What Is Faith?… The Angels
By RAYMOND DE SOUZA
Part 12
“Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here; ever this day, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen!”
Everyone who had a minimal Catholic education knows this prayer and should say it every day, as a remembrance of the guardian angels’ presence in our lives and to ask their guidance and protection. But over and above this beautiful invocation, the angels constitute a world of their own, which unfortunately is by and large unknown to most Catholics these days of widespread ignorance of Catholicism.
In this column of The Wanderer, we will investigate the angelic dimension of reality, in order to enrich our knowledge of God’s creation and benefit our spiritual lives.
What does the Church of Jesus Christ, based upon the Revelation delivered to her by the apostles, believe about the angels?
The angels are pure spirits, intellectual beings, created by God in His spiritual likeness, and, as such, they have a higher dignity than man. Some of the angels sinned, misusing their free will to revolt against God their Creator. Although they were created good by God, they became evil through their own fault. We refer to them as devils or demons. The good angels are sent by God to aid man to secure salvation in Jesus Christ.
We can know a great deal about the angels from Holy Scripture, the Tradition of the Church, and from the works of learned and saintly writers.
It is a basic truth of our religion and of common sense as well, that God our Lord does not force anyone to love and serve Him. Minerals, plants, and animals give glory to God by their existence and natures. Living irrational creatures give glory to God without knowing they do it, enslaved as they are by their natural instincts.
But with persons — that is, beings endowed with intelligence and will — God acts differently: He wants to share His life of unending happiness with them, by being freely loved and served by them, that is, knowingly and willingly, not by compulsion. The only creatures we know that God created and endowed with intellect and will are angels and men.
The angels are, therefore, pure spirits, created at the beginning of time, at the very dawn of creation. They were endowed with sanctifying grace to enable them to merit the happiness of the vision of God in Heaven. But it was not going to be a free ride: They were to undergo a period of probation, to test their willingness to freely love and serve God.
Some of them were so much in love with themselves — God made them perfect creatures, similar to Him — that they turned against Him who gave them their perfections. Since angels have a complete knowledge of reality and make no mistakes in their choices, they do not change their minds or repent from their decisions. So, those who refused to love and serve got what they deserved: They were condemned to eternal punishment, and are known as demons or devils.
St. Peter tells us in his second encyclical letter that “God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell” (2 Peter 2:4), and the Book of the Apocalypse reports: “Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon [the Devil]; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven” (Apoc. 12:7-8).
The same Book of the Apocalypse (12:4) mentions the dragon taking down a third of the stars of Heaven with him, and the early Fathers of the Church interpret this passage as meaning that a third of the angels followed Lucifer and were punished with him.
So we are left with two-thirds of the angels to help us in the battle against the devils and his minions who plot our eternal loss. There is strength in numbers!
So we know that the number of angels who remained faithful was very large: Christ Himself spoke of “legions of angels” (Matt. 26:53) who could come to assist Him if He wished to call them against the Jews and Roman soldiers; the prophet Daniel says of God that “a thousand thousands served Him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him” (Daniel 7:10). That is a lot of angels, for sure! As you see, we are in good hands, if we wish to count on their assistance, because God employs the assistance of the good angels in the government of the world and the protection of mankind (cf. Psalm 91 [90]:11-12; Heb. 1:14).
The first ones we should talk about are the famous guardian angels, whom we address in the little prayer I quoted in the beginning of the article. Unfortunately, a romantic iconography has portrayed the guardian angel in a quasi-feminine way, delicate, pink-faced, and looking more like someone in need of protection than like anybody’s protector. It is a pity, because this kind of picture deforms the idea of the angel, who is a powerful creature whom God sent to help us against the Devil.
Funny how many people are afraid of the Devil but have no confidence in the angel! Hence we should avoid having holy pictures of angels that depict them in a weak, effeminate manner. Even St. Michael the Archangel is at times portrayed as a girl dressed for combat. . . . But I digress.
Powerful Intercession
The Church teaches us that from birth each one of us is given an angel to accompany us through life. Christ Himself said that the little children’s “angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” (cf. Matt. 18:10. See also Job 33:23; Acts 12:15; Heb. 1:14). Their mission is to shield us from the assaults of demons and even from temporal evils — except insofar as God permits them for our spiritual advancement.
Yes, the protection of the angels is not to make our lives a plain sailing through a calm sea of scented nectar without any ripples. No, God allows obstacles — usually called “crosses” — to come our way. But this is another topic; I just mention it here in passing. We all know that life is not just peaches and cream.
Our guardian angel suggests good thoughts to us, offers our prayers and good works to God (Tobias 12:12-15; Zech. 3:1-5; Rev. 8:3-4), adding them to his own most powerful intercession, gives us special aid in the last hour of life, and leads our souls after death to the throne of the Most High, or to the chastening fires of Purgatory, where we are purified before getting to Heaven.
The guardian angels are commemorated in the Church liturgy on October 2. So it is a very good habit to say every day, several times a day, the short prayer I mentioned in the beginning of the article. But there are also bad guys in the park. While the good angels seek to draw us to God, the wicked angels or demons are ever plotting our spiritual ruin (See Gen. 3; Matt. 4:1; John 13:2; Acts 5:3; 1 Peter 5:8).
They work to fill our minds with evil thoughts, to fix our attention on temporal success, to turn us away from prayer. They are a real pain! And God our Lord may allow evil spirits to afflict us (Matt. 18:10). He has the habit of trying those whom He loves, to increase our merits and happiness. Read the history of Job. St. Paul too was harassed by an angel of Satan (2 Cor. 12:7-9) and Jesus Himself was also tempted. Such is life in this valley of tears! But there is a lot more to get from the good angels!
Next article: More on the angels.
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
