A season of vigilance, prayer, and spiritual combat.

St. Michael's Lent is a devotional fast of forty days kept between the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15 and Michaelmas — the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, Archangels — on September 29. The two dates are the point: the season begins with the creature who said yes and ends with the angel who fought.

The practice is Franciscan in origin. St. Francis kept this fast on Monte La Verna in 1224, and it was during it that he received the stigmata. It has never been a season of obligation, and that is part of its character: it is undertaken freely, by people who have decided that the year needs more than the Church requires of them.

Catholic Daily Reflection keeps it as a disciplined return to vigilance. The 2026 series reads St. Augustine's City of God straight through, in Augustine's own order, gathered under six movements: vigilance, asceticism, discernment, worship, lineage — Augustine's long tracing of the two cities through Scripture, from Cain and Abel down to Christ — and peace. The goal is not study, but formation: daily attention to the habits of mind by which a Christian learns which city he is actually living for.

Each day pairs a short reading with a meditation written for morning prayer. The series runs from August 15 to September 29, 2026.