The pope who saw demons in the Vatican
A piece of Catholic folklore
This article examines the history of a piece of Catholic folklore - the story that Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) saw a vision of demons one morning in the Vatican.
It is said that Leo was inspired by his vision to write a prayer to St Michael, the vanquisher of demons, and that he ordered the prayer to be said by Catholics throughout the world after Mass.
The Prayer to St Michael
The prayer itself is definitely real. It runs as follows:
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio; contra nequitiam et insidias diaboli esto praesidium. Imperet illi Deus, supplices deprecamur: tuque, Princeps militiae caelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen.
Holy Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray: and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God cast into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.
This prayer formed part of a set of prayers known as the ‘Leonine Prayers’ or the ‘Prayers for Russia’ which were recited after most celebrations of Mass until the 1960s.
The Leonine Prayers went back to 1859, before the time of Pope Leo. The Papal States were facing invasion, and Pope Pius IX ordered that certain prayers be said after Mass within his realms. (These consisted of the Ave Maria said three times, the Salve Regina, and two further elements known as a versicle and a collect.) Leo XIII extended these prayers to the whole church in 1884, in the context of Bismarck’s campaign against Catholicism in Germany. In 1886, the text of the prayers was amended slightly – and, more importantly for our purposes, the prayer to St Michael was added.
Popes continued to tinker with the prayers after Leo’s death. In 1904, Pius X added the line “Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us”. In 1930, Pius XI directed that the prayers be said for the interests of the church in Soviet Russia.
An unlikely visionary
One thing that stands out about the story of the vision is how unlikely a candidate Pope Leo was for the role of seer. Apparitions have a well-established place in Catholic religious experience, but they are not generally reported by elderly aristocratic intellectuals like Leo. He was more likely to be found composing encyclicals in Ciceronian Latin than seeing visions of demons. The archetypal Catholic visionary is female, and may well be young in age, like Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes or Lucia dos Santos of Fatima. (See, for example, this collection of apparitions compiled by the University of Dayton.)
In this sense, Leo’s experience was extremely unusual even by the standards of the Catholic apparitional tradition - although admittedly it was not quite unique. There is one parallel in modern times: Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) is said to have seen visions of Christ and of the Fatima Miracle of the Sun.
There is a body of scholarship on Catholic apparitions - and apparitions of the Virgin Mary in particular - which suggests that they coincide with periods of socio-political upheaval and threats to the standing of the church. Examples in this regard range from Lourdes and Fatima to lesser-known apparitions in Bismarck’s Germany, the Second Spanish Republic and 1940s Italy. Chris Maunder noted in Our Lady of the Nations that “apparition cults express anxiety about developments that appear to be detrimental to traditional faith practice and lifestyle”. It is apparent that “the Catholic subcommunities in which apparition cults have arisen are generally those that have resisted political, social, and moral change”.
In this context, Leo’s vision came at just the right time. By the late nineteenth century, the Catholic Church’s conflict with the rising modern secular liberal order had become acute. Catholicism was still powerful enough to be a force in world affairs, but it was in retreat on all fronts: political, philosophical, intellectual and moral. The painful emergence of secular modernity provided a suitable material backdrop to Pope Leo’s spiritual experience.
Reports of the vision
There are essentially four sets of testimony to the vision. They are independent of each other, but they are sufficiently similar that they can confidently be said to have had a common origin in Leo’s reign.
The French testimony consists of an article which appeared in a French Catholic periodical (Annales du Mont-Saint-Michel) in 1906, not long after Leo’s death. The article reported that, while celebrating Mass, the Pope saw a “legion of demons” (une légion de démons) emerging from an abyss and spreading over the world. The demons attacked the church, but St Michael appeared and drove them back. The source for this account seems to have been a Vatican official, Mgr Filiberto Michele Termoz, who was said to have heard the story from Leo himself.
The German testimony appeared in a pamphlet about an exorcism which was published in 1931. In this version, the vision took place after Mass. Leo saw the Devil attacking the church, and St Michael sent him back into Hell. The pamphlet was translated into several languages, including an English edition which was published in America in 1935 under the title Begone Satan!
The Italian testimony consists of two sources. The first was a 1946 pastoral letter of the Archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Giovanni Nasalli Rocca di Corneliano. The Cardinal was a Vatican insider who had studied and worked in Rome during Leo’s reign. He said that Mgr Rinaldo Angeli, who was Leo’s private secretary, had told the story “many times” (più volte). In this version, the Pope saw a vision of demons converging on Rome. The year after the Cardinal’s letter, a priest named Fr Domenico Pechenino re-told the story in an Italian periodical (La Settimana del Clero). It is not clear who Pechenino’s sources were or how far his account was independent of the Cardinal’s.
The Spanish tradition consists of a footnote to the 1951 Spanish translation of Josef Jungmann’s monumental history of the Mass, Missarum Sollemnia. The translator said that he had heard from a liturgical scholar, Fr Franz Brehm, that an elderly cardinal in Rome had claimed that Leo had introduced the Prayer to St Michael as a result of a “supernatural revelation” (una revelación sobrenatural) about the “threat of Freemasonry” (la amenaza de la francmasonería). No further details were given. At this time, Freemasonry was regarded in Catholic circles as a dangerous anticlerical movement.
The historian cannot decide whether or not Pope Leo ‘really’ had a vision in the sense that he underwent an authentically supernatural experience in which he saw actual spiritual beings. But we have evidence here which is sufficiently clear and sufficiently proximate to Leo to allow us to conclude that the Pope believed that he saw a vision. This took place during or after Mass, and it involved demons who attacked the church but were challenged and defeated by St Michael. Whether the Prayer to St Michael originated from this incident is more doubtful, although (as we will see) Pope Leo issued several prayers to St Michael, and one of them may have been prompted by the vision.
The afterlife of the story - Three variations
From the 1970s onwards, the story of the vision was given a new lease of life as several Catholic subcultures took it up and ran with it. From roughly the latter part of the 1990s onwards, the story began to enter the Catholic mainstream.
In the 1970s, the story became known within the ultra-traditionalist resistance movement to Vatican II, the international council that was held from 1962 to 1965 to modernise the church. This was the first Catholic subculture to treat the story with real interest. In 1973, for example, the traditionalist publishing house TAN Books republished the 1935 exorcism pamphlet Begone Satan!
It seems to have been in the ultra-traditionalist milieu that three variations to the story emerged. The first, which was in circulation by 1978, claimed that Pope Leo had heard Christ and Satan having a dialogue about the events of the coming decades. This variation originated from the 1947 testimony of Fr Domenico Pechenino referred to above. Pechenino had indulged himself by imagining the following exchange: “And if you give me a little more freedom, you could see what I would do for your church!” – “What would you do?” – “I would destroy it.” – “Oh, that would be something to see. How long would it take?” – “Fifty or sixty years.” “Have more freedom, and the time that you need. Then we’ll see what happens.” Someone must have read Pechenino’s article too quickly and failed to realise that this was just the author riffing. In more recent retellings, the period of 50-60 years has been lengthened to 75-100 years.
The second variation, which was in existence by 1984, links the story to the Fatima apparitions. This variation claims that the vision took place on 13 October, the date of the Miracle of the Sun.
The final ultra-traditionalist variant of the story takes the form of a conspiracy theory. By 1991, it was being claimed that the Prayer to St Michael is a censored version of a longer prayer which was promulgated by Leo XIII: the original text was mutilated by devilish conspirators. In order to understand this claim, we must bear in mind that the Prayer to St Michael in the Leonine Prayers was not the only prayer of its kind that Leo issued. In 1888, the Pope approved a quite different, and much longer, prayer to St Michael. In 1890, he ordered an expanded version of the 1888 prayer to be promulgated. Then, in 1899, he issued a revised and shortened version of it. From the point of view of the conspiracy theory, the key development was that the following passage was cut in the 1899 revision:
These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on her most sacred possessions. In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety, with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck, the sheep may be scattered.
One can perhaps see how an ultra-trad conspiracist – the sort of person who believes that the church and the papacy have fallen into the hands of heretics – would find it intriguing that this passage would be cut without explanation. But a plausible explanation may be found in a thaw in the hostile relations between the Vatican and the Italian state that was taking place when the cut was made in 1899 (if you are trying to make peace with the King of Italy, you don’t tell him that he is sitting on a “throne of abominable impiety”). In any event, the deletion had nothing to do with the first St Michael Prayer of 1886, the one that Leo supposedly composed as a result of his vision.
The afterlife of the story - Entering the mainstream
From the second half of the 1980s, the story of Pope Leo’s vision appears in literature relating to the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Medugorje. It also occurs in the same period in literature from other circles that had a special devotion to Mary, and in writers with what one might call an interest in the miraculous. It is no surprise that the story surfaced in apocalyptically-oriented works that were published in the run-up to the year 2000.
In Italy, the story appeared in the 1990s in two works published by exorcists: Corrado Balducci’s Il diavolo and Gabriele Amorth’s Un esorcista racconta. The latter book in particular was widely-read and influential beyond the boundaries of Italian Catholicism. Fr Amorth was a prolific author who became something of a celebrity after he was appointed as an exorcist of the diocese of Rome in 1986. Un esorcista racconta went through multiple Italian editions, as well as being translated into French, German, Spanish and Polish. An English edition appeared in 1999 under the title An Exorcist Tells his Story and became well-known in conservative Catholic circles.
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the story continued to appear in English in the same slightly unusual Catholic subcultures as before: ultra-traditionalists, devotees of Medjugorje and the Virgin Mary, apocalypticists, and people with a general interest in the miraculous. Oddly enough, it is also in this period that the story began to appear in occultic literature from outside the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy.
In more recent years, knowledge of the story seems to have spread among normie Catholics. How did this happen? The answer seems to be that the story entered the mainstream from the latter part of the 1990s onwards. In 1995, the American writer Peter Kreeft, who may be described as a broadly mainstream conservative figure, referred to the story in one of his books, Angels and Demons. In Spain, the story appeared in two mainstream books in 1997 and 1999 (José Antonio Sayés, El demonio, realidad o mito? and Padre Apeles, Historias de los papas). In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the story continued to appear in mainstream and mainstream-conservative Catholic material. In 2005, one Catholic book - Amy Welborn, The Words We Pray - contained a sceptical reference to the story. This was unusual: writers usually only mention the story because they believe in it.
In 2015, the conservative Catholic writer Kevin Symonds published a popular book on the subject, Pope Leo XIII and the Prayer to St. Michael; a second edition appeared in 2018. It is interesting that Symonds viewed the story through a Marian lens, connecting it to the cult of Our Lady of Fatima. It is probably the appearance of Symonds’ work that explains why, from 2017, the story started to be seen more often in mainstream conservative Catholic venues, such as the uCatholic and Aleteia websites, the British Catholic Herald, and books published around this time.
By 2019, the story was appearing on official diocesan and parish websites (see here, here and here). It has also been seen in recent years on Catholic365 and in Catholic Answers magazine. By last year, it had received the ultimate accolade of being incorporated into the latest edition of Catholicism for Dummies.
The leakage of the story over the last few decades from relatively idiosyncratic subcultures into the Catholic mainstream could be seen as a sign of the radicalisation of the mainstream. Or it could just be due to the striking and impressive nature of the story. In any event, it looks like people don’t seem to be able to leave it alone. It seems to have a tendency to become associated with changing preoccupations, from the Freemasons to Fatima to Vatican II. It is difficult to predict what the next iteration of the narrative will look like; but we have surely not heard the last of it yet.