Through Christ our Lord…the multitude of Angels extols your majesty ,and we are united with them in exultant adoration, as with one voice of praise we acclaim: Holy, Holy, Holy…

                                                                                                                     The Roman Missal, Preface of the Angels

It was like the return of a long-lost friend. In recent weeks the Archdiocese of Portland began the recitation of Pope Leo XIII’s prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, as part of a response to the sex abuse scandals.  The prayer had been commonly used at the end of Mass until 1964 but was discontinued. Now, angels were back again.

Of course, they had never really left us. But in recent years, sermons on angels were rarely heard and even the most pious seldom invoked their assistance. Deep down in the Catholic psyche there remained a sense that angels exist and are meaningful, but as influences in our prayer life they appear to have largely vanished.

It was not always this way. Catholics in early times were comfortable with a spiritual world populated with saintly figures, and divine messengers. In recent decades many of us have been tempted to discard such intermediaries in favor of personal communication with Jesus or our heavenly Father. In an “I-thou” world, there seemed to be less room for a broader “we.” Only the liturgy still seemed to care. At every Mass we have always been invited to join with the heavenly choirs of angels  and unceasingly praise our heavenly Father.  During the solemn Easter Vigil Mass an invocation to all the “Holy Angels and Archangels” is given special prominence, and a frequently-sung  hymn has  us joining with the Cherubim and Seraphim in the praise of Mary.

All of which raises the question: what does the Church mean when it speaks of angels?  From the beginnings of Christianity, such creatures were viewed as part of the cosmic element, in a world far more multi-faceted than our senses perceive. In Judaism, angels were perceived as fiery, brilliant, human-like forms, with multiple even thousands of wings.  In the early Church this belief was co-opted into a salvation history, in which whatever graces angels imparted derived from Christ, the head of the angels. If the redeemed world proclaims Christ’s victory over sin and death, the angels are elements of this chorus of praise, never its source or center point. In this context, the role of these spiritual, non-corporeal beings has varied over the years. Angels do not appear in Church art until the 8th century and then rarely. It eventually became common to depict them as young men with multi-colored wings. Although the existence of good and bad angels was taken for granted during the Middle Ages, it was not given major religious emphasis. Not until witchcraft hysteria swept Catholic and Protestant cultures in the 17th century, did concern for evil spirits become a dominant issue and then often with tragic consequences.

The imagery of angels also began to change. Responding to rationalist thinkers of the following centuries, artists depicted angels as romantic evocations of beautiful, comforting creatures. Angel art became a frequent motif on tombstones and decorative sculpture. In more recent years, this naturalizing tendency has become particularly pronounced in photographs of children wearing angel wings, as were young models advertising lingerie, renderings completely void of religious meaning. In these circumstances, prayer to St. Michael the Archangel seems timely.

If we can still affirm the once-and-for-all-meaning of the Christ event, then surely there is room for these spiritual creatures in our faith life. But we have much to relearn. In typically personalist terms, Pope Francis reminds us, “According to Church tradition, we all have an angel with us, who guards us, who makes us hear things” …. no one walks alone, and none of us can think he is up alone: this companion is always there.” The liturgy speaks of creatures “whose splendor surpasses the goodness of the whole of creation.”   Theologian Karl Rahner reminds us, that beyond the world of our senses, “there is an unsurveyable world of spirits with a life, in comparison with which, all earthly events are like a shadow” and from whose “luminous worlds of roaring life and blinding light not a glimmer penetrates down into the depths of our material poverty.”

Without the angels, the wondrous world God created would be a much sadder, hollowed-out place.

Nov. 1, 2018