The city of angels - our guardians and benefactors

Angels are created spirits, without bodies, who serve as servants and messengers of God. They have intelligence and free will, and are “personal and immortal creatures surpassing in perfection all visible creatures, as the splendor of their glory bears witness” (Catholic Catechism, 330). Catholic teaching not only asserts their existence, but states that everyone born into the world is assigned his own guardian angel – for the entirety of his life – to act as his protector and guide to his heavenly home. Among those who have devoted themselves to promoting greater awareness and devotion to angels is Fr. William Wagner of the Order of Canons Regular of the Holy Cross through the community’s apostolate Work of the Holy Angels.

Angels, Fr. Wagner noted, are God’s first creatures. God created three orders of creaturehood: angels, which are pure spirits created by God at the very beginning, physical creation, and man, who falls between both because he has an immortal soul and a physical body.

Quoting St. Thomas Aquinas, Father notes that God wills to communicate two things to creatures: the goodness of being in which rational creatures know God, praise Him and have union with Him, and the goodness of causality, in which His creatures contribute to the goodness of others. While those with greater talents, such as angels, are higher in an order of authority, in an order of finality, they serve the rest, including man. Father added, “This leads to the question of the angels’ trial.”

God proposed some mystery of the Faith to the angels upon their creation, Father said, “and my personal conviction is that trial was the mystery of the Incarnation.”

When angels were created, he explained, they had an immediate knowledge of themselves, creation, and God. In this first act, they see that it is all good. The angels delighted in their relationship with God, and their call to minister to and build up creation; that they could form creation for the whole physical universe.

Fr. Wagner continued, “Yet considering the Incarnation, the angels suddenly saw that they would be called not to be the chiefs, but to serve the Man, Jesus Christ.”

“And even more, they saw that He would be born of a woman, that this woman would also have a dignity over them. They would be servants first of the Incarnate Word, and therefore, owe a special deference to the mother of this Word. Lucifer responds, ‘I will not serve’ and St. Michael counters, ‘But who is like God? I will serve.’”

Father said, “This is the separation given in Revelation, where John presents us with an archetypal battle between the good and bad angels, which he sees will be carried out throughout the economy of salvation. The battle is for or against Christ, for or against the Church.”

Once the devils are cast out, he noted, the good angels entered into the Beatific Vision. “There is no increase in the Beatific Vision for the angels from that point on, and no redemption for the fallen angels. All further battles are over man and physical creation.”

Ministers of Christ

Angels are important because they are ministers of Christ. They are not merely heavenly beings associated with Him, but in their choice and in their trial, “the angels are also members of the Church. Their ministry is essentially Christological. Whatever grace, admonition, consolation or light they bring to us, is a dimension of the Mediatorship of Christ.”

The angels are the normal ministers of God’s grace, actual graces and those of contemplation, deeper prayer. “God has two options for offering this life. He can simply create it, or create an order of persons whom He would try at the beginning of creation to take into the Beatific Vision and they would then be His personal ministers in mediating that life.”

Angels give us physical protection from harm. They can appear at their will and discretion. They can inspire us to do good through phenomena: an image, a word, something we hear. We see a crucifix and we meditate on it, or a picture of a relative which stirs up some affection or reverence. Father said, “That’s where the angel either directly implants an idea, moves our imagination, or touches our memory to recall something.”

And they can also inspire us to do good when we practice our Catholic faith, such as when we read Sacred Scripture, allowing our angel to underline certain points with his power of illumination. Father explained, “An angel has a vastly more powerful intellect than we do and he can direct the intensity of his intellect into ours and increase temporarily our capacity to understand. The angel is like a step-up transformer. If we have six volts of understanding and he has 240, he can channel that into our intellectual capacity.”

Angels are persons, Father said, “yet possess a greater order of being or personhood than we do.” They have names, but St. Gregory noted that the names of the angels don’t designate their essence, but rather their mission or ministry.

Cultivate friendships with angels

We should cultivate friendships with angels, Father said. They are fellow servants and spiritual brothers with those who keep the witness of Jesus. They keep us from being alone. Fr. Wagner said, “People who are lonely should especially remember that. Our Lord says that where two or three pray in His name He is with them. We should not just pray to our guardian angel, but with him. Ask him to join with us. Remember the angel is God’s servant, and he has no other mission.”

Remembering our angel also places us in the presence of God, he continued. Real spiritual growth, our prayer, always pre-supposes our awareness of the presence of God. “Realizing God has given you an angel awakens you to God’s personal love. He has given you a gift of that love in the angel. We always have an interior source of strength and counsel that we can seek to know God’s will and carry it out.”

While bad angels can manipulate our imagination and emotions and produce a false sense of peace, joy or gratification, they won’t illuminate us so we can judge the truth more correctly, “because they have been liars from the beginning” (John 8:44). The good angels, conversely, want to lead us upward, toward the spiritual life, so we can be more disposed to the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Father continued, “The devil wants to lead people into the feelings—drugs, sensuality, slavery to sin— so that people are living according to their passions and sensations rather than their intellect. A devil is great for nurturing a grudge or fanning the passions, such as hatred.”

Father compared devils to communists, who “don’t start problems, but exploit them … Some people get too excited about the devil. They think they need to make multiple signs of the cross or have exorcisms, when the real answer is to practice virtue. Practice charity. Banish your own bad thoughts. St. James says, ‘Resist the devil and he will flee from you’ (James 4:7). How do you resist him? Practice virtue.”

JIM GRAVES is a Legatus magazine contributing writer.