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‘Angels are servants and messengers of God’
Posted: 09.25.09 On Sept. 29, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. These three angels in particular are singled out for the role they played in Salvation History. These biblical messengers, God’s emissaries as it were, signify God’s transcendence and loving care: Michael (meaning, “Who is like God?”), Gabriel (God’s strength) and Raphael (God’s remedy). Then, on Oct. 2, the Church celebrates the Feast of the Guardian Angels. While the whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of the angels, the Feast of the Guardian Angels celebrates those angels assigned to guide and protect each one of us from our infancy till death. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms: “The existence of the spiritual, noncorporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls ‘angels’ is a truth of faith. The witness of Scripture is as clear as the unanimity of Tradition” (CCC 328). They are not dead humans “who have earned their wings” but are “personal and immortal creatures, surpassing in perfection all visible creation” (CCC 330). St. Augustine says: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit’, from what they do, ‘angel.’” With their whole beings the angels are servants and messengers of God. Because they “always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven,” they are the “mighty ones who do his word, hearkening to the voice of his word” (cf., Mt 18:10, Ps 103:20). At every Mass, angels are given a special mention in the Preface, acknowledging that our own worship and praise is offered in the sight of the angels. “Sacrosanctum Concilium,” Vatican II’s “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy,” insisted that the full liturgical assembly includes not just the people gathered in a parish church at a particular time and in a particular place, but the full liturgical assembly includes angels, saints and indeed the entire cosmos. As Pope John Paul II said in “Ecclesia de Eucharistia,” paraphrasing that same Vatican II document, “The Eucharist is really a glimpse of heaven appearing on earth. It is a glorious ray of the heavenly Jerusalem which pierces the clouds of our history and lights up our journey.” Of course, in a secularized, rationalistic world there is no room for angels, just as there is no time for liturgy. For a world closed to transcendence cannot bring itself to admit the existence of these purely spiritual creatures with intelligence and will any more that it can admit that God matters. Such a world, as Pope Benedict XVI said, can seem like a desert. But into this world an angel was sent by God to announce to Mary that the Word would become flesh in her virginal womb; likewise angels appeared at the tomb of Jesus and announced to the women that he had risen as he said: Angels “evangelized,” that is, they brought good news, by proclaiming Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection. Today, the angels – and the Church’s celebration of the angels – continue to remind us that the world, created by a good and provident God, is more than just a desert and that man is destined for more than just to one day die.
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