“HOW, then, are we — who, by our very nature, are darkness and misery — to wrestle with these spiritual principalities and powers, who devote all their wisdom and rage to produce darkness, so as to turn the whole earth into a world of darkness? “By our becoming Light,” answers St. John Chrysostom. The light, it is true, is not to shine upon us in its own direct brightness until the great day of the revelation of the sons of God; but meanwhile, we have a divine subsidy which supplements sight; that subsidy is—the Revealed Word. Baptism did not open our eyes so as to see God, but it opened our ears so as to give us to hear Him, when He speaks to us; now He speaks to us by the Scriptures and by His Church; and our Faith gives us, regarding Truth thus Revealed, a certainty as great as though we saw it with the eyes of either body or soul or both. By this child-like docility, the just man walks on in peace, with the simplicity of the Gospel within him. Better than breast-plate or helmet, the shield of faith protects us, and from every sort of injury; it blunts the fiery darts of the world, it repels the fury of our own passions, it makes us far-seeing enough to escape the most artful snares of the the most wicked ones. Is not the word of God good for every emergency? And it is never wanting to us. Satan has a horror of the Christian who, though he may be weak in other respects, is strong in this divine word. He has a greater fear of that man than he has of all your schools of philosophy and all its professors; he knows well that at every encounter he will be crushed beneath his feet, and with a rapidity which is akin to what our Lord tells us he himself witnessed: ‘I saw Satan, like lightning, falling from heaven.’ It was on the great battle day when he was hurled from paradise by that one word MICHAEL; exquisite word, which was given to the triumphant Archangel to be his everlasting noble name! And he himself, by that word of God, and by that victory for God, was made our model and our defender. We have already explained to our readers why it is that these closing weeks of the Church’s Year are so full of the grand Archangel St. Michael.
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“In the Gradual and its Versicle, the Church tells her Lord how He has ever been the refuge of His people: His goodness, like His power, were before all ages, because He is God from all eternity. May He, therefore, now protect His faithful servants who, reduced to a scanty number, as Israel was of old, are preparing the last exodus of the Church, which is leaving this world turned infidel, and is hastening to the true land of promise.” [emphasis added]
— Dom Guéranger, The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost
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