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Above: The Guardian Angel by Marcantonio Franceschini (1648 – 1729)
Me and the Angels
My spiritual background is an example of how much our secular culture and our ailing Church today leave many like me either skeptical of or oblivious to the angels. In my childhood and student years, steeped in the Enlightenment-influenced secular education of California public K-12 schools, Stanford, and Yale, I unwittingly thought talk of angels was mostly a superstition of simple people from the past. I thought the idea of a “guardian angel” was a silly myth made up for children. My dismissal of angels was likely compounded by my exposure to the New Age movement during my childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and ’80s, with people gushing about “angels” and “spirits” the way one talks about drugs, as sources of highs—often while trying to sell me New Age books or music, or tickets to their programs. Secularism told me angels are irrelevant and likely not real; the New Age made me think angels—or more likely “angels”—were goofy or even something to be leery of.
Next, during most of my first three decades as a Catholic, after entering the Church in 1990, the angels all but did not exist in the anemic Novus Ordo settings where I languished, trying to figure out where the depth and grandeur of the Church I had read about had disappeared to. As a Catholic, I believed in angels, but I left it at that. Aside from famous angels such as Gabriel at the Annunciation or in older artwork, angels were simply absent in these Catholic environments, busy as they were with kumbayah and social justice. The revolutionaries of the 1960s and ‘70s had succeeded in breaking a link to traditions such as prayers to the angels.
Two catalysts built a bridge from my spiritual life to the angels. First, when I stumbled upon the work of Ida Friederike Görres in late 2019 and began reading anything by her I could get my hands on, I discovered a serious, deeply faithful, highly intellectual Catholic for whom devotion to the angels was taken for granted; her devotion to St. Michael the Archangel was so strong that she had an image of him carved on her gravestone.
Second, around this time, I began to re-discover traditional Catholicism. This led me to spend time with Catholics for whom the Holy Angels have been anything but forgotten. I remember the first time I heard people pray the St. Michael Prayer, and I was perplexed that everyone else knew this prayer—a new one for me—by heart. Then, when I talked to a traditional priest in Austria about veiling at Mass and he brought up the connection between veiling and the angels (1 Corinthians 11:10) and how they pray with us at Mass, I found this connection tremendously beautiful.
Next, imagine my astonishment at a Bible study led by this same priest when he mentioned in passing, matter-of-factly, that we know about the existence of guardian angels from the Psalms (91:11). I kept a poker face because this was obvious to everyone else at this gathering, but a voice was exploding with questions inside my head: WAIT a minute, you mean guardian angels are for real? An angel is watching out for me? And others? I can pray to my Guardian Angel? (They don’t teach about such things in Yale PhD programs.) When a singing instructor mentioned how the ninefold traditional Kyrie is structured to reflect the nine choirs of angels, it was a “Wow!” moment for me. (But with the Novus Ordo having done away with this, it was also a specific reminder about how the reforms of recent decades could result in a Catholic convert like me being ignorant about and oblivious to the angels, marginalized as they have become.)
The Power of a Good Book
For the many Catholics like I was, deprived of the traditions of traditional devotions to the angels, and for angel-loving Catholics as well, Arouca’s Devotions to the Holy Angels offers a collection of carefully selected prayers in a conveniently small and modestly priced book. I’m very grateful to Arouca for this important book in my own spiritual life.
The small guidebook offers a new, well-designed , modestly priced resource to help recover devotion to the Holy Angels. It contains a delightful selection of traditional prayers—meditations, practices, litanies, and prayers of petition—to help reconnect us to the angels and their intercession. In an era when angels have been pushed off the radar of our secular culture and our ailing Church, a well-edited little book like this is a fine addition to modern devotionals.
In terms of size, the book hits just the right balance: it is lightweight and fits nicely alongside a missal. The editor has been careful to select some top gems suited to the enrichment of souls, rather than to try to pack in any and every prayer the editor could find on angels. This is a carefully curated collection, not an exhaustive compilation. Yet, at forty-five pages, the book Devotions to the Holy Angels offers such a variety of devotions as to be well worth the price.
I think the modest number of prayers in this book is one of its strengths. The amount of content is manageable instead of overwhelming. Large prayer books the size of encyclopedia volumes sometimes leave me feeling guilty because they have so many prayers I seldom pray. They are not the ones I pick up to carry along to help me pray at adoration or Mass. And due to my own lack of experience with the angels, the small size of this book was ideal to serve as an on-ramp, a point of entry for reintroducing me to the Holy Angels.
For anyone who fears—as I did when I ordered this—that the publisher made this book small by smushing text onto every square millimeter of the page in as small a font size as possible (that is, an illegible size) onto each page, I am happy to report that Arouca Press wisely did not do so. The layout of the text is pleasant and the font size is legible.
My only disappointment with the book is the lack of clarity in some parts about the sources of the prayers. For some, the book lists a source, such as “meditations of Henri-Marie Boudon (1624–1704)” and “Pope Leo XIII.” For others, the source is unclear. One improvement I would welcome in a future edition is slightly more information about the origin of the prayers, even if it is only to tell us that many of these prayers are so deeply rooted in tradition that their sources are unclear. This, however, is a secondary concern. To be sure, this is a book to help us pray, not an academic study. In its primary mission, the book succeeds.
The lovely cover invites devotion to the Holy Angels: it has traditional artwork of two angels set on a rich, dark eggplant-colored background. This nice cover along with the wonderful content makes this most suitable as a gift. (Just this week, I ordered copies to send to a newlywed couple and for a girl’s upcoming confirmation.)
I was Catholic for thirty years before I rediscovered traditional Catholicism and realized that the Guardian Angels had a feast day of their own. This year I am outright celebrating the Feast of the Guardian Angels, and I will do so with help from the little book Devotions to the Holy Angels.