I have always prayed it, and when I got to Korea, I sometimes said it a couple of times a day while marching or resting.

Well, one day, we were told to move forward to scout for Commies. It was a really cold day. As I was walking along, I perceived another fellow walking beside me, and I looked to see who it was.

He was a big fellow, a Marine about 6’4” and built proportionally. Funny, but I didn’t know him, and I thought I knew everyone in my unit. I was glad to have the company and broke the silence between us:

“Chilly today, isn’t it?” Then I chuckled because suddenly it seemed absurd to talk about the weather when we were advancing to meet the enemy.
He chuckled too, softly.

“I thought I knew everyone in my outfit,” I continued, “ but I have never seen you before.”

“No,” he agreed, “I have just joined. The name is Michael.”

“Really?! That’s mine, too.”

“I know,” the Marine said, “Michael, Michael of the morning….”

Mom, I was really surprised that he knew about my prayer, but I had taught it to many of the other guys, so I supposed that the newcomer must have picked it up from someone else. As a matter of fact, it had gotten around to the extent that some of the fellows were calling me “Saint Michael.”

Then, out of the blue, Michael said, “There’s going to be trouble ahead.”

I wondered how he could know that. I was breathing hard from the march, and my breath hit the cold air like dense clouds of fog. Michael seemed to be in top shape because I couldn’t see his breath at all. Just then, it started to snow heavily, and soon it was so dense I could no longer hear or see the rest of my outfit. I got a little scared and yelled, “Michael!” Then I felt his strong hand on my shoulder and heard his voice in my ear, “It’s going to clear up soon.”

It did clear up, suddenly. And then, just a short distance ahead of us, like so many dreadful realities, were seven Commies, looking rather comical in their funny hats. But there was nothing funny about them now; their guns were steady and pointed straight in our direction.

“Down, Michael!!” I yelled as I dove for cover. Even as I was hitting the ground, I looked up and saw Michael still standing, as if paralyzed by fear, or so I thought at the time. Bullets were spurting all over the place, and Mom, there was no way those Commies could have missed at that short distance. I jumped up to pull him down, and then I was hit. The pain was like a hot fire in my chest, and as I fell, my head swooned and I remember thinking, “I must be dying…” Someone was laying me down, strong arms were holding me and laying me gently on the snow. Through the daze, I opened my eyes, and the sun seemed to blaze in my eyes. Michael was standing still, and there was a terrible splendor in his face. Suddenly, he seemed to grow, like the sun, the splendor increasing intensely around him like the wings of an angel. As I slipped into unconsciousness, I saw that Michael held a sword in his hand, and it flashed like a million lights.

Later on, when I woke up, the rest of the guys came to see me with the sergeant.

“How did you do it, son?” he asked me.

“Where’s Michael?” I asked in reply.

“Michael who?” The sergeant seemed puzzled.

“Michael, the big Marine walking with me, right up to the last moment. I saw him there as I fell.”

“Son,” the sergeant said gravely, “you’re the only Michael in my unit. I hand-picked all you fellows, and there’s only one Michael. You. And son, you weren’t walking with anyone. I was watching you because you were too far off from us, and I was worried.

Now tell me, son,” he repeated, “how did you do it?”

It was the second time he had asked me that, and I found it irritating.

“How did I do what?”

“How did you kill those seven Commies? There wasn’t a single bullet fired from your rifle.”

“What?”

“Come on, son. They were strewn all around you, each one killed by a swordstroke.”

And that, Mom, is the end of my story. It may have been the pain, or the blazing sun, or the chilling cold. I don’t know, Mom, but there is one thing I am sure about. It happened.

Love your son,

Michael

Click here to print Prayers and Novenas to St. Michael