Ss. Angelorum Custodum — 2 October, III classis
Ecce ego mittam Angelum meum, qui praecedat te, et custodiat in via, et introducat in locum quem paravi. “Behold I will send my angel, who shall go before thee, and keep thee in thy journey, and bring thee into the place that I have prepared.” — Epistle of the Mass, Exod. 23:20
I. Identitas et Origines
Three days ago the Church kept the feast of an angel with a name. Today she keeps the feast of angels without names, and the difference is the whole point of the day.
On the feast of St. Michael we followed St. Gregory the Great’s principle that the names of the angels are names of office rather than of nature: in heaven they need no names to be known, and they receive them only when they are sent to us, from the work they are sent to do. Michael is named for the war-cry that ended the first rebellion; Gabriel for the strength of God he announced; Raphael for the medicine of God he carried to Tobias. The guardian angels have, in Scripture and in the liturgy, only one name between them, and it too is the name of an office: Custos, keeper. Each of them is known by what he does for one soul, and the soul he keeps is, in a sense, his name.
What they are is what every angel is. They are pure spirits, created by God out of nothing at the beginning of time together with the corporeal creation (Fourth Lateran Council, Firmiter), endowed with intellect and will, tested once and confirmed for ever in grace and glory. They are not a separate species of angel, nor a ninth choir alongside the others. Guardianship is a ministry, not a rank. St. Thomas teaches that the guarding of men belongs ordinarily to the lowest of the nine choirs, the order called simply Angels, because the lowest are nearest to us and the divine illumination descends through the higher to the lower until it reaches the human mind (Summa Theologiae I, q. 113). Dom Guéranger, following the common teaching, says the guardians are for the most part chosen from that choir. The lowest of the heavenly orders is thus the one that stoops furthest — which is, after the Gospel of this Mass, exactly where heavenly greatness ought to be found.
What the Church celebrates today is not, then, a class of beings but a providence: the fact that God, who has no need of any creature, has willed that every man should walk through this life under the watch of a spirit who sees His face.
II. Testimonium Scripturae
The doctrine of the guardian angels is not built on a single text. It is the convergence of many, from the patriarchs to the Apostles, and the Mass of the day takes up its two principal pillars.
The angel who goes before (the Epistle). Behold I will send my angel, who shall go before thee, and keep thee in thy journey, and bring thee into the place that I have prepared. Take notice of him, and hear his voice, and do not think him one to be contemned: for he will not forgive when thou hast sinned, and my name is in him (Exod. 23:20–21). In its literal sense the promise is made to Israel in the desert, and the Fathers read the angel who leads the people in more than one way: some as Michael, the prince of the people of God, and some, because my name is in him, as a figure of the Son Himself, the Angel of Great Counsel. The Church, in placing the passage on this feast, applies it by accommodation to the angel who leads each Christian through the desert of this life toward the place prepared for him. Notice what the text demands: not only confidence in the guide, but attention to him, obedience to his voice, and the fear of grieving him by sin.
Their angels always see the face of the Father (the Gospel). The Gospel (Matt. 18:1–10) is the same pericope the Church read at Michaelmas, and it ends on the sentence that is the charter of this feast: See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven (18:10). Our Lord speaks of their angels — the little ones possess them as their own. And He gives this as the reason not to despise the least: a child who seems to count for nothing on earth has a servant who stands in the presence of God. The angel’s mission to earth does not interrupt his vision in heaven.
The patriarchs and the prophets. Jacob, blessing the sons of Joseph on his deathbed, invokes the angel that delivereth me from all evils (Gen. 48:16). The Psalmist promises that the angel of the Lord shall encamp round about them that fear him: and shall deliver them (Ps. 33:8), and in the ninetieth Psalm, which supplies the Gradual of the Mass: For he hath given his angels charge over thee; to keep thee in all thy ways. In their hands they shall bear thee up: lest thou dash thy foot against a stone (Ps. 90:11–12). The Book of Tobias is an extended narrative of the ministry of an angel to a single family: Raphael guides the young Tobias on his journey, protects him, heals his father, and reveals at the end that he had presented their prayers and tears before the Lord (Tob. 12:12).
The Apostolic Church. When St. Peter, delivered from prison by an angel, knocked at the door of Mary the mother of John Mark, the disciples within would not believe the servant girl, and said: It is his angel (Acts 12:15). The remark is the more telling for being offhand. The first Christians took it for granted that each of them had an angel of his own. And St. Paul gives the general principle: Are they not all ministering spirits, sent to minister for them, who shall receive the inheritance of salvation? (Heb. 1:14).
To these the tradition adds the angels of nations in Daniel, where the princes of Persia and of Greece are set against Michael, the prince of Israel (Dan. 10:13, 20–21). From these texts the theologians have commonly drawn the further teaching that not only persons but peoples, churches, and communities have their angelic guardians.
III. Theologia: Natura et Officia
What the Church holds. The Church has not solemnly defined the existence of a guardian angel for each man, but the teaching is so firmly rooted in Scripture, in the unanimous voice of the Fathers, and in the liturgy that the theologians hold it as certain. They commonly distinguish two degrees: that each of the faithful has his own guardian angel is held as theologically certain; that every human being without exception, the unbaptized and the sinner included, has a guardian from birth is the common and well-founded teaching. Guéranger expresses the same distinction: the protection is certainly given to the baptized, and very probably extends to the whole human race. The Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches the faithful to honour and invoke the angels who are given to them for their protection.
From birth, not from baptism. St. Thomas asks when the guardian is assigned, and answers: at birth (I, q. 113). The reason he gives is that guardianship belongs to man as a wayfarer, and a man is a wayfarer from the moment he begins his life apart from his mother; the benefits of grace come with baptism, but the benefits of nature and of providence are given to every man as man. St. Jerome had already drawn the same conclusion from the Gospel of this Mass: so great is the dignity of souls that each has, from the beginning of its life, an angel deputed to its keeping (Commentarius in Matthaeum, on 18:10).
What the guardian does. The theological tradition gathers the offices of the guardian angel under several heads. He protects the body from harm, so far as this serves the salvation of the soul. He wards off the assaults of the demons, or restrains them so that they do not tempt beyond our strength. He moves the soul to good, not by forcing the will, which he cannot do, but by acting upon the imagination and the senses and by illuminating the understanding, so that the good is seen more clearly and the evil recognized for what it is. He presents our prayers to God, as Raphael did those of Tobias, and intercedes for us. And at the hour of death he stands by the soul in its last combat and, with St. Michael, leads it to judgment.
He does not abandon. St. Thomas holds that the guardian angel never wholly forsakes the soul committed to him in this life, even in mortal sin. He may, by God’s permission, allow a man to fall, either because the man resists or so that he may learn humility from his fall; but the guardianship itself is not withdrawn while the soul is still on its way (I, q. 113). And the angel does not grieve over our sins as we would, for nothing disturbs the beatitude of those who see God; he wills the order of divine justice and mercy in all things.
Why God uses them. God has no need of any intermediary. He guards the world by His own providence immediately, and the angels add nothing to His power. But it belongs to the dignity of His government, St. Thomas teaches, that He executes His providence over lower things through higher ones, communicating to His creatures the dignity of being causes. The guardian angel is therefore not a replacement for God’s care but its instrument, and the honour paid to him is paid finally to the One who sends him. The Collect of the day says this exactly: God sends the angels ineffabili providentia, by an unspeakable providence.
The angels of communities. Following the hint of Daniel and the Apocalypse, where the letters to the seven churches are addressed to the angel of the church (Apoc. 2–3), many Fathers and theologians teach that each nation, each particular church, and each community has its own angel. The teaching is less certain than that of the personal guardian, and it is held here as a common and reverent opinion, not as doctrine.
IV. Ratio Cultus et Propagatio
An ancient belief, a modern feast. The Catholic Encyclopedia observes that the feast of the Guardian Angels is of comparatively recent introduction, but that it gives the Church’s sanction to a very ancient belief, and that the absence of a special feast in the early Church is no evidence that the guardian angels were not prayed to and honoured. The early Roman sacramentaries, in their Masses for the dedication of the angel’s basilica, already joined to the praise of Michael the commemoration of all the angels and their protection of men. For centuries the guardian angels were honoured within Michaelmas.
In the East. The Byzantine Church has no separate feast of the guardian angels: they are included in the Synaxis of the Archangel Michael and all the bodiless powers on 8 November. But the Greek Horologion contains a supplicatory canon to the guardian angel, attributed to John the Monk, in which the belief that an angel is assigned to each person is expressed without ambiguity, and the prayer to one’s guardian angel has long belonged to the daily rule of prayer of the Eastern faithful. The doctrine is common patrimony; only the feast is Latin.
Spain, and the Roman calendar. The feast arose, as so many did, in particular churches before it entered the universal calendar. It was not among the feasts retained in the breviary of St. Pius V in 1568, but among the earliest petitions for local supplements to that breviary was a request from Córdoba in 1579 for a feast in honour of the guardian angels, and Valencia obtained approval in February 1582 for proper offices including that of the Guardian Angels. On 27 September 1608, Paul V placed the feast in the general calendar as a double ad libitum, to be kept by choice; it was understood as a kind of supplement to Michaelmas. Clement X, in 1670, made it obligatory for the whole Church and fixed it on 2 October, the first free day after the feast of St. Michael. Leo XIII raised it in 1883 to the rank of a double major, and under the rubrics of 1960 it is kept as a feast of the third class.
The feast’s place in the calendar is therefore itself a piece of theology. It follows Michaelmas as a corollary follows a principle: the prince of the heavenly host who defends the whole Church on the twenty-ninth of September is followed, three days later, by the unnamed host who defend each of her members. The Mass even begins with the same Introit, Benedicite Dominum, omnes Angeli eius.
The Angele Dei. The best-known prayer to the guardian angel in the Latin Church, the Angele Dei, is medieval in origin, and was learned at the knee by generations of Catholic children:
Angele Dei, qui custos es mei, me tibi commissum pietate superna illumina, custodi, rege et guberna. Amen.
It was enriched with indulgences by the Holy See, and it compresses into a single sentence the four offices of the guardian: to enlighten, to guard, to rule, and to govern.
The saints and their angels. The lives of the saints are full of the guardian angels, and the Church has allowed some of these accounts into her own prayer. The lessons of the Roman Breviary for St. Frances of Rome (9 March) record that she enjoyed the visible presence of her guardian angel, and the processes of her canonization dwell at length on that companionship. In the last century, St. Gemma Galgani, canonized by Pius XII in 1940, spoke with her angel as with a familiar friend and sent him on errands, according to her own letters and the testimony of her director. Such favours are extraordinary and are not the measure of ordinary devotion; but they are the Church’s reminder that what the saints saw, the rest of us possess unseen.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, on the charge given to the angels (Sermones in Psalmum Qui habitat, sermo 12). This sermon supplies the lessons of the second nocturn of today’s Office, and it is the classical meditation on the feast. Bernard dwells on the words in omnibus viis tuis, in all thy ways — and notes that they are thy ways, the ways of a son, not the ways of the devil; the angel keeps us on the road, not off it. He asks what we ought to render for such a gift, and answers: reverence for their presence, devotion for their good will, and confidence for their protection. Then, in a turn of strong encouragement, he asks what we can fear under such guardians. They cannot be overcome, they cannot be deceived, still less can they deceive us; they are faithful, they are wise, they are powerful. Why then do we tremble?
St. Jerome, on the dignity of souls (Commentarius in Matthaeum, on 18:10). Commenting on the Gospel of the day, Jerome draws from Our Lord’s words the conclusion that each soul has from its birth an angel appointed to keep it — and finds in this not first a consolation but a measure of the soul’s worth. If God has given a prince of His court to guard a beggar’s child, the child is not to be despised.
St. Basil the Great, on the angel as tutor (Adversus Eunomium III, 1). Basil teaches that beside each of the faithful stands an angel as tutor and shepherd, guiding his life — unless that man drives him away by his sins. The image of the paedagogus, the household servant who walked the child to school and kept him from harm on the way, captures both the tenderness and the discipline of the office.
St. Thomas Aquinas, on the angel who does not leave (S. Th. I, q. 113). The guardian remains with the soul through the whole of its pilgrimage, through its falls as through its fidelity, and only at the end of the journey does his office of custody give way to fellowship in glory. What he does on earth as keeper, he will do in heaven as companion — which is precisely what the Collect asks: to be defended by their protection here, and to rejoice in their fellowship for ever.
The lesson of the Gospel. The Church sets the guardian angels beside the child in the midst of the Apostles. The angels who see God’s face are given to the little ones; and the soul that would profit by its angel must first become little. Pride is deaf to every voice that is not its own, and the voice of the guardian is quiet. Take notice of him, and hear his voice.
VI. Oratio
The Collect of the Mass:
Deus, qui ineffabili providentia sanctos Angelos tuos ad nostram custodiam mittere dignaris: largire supplicibus tuis; et eorum semper protectione defendi, et aeterna societate gaudere. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti, Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.
“O God, who in Thine unspeakable providence dost vouchsafe to send Thy holy Angels to guard us: grant to Thy suppliants that we may ever be defended by their protection and rejoice in their everlasting fellowship. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.”
The prayer asks two things, and their order is the order of the Christian life: protectione defendi — to be guarded now, on the way; aeterna societate gaudere — to rejoice in their company for ever, at the end of it. The keeper becomes the companion. The Collect of Michaelmas asked that those who serve God in heaven might defend our life on earth; this Collect completes it by asking that those who defend us on earth might be our fellows in heaven.
VII. Aspiratio
Angelis suis mandavit de te, ut custodiant te in omnibus viis tuis. “He hath given his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.” — Gradual of the Mass, Ps. 90:11
And the prayer of childhood, to be said morning and night for the rest of one’s life:
Angele Dei, qui custos es mei, me tibi commissum pietate superna illumina, custodi, rege et guberna. Amen. “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.”
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Scripture. Exodus 23:20–23; Matthew 18:1–10; Genesis 48:16; Psalms 33 and 90; Tobias 5–12; Daniel 10; Acts 12:1–17; Hebrews 1:14; Apocalypse 2–3.
Fathers and Doctors. St. Basil, Adversus Eunomium III; St. Jerome, Commentarius in Matthaeum, on 18:10; St. Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia, Hom. 34; St. Bernard, Sermones in Psalmum Qui habitat, sermo 12; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 110–113 (the angels’ action on bodies and on men, and their guardianship).
Magisterium and liturgy. The Fourth Lateran Council, chapter 1, Firmiter; the Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part IV; the Office of the Guardian Angels in the Roman Breviary, 2 October.
History and reference. The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Feast of Guardian Angels” and “Guardian Angel”; Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year, for 2 October; Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 2 October.
Learning paths. The Theology and Doctrine path continues the angelology begun at Michaelmas with the Thomistic treatise on the angelic ministry: how a pure spirit acts on a bodily creature, how angels illumine the human mind without violating the will, and why guardianship begins at birth. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Gospel of Matthew 18, which the Missal reads three times in five weeks — for St. Joseph Calasanctius, for St. Michael, and today — and asks what the Church teaches by that repetition. The Spiritual Practices and Devotions path treats daily recourse to the guardian angel and the practice of the presence of the angels. The East-West Comparative path follows the guardian angel from the canon of John the Monk to the Synaxis of 8 November.
Practice
Examine. Have I lived today as one who is accompanied? Is there anything I did, said, or permitted myself in secret that I would not have done before a witness? St. Bernard’s counsel is that we should not dare to do in our angel’s presence what we would not dare to do in the presence of a man.
Do. This week, say the Angele Dei on waking and before sleep, and teach it to a child who does not yet know it. Before a journey, a difficult conversation, or a temptation you can see coming, ask your angel’s help by a single word.
Pray. The Collect of the day, or the Angele Dei; and, for those you love, a prayer to their angels — the guardians of your children, your spouse, those who are far from God — that they may lead home the souls committed to them.
Devote. Honour the angel of your parish, of your family, and of your nation, as the tradition counsels; and at the end of each day, before the examination of conscience, thank your guardian for the dangers turned aside that you never knew of.
Sancti Angeli, custodes nostri, defendite nos in proelio, ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio.