Trump, St Michael, and Two Leos: A Curious Little Connection
On September 29, 2024, the Feast of St Michael the Archangel on the pre-1969 calendar, now the Feast of the Three Archangels in the new–which completely depersonalizes the uniqueness of each archangel and their very specific jobs–Trump posted the traditional prayer to St Michael on his Truth Social account. Most dismissed it as mere pandering to his Christian base, particularly his Catholic one.
But beneath the surface lies something far more unsettling—a spiritual alarm bell tied to one of the darkest prophetic visions in Church history. The very prayer Trump posted was written in response to a vision given to Pope Leo XIII in the late 19th century–a vision that most Catholics today have never even heard about.
Has the stuff of legend been injected into it? I’m not sure. But the prayer(s) exist for a reason. Something happened that day in the 1880s with one Pope Leo XIII–the pope whose name the current Leo XIV has taken.
The prayer is a shorter version of a much longer one Leo XIII wrote. It pleads, “St 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, oh prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God, cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
The prayer is common knowledge and practice for most faithful Catholics, usually recited at the end of Mass or printed on prayer cards. But its origin story isn’t merely liturgical—it’s apocalyptic.
We learn in the Book of the Apocalypse (Revelation) that it was St Michael who led the charge against Satan and his minions’ rebellion after their vision of the Woman and her Child and learning of God’s plan as to how he he would one day redeem humanity.
According to historical accounts from those close to the pope, in 1884–33 years before the Blessed Virgin’s adjacent, chilling apparitions at Fatima–Leo XIII collapsed one day after Mass, seemingly lifeless. When he came to, he recounted a vision in which he heard a conversation between Christ and Satan. The devil boasted that he could destroy the Church, given more power and time–specifically 75-100 years. Christ, echoing the permission granted by God to Satan in the Book of Job, allowed it. This was not some poetic musing placed in an ancient text. It was a permission slip for spiritual carnage. The century of trial would test the Church’s fidelity, its leadership, and its laity.
It is my belief that even those who know this story believe that it is things like abortion and wokeness that have been Satan’s greatest weapons. I have contended in my work, providing ample evidence and pattern recognition along the way, that the weaponry went well beyond the obvious enemies of the Church. I and many others have shown that the attack has come from within.
Which makes the massive changes to the faith in the mid-20th century all the more curious.
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Leo XIII responded the only way a pope steeped in real spiritual warfare could—by writing the St Michael prayer and ordering it to be recited after every Low Mass–the name of the more silent Traditional Latin Mass without Gregorian Chant and other practices of the High Mass.
Leo’s instruction wasn’t about nostalgia–it was a wartime memo.
And it came on the heels of a century-long increase in papal encyclicals warning about secret societies and powers infiltrating the Catholic Church–just as it had in France, just as it would in Russia, just as it would in the United States.
Some of this should sound familiar to us, if not all.
Now pause–and connect some potentially providential dots….
The twentieth century could easily be evaluated as a century of testing. It was a century marked by two world wars, the rise of communism, cultural Marxism, the sexual revolution, Vatican II confusions and upheavals, financial corruption, clerical abuse debauchery, liturgical collapse, and a growing anti-Christian agenda in Western media, law, and art.
Everything we have experienced in the 21st century–the seemingly complete collapse of everything good and sensical–could appear like the natural result of such a century.
Enter Trump and everything that name means for this country and the world stage–in particular what he has always purported to be fighting.
Fast forward, perhaps arbitrarily, yes, to Trump’s St Michael post in September 2024, mere months before Leo XIV assumes the Chair of Peter.
And here’s the kicker I guarantee you most Catholics don’t know, because the feast was removed in 1969: The date of Leo XIV’s assumption to the Chair? May 8–the Feast of the Apparition of St Michael the Archangel, commemorating his miraculous appearance on Monte Gargano, Italy in the fifth century.
(By the way, if you ever want to attend a Traditional Latin Mass, don’t be duped by the lies out there. The English translation for everything is right there in the Missal and other readily available handbooks. My wife and I have 5-6 circulating between us. Language is not at all the barrier they’d have you believe–which would make me curious if I were on the other side of this).
And here’s yet another angle to a fascinating collision of coincidences, one I only alluded to earlier–the vision mirrors the opening of the Book of Job, where Satan appears before God and asks to test Job, the righteous man. God allows it, not out of malice, but to manifest the endurance of one faithful man. To show the devil that God’s greatness through Job would shame him right back to hell and the laughter of his minions. To teach us that God allows these things because he foresees the future unlike Satan, and he knows that such widespread and seemingly unjust malice will ultimately prove both the gold of faithful souls and God’s own glory even more.
The key difference? Job was one man. The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ—millions of souls, now bruised and bewildered, facing a test not of flesh alone but of fidelity, on the heels, or still in the midst, of its own season of ashes, boils, and thorns.
Job loses everything: his family, his health, his livelihood. And yet, his soul remains. His faith remains. “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him,” he says. Just as the Church, battered by scandal, division, and a level of fifth-column infiltration still not enough Catholics understand, persists.
The devil’s playbook has always included corruption from within–that is what Jesus is warning about through much of the Gospels, with the Gospel of St John Ch 8 as perhaps the most extensive example. And in the century that followed Leo XIII’s vision, the evidence of that corruption became harder and harder to ignore. From theology departments seeding doubt about the divinity of Christ, to seminaries perhaps unwittingly allowing communist infiltrators into the classrooms, to bishops denying moral absolutes, to popes appearing more like UN ambassadors and Davos darlings than Catholic successors of Peter—it’s no longer a stretch to wonder if we’ve already lived through the devil’s permitted century.
From what I’ve read, popes typically have been much quieter and behind the scenes than what we’ve seen for decades. So if what we see is all we know, how else are we to understand that–at their foundation–popes, as successors of Peter, are supposed to simply preserve and hand down the faith passed to them–and little more?
Those of my friends in Beauregard Parish know of St Pius X Catholic Church. Pius X immediately followed Leo XIII, and he is the most notorious warrior against Modernism, an evil creep of which he said before he died had simply gone underground, waiting to re-emerge more viciously very soon.
Pius X died in 1914. Think about that date and its relation to geopolitical affairs.
Why did Trump, of all people, introduce the St Michael prayer mere months ago, and to many a person who’d never heard of it before? Perhaps because, as we’ve been hammering home, the real war is not just political, but spiritual, religious even. Perhaps because the veil is thinning, and even those with earthly power can sense the encroaching darkness. Or perhaps because this prayer—ignored by so many modern bishops and priests—still terrifies the enemy it was written to rebuke.
Pope Leo XIII didn’t leave us with a warning alone. He left us with a weapon. And like Job, we’re not called to understand all the reasons for our trials, but we are called to know what we can. Yes, we must have the faith of Job, but “faith” does not mean us Catholics ignoring the very real problems inside the Church and turning to our bread and circuses while “God takes the wheel.” Such Quietism, as it is called, shuns the lesson learned when Christ fed the four thousand and the five thousand–but only when the little boy gave what he could.
The Catholic Church, like Job, may be covered in boils, scraping itself with pottery shards on the ash heap of its own failings—but Catholics believe that it is still under divine watch. And those failings, while yes partially our own fault, also originate in the very clandestine evil and plausible deniability I’ve been writing about so much. God doesn’t like it, but he understands. We’ve been duped by the same magicians that have done it for centuries–for millenia.
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One question I’ve kept suspended while I support him is whether Trump is a prophet, a pawn, or something in between—a man thrust into a spiritual battle he may not fully understand. I’ve also wondered it for the exact opposite reason–because he seems to know and foresee too much sometimes. Some will label that question as Trump-hating. It’s not, and is only a label to folks trapped in that false binary mentality I also warn about so often. It is simply a reminder of how subtle the battlefield is—and how even those fighting for good can be used, knowingly or not, by powers far greater than they grasp. Lucifer was once the brightest, most beautiful angel. His brilliance wasn’t false—it was simply turned against its source. And we’d be fools to forget how cunning he still is in the affairs of men.
There is a Man and King far above any political hero that holds precedent in my life, even though he very well may be using that hero as his vessel.
For Catholics, and for non-Catholics who respect our religion and the assault it has been under by the very same cabal that has poisoned the United States–do we believe the battle goes beyond politics?
Do we believe that we have a very necessary–while small–role in it? What constitutes your five loaves and two fish?
Do we see coincidences like the Trump-Leo-St Michael intersection as exactly that–mere coincidence? Or do we use them as opportunities to add air to deflated tires in the faith life, in the battleground for Him, for Truth and Reality Himself?
The battle lines have long been clear–and should have been since at least 2020. Like Job before us, the only way to the light, perhaps to this purported “Golden Age,” is not around the suffering—but through it, eyes fixed on the Redeemer, just as Psalm 23 inspires.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s why Trump posted that prayer.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s why Robert Prevost was divinely inspired to choose the name he did–not necessarily because his skeletons and sins aren’t there, but simply because the devil is in fact not in charge–and God deems it is time.
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May everyone named directly or referenced indirectly ask forgiveness and do penance for their sins against America and God. I fight this information war in the spirit of justice and love for the innocent, but I have been reminded of the need for mercy and prayers for our enemies. I am a sinner in need of redemption as well after all, for my sins are many. In the words of Jesus Christ himself, Lord forgive us all, for we know not what we do.
