October 2 is the feast of the Guardian Angels. I hold a particular devotion to the Guardian Angels.

Angels, after all, testify to a certain hierarchy of being: from inanimate things (rocks) to beings with simple vegetative souls (the principle by which something lives, e.g., flowers) to beings with simple animal souls (e.g., animals) to beings that have rational souls and physical bodies, capable of thinking and choosing (i.e., man) to purely rational souls created by God (i.e., angels) to Uncreated Being Himself (i.e., God). Our world doesn’t like hierarchy, especially when man is “a little less than the angels” (Heb 2:7). Of course, the fallen angels don’t like that hierarchy, especially the part where God surrounds man with “glory and honor,” as described in the Bible. God’s giving to man the guardian angels is taken as an insult by Satan and his prideful lot. The created hierarchy includes love and service — a refutation of Satan’s non serviam!

Yet the angels are not just a lecture in hierarchy of being. The Guardian Angels specifically are proof of several other important points:

• The communion of saints – God does not just give us human patrons in heaven to pray for us, He gives us angelic guardians to walk with us. Now, of course, because heaven is a state and not a place, the Guardian Angels have the vision of God always with them. This ought to console as well as challenge us: The beings God has given to us as friends have both the vision of God and the vision of our lives before their eyes and want to bring the latter into union with the former.
• Spiritual warfare – St. Paul reminds us that “ours is a struggle not against flesh and blood… but against the spiritual forces of evil” (Eph 6:12), a struggle in which we are not sent alone nor without the accompaniment of spiritual forces of good. We are not outflanked (unless we want to be) because God does not leave us outmatched.
• Providence – God does not abandon us nor leave us alone “to work out our salvation.” Salvation is a team effort, and God shares the best of His team with us so that we may be saved and “God may be all in all.” That Providence should assure us. At the same time, because the Guardian Angels are often associated with children (which hardly makes devotion to them “childish”), we’re assured that God cherishes us as His Children whom He seeks to lead through this life to life eternal. Putting our trust in God and in His angels, then, is not childish but should elicit in us the child-like.

Many of us learned as children the rhyming prayer, “Angel of God, my guardian dear to whom God’s love entrusts me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.” It’s simple and childlike but remains powerful at every age. How many of us still pray it?

As I asked last year (see here), how many priests invoke the assistance of the Guardian Angels of those for whom they are responsible? The Guardian Angels are on your team if you are on God’s team. They depend on you to be faithful to your priestly ministry to their charges, who are also yours, so that they can sanctify those put into their care.

Let us recognize and avail ourselves of the help of those to whom God in His Mercy entrusts us.

Finally, let us ponder one other thought. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that “[f]rom its beginning until death, human life is surrounded by [the angels’] watchful care and intercession” (no. 336). Can we even imagine the cry for just vengeance that goes up from the angelic choirs as they witness, ostensibly as a matter of “right,” the murder of those entrusted to their care — or the insult of those of their charges who defend it? Can you imagine their prayers for human conversion?