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Father Hugh Barbour helps us get ready for the Feast of St. Michael with a reflection on angels. Who are they? What do they do? And how, without having bodies, do they get anything done?
Cy Kellett:
What is the deal with angels? Father Hugh Barbour is next. Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and we’ve got the feast of Saint Michael coming up. Michael the Archangel.
Is he the highest angel? Is he close to the highest angel? Well, we’ll talk about that. But we want to talk with Father Hugh about what is an angel in order to get a sense of who is Michael and what, in a practical sense, does Michael do for us? Because he is our defender, and we’ll talk a bit about the Saint Michael prayer and all of that. But you can’t talk about angels, especially with Father Hugh, without getting your mind blown just a little bit. These are unbelievable, just beyond our ability to comprehend, creatures. Every single one of them, even the lowest angel. So prepare to get your mind blown as we ask Father Hugh Barbour about Saint Michael the Archangel.
Father, I’m going to give you a really tough question as we go on but I am previewing it for you now, which is, I want to know this. I don’t want you to answer this yet, but as we go along, teasing for the future, how does an angel experience reality if they can’t see, hear, taste, touch or smell? And that’s the only way we know it. Don’t tell me now. I’m going to get to that, because the feast of Saint Michael is coming up. So first, I want you to tell me about Saint Michael.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Happily. I’ll do so happily. Saint Michael is called Saint Michael the Archangel, is the sainted angel among the angels, which is the most venerated, or who is the most venerated, in the Catholic Church. That is, there are millions or maybe billions of angels. I mean, if there are billions of human beings, there are billions of angels. And so, consequently, he receives a special veneration which we don’t really understand the reason why, out of all of these angels in their various orders and hierarchies, why he would be the one that would be chosen for this particular role, just like we don’t know why our Lord picked Peter as opposed to some other follower to be the head of his church, or Saint Joseph to be his legal father on earth, or even the blessed mother. God looked on her lowliness.
So the choice of a person… And angels are persons. They’re persons who are bodiless. They don’t have a body but they exist as true spiritual beings. As Saint Thomas calls them, intellectual substances. They know and they love and they have that center of their being and power.
But he’s the one of whom we have the most indication in the sacred scriptures and in the church’s liturgy. And the other two are Gabriel, we’re acquainted with from the Gospel of Luke, especially. And, of course, Saint Raphael from the Book of Tobit. But considering the number of angels there are, we have very little personal information about the angels as individuals, so it’s an interesting case. Michael, we have the most because of the Book of Daniel and because of various traditions associated with Michael in the Old Testament. And, at least in the new, in the case of the Letter of Jude, there’s one mention there, too, as well.
But the role he plays is a very important one. He’s an archangel but he belongs, according to Saint Thomas, in any case, to the realm of the principalities. The three ranks, the three orders of angels, three hierarchies, and then within them, the different ranks that you have there. And so, we’re used to some of those expressions. Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels. So, they’re three groups of three. And the last three has to do with the care of the human race. And so, the tradition, I’m giving you Saint Thomas Aquinas. There are many other traditions about this because revelation is not explicit, and so there’s a lot of theological reflection about the angels but not that much that we know for absolute certain.
So, Saint Thomas puts him as the highest of the angels of that third group, that is Principalities, Archangels and Angels, who have the care of the human race, either as whole societies or families or regions, however it might be divided. But that’s the way that part of the angelic world is described. And so, he’s the leader of the heavenly host as regard to the protection, defense, and guidance of God’s people among the human race, in view of their eternal salvation. So, he’s viewed as especially as protector of Israel, and then later on, as the protector of the church, since the church is the new Israel.
And so, in a way, you might say he’s the patron of the Church in an external way, by way of defense against enemies, just like Saint Joseph was declared by Pope Pius IX to be the patron of the universal church, but in a more internal way in terms of a spiritual life and growth and holiness. And so, you have those two who give a father’s care to the human race in a particular aspect.
So Saint Michael is, therefore, an angel invoked and venerated because obviously, if God has given him this role, to lead the protection of the part of the angels and defense of the human race, then his role is extremely powerful and efficient. So much so that, when you look, you can tell sometimes about a theological reality based on the errors that come up regarding it. And if you consider the case of Saint Michael, what happens if there are any heresies about Saint Michael? Well, there are some professed by-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, because the son of God.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. Professed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and by the Sunday Adventists, and by the Mormons, where they hold that Michael is just the preexistent Christ. And you can see the easy jump they would make because he’s the spiritual defender of the human race, therefore in a certain sense a kind of savior. So consequently, he would be identified with Christ before Christ appeared. Course, they hold that Christ is only a very, very, great spiritual being, the son of God meaning the highest of the angels. Now, that’s the word the scripture. The scripture calls angels sons of God, and of course, our Lord would be the first of them but because he really is the son of God, by nature, not simply by an analogy or attribution. So the angels are called sons of God, and so it’s not surprising that these errors would crop up, making Michael the Archangel a divinity, like God the son. Or like God the son.
Cy Kellett:
And so we know of him, or the revelation of him, is connected to his role. There’s a certain way, though, in which reflecting on Saint Michael and relating to Saint Michael, and even having a feast of Saint Michael, is because he’s the named leader. It’s almost… Let me make an analogy. Like if I’m loyal to the Queen, Queen Elizabeth, I’m loyal to the whole country, to all of Great Britain or to the whole Commonwealth, or whatever. So in a certain sense, is that Michael’s role too, to represent, by name, all those that are in part of that work in protecting us and keeping us?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Exactly, and very well put because the phrase which is associated with him is on his shield in much of the western Catholic iconography. It says, “Quis ut Deus?” Who is like God? Which is what his name in Hebrew means. Mi-Kai-El. So he is the angel who represents the angels who resisted the conspiracy of Lucifer and refused to abandon their obedience to God. And so, their motto and his name is, “Who is like God?” Like, who are we to follow, other than the one true God? And so, he exalts the supremacy of God and his power, and the importance of obedience to him, and fights against the rebellion of the fallen angels. And so there’s that special sense in which he is viewed, as the Eastern liturgies call him, the [foreign language 00:08:39], the supreme general or the supreme leader of the angelic host in their battle against Satan.
Now, in the Eastern church, that was taken to mean that he was absolutely the highest of all the angels whatsoever. And that was not taken over in the Western Church because we took the theology of Saint Dennis, who is an Eastern father, wherein the very highest angels don’t have earthly apparitions. They’re just pure contemplatives, the Seraphim, the Cherubim, they just simply surround the word of God and the blessed Trinity with their worship, and they don’t make appearances on earth. And if they do, it’s through other angels of a different or lower order.
And so for us, in the Latin tradition, Michael the highest of those angels who have to do with the care of the human race, and therefore defending us against those angels who fell, who then in their fall, then attempted by their envy to make us fall as well, and succeeded. So that’s our version. But nobody knows for sure. I mean, he may well be the very highest of all the angels. The [inaudible 00:09:43] at Lucifer may have been that one. Who knows? But these are things that are part of tradition, they’re parts of the drama that we’ll know the whole story when we actually know. But our Lord doesn’t want his revelation to concern the angels, principally because that gets us distracted and the natural interest would take away from the deeper mysteries of faith, which are revealed, namely the Trinity and the incarnation.
So, even among the Jews, there was a practice that were developing a praying to Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel in particular, and the rabbis forbade it because they were afraid that they would begin to worship them as gods. And of course, the incarnation hadn’t occurred yet, and the proper teaching of the church and the veneration of the angels and saints, but let’s just say, his veneration was so great in Israel that Daniel says, “Michael the Archangel helped me.” I mean, it’s quite evident the angels are deeply involved in the actions and the fates of men.
And so, Michael’s role is of a defender of the people of God, basically. Now that means, also, that in the tradition, that point at which need a special defense, that is the moment of death, our particular judgment when the demons will to try to accuse us and justify our loss, that he is there to defend us. That’s why he’s often shown with the scales because the Devil’s trying to make an argument against our salvation, and he and our guardian angel, and most of all, our Lord, who is our advocate with the father, excuse our faults and explain them away, but in such ways as for is to understand how great was the spiritual battle over our own individual soul. That there were real demons that hated us and want to drag us down, and that we’re continually helped and assisted by, not only our guardian angel, but also by Saint Michael, and finally, by the intercessions of the savior and all the other saints.
So his other role was one who brought or conducted the souls of the departed safely to their, either temporary fate, or eternal fate. That is either to purgatory or to heaven. And so, he’s venerated that way in the traditional requiem liturgy of the [inaudible 00:12:01]. And then, of course, in a particular way, as I said, as a defender of the Church. And also, early on, as a bringer of healing. We think of Gabriel as being the angel of healing but Michael was much venerated at his shrines in the East for the obtaining of healings of the sick as well.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So in modern times, I don’t know how far back the prayer dates from, but it was given to us by one of the modern popes to pray the prayer of Saint Michael at the conclusion of Mass. So can you walk us through that? How do we end up with the prayer to Saint Michael and what are we doing when we’re praying that prayer?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, it was Pope Leo XIII, and as the story is told… Again, the exact documentation about this is not in the decrees. The decrees simply ordered that the prayer be recited, but then there’s stories as to how the prayer came about, that Pope Leo XIII had a vision regarding the state of the Church for the next 100 years or so and became aware of the idea that Satan and the fallen angels would be let loose in the coming century to fight against the Church.
And the vision, it involved something to do with Saint Michael and his hearing of the claim on the part of the Devil that he would be able to destroy the Church in so many number of years, and our Lord’s response. And so, he wrote the prayer to Saint Michael as coming out of that experience, whether the prayer was directly inspired in his mystical experience there of the struggle between our Lord and the Devil when he was celebrating Mass or whether he composed it himself, but he was very keen on establishing that prayer to prayed after every low Mass. That meant every ordinary weekday Mass in the Catholic world, the priest should pray that prayer. And so, that was the norm until 1964.
But now, you see that prayer coming back in various places. And in the Diocese of Orange, for example, the bishop himself has decreed that the prayer should be said after every mass by the priest and people together, even if it is a Sunday Mass, not just a weekday Mass. And so, we see it reappearing, and again, it’s a prayer of the Church in the conscious of the struggle with the powers of evil in the age in which we actually are living.
So, in that sense, Saint Michael’s role is apocalyptic, that is, it points our attention to the fact that the events predicted regarding the last things in the end of the world are being worked out in our own time, even as they were worked out in other times as well. But we’re very conscious of the fact that they’d certainly be worked out in our time. Whether or not it’s the actual end, all of the elements are there, the spirit of the Antichrist, the opposition to true worship. All those different difficulties.
But it was Leo XIII who did that, and it was removed in ’64, and then now it’s gradually coming back here and there. Saint John Paul II prayed it publicly when he visited the shrine of Saint Michael at Monte Galgano in Italy. No surprise that that’s the shrine nearest to Padre Pio’s shrine, and the one to which was most devoted. Great devotion of Saint Michael there, where, in the fifth century, Saint Michael miraculously consecrated this cave as a church under his title. There’s a whole story behind that. And it became a shrine ever after, and you can still go there and visit the place and venerate Saint Michael there.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so I guess I would like to get just an idea from you of what it means to defend us in battle. So Saint Michael the Archangel defend us battle, be our protector-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right. So let’s say you have a person who, as you said, because every human being is hated by demons. But let’s say this person is attempting to be a good and virtuous Christian person. And so, maybe, this person, because of their goodness, draws the particular attention of the demons.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Envy. Yeah.
Father Hugh Barbour helps us get ready for the Feast of St. Michael with a reflection on angels. Who are they? What do they do? And how, without having bodies, do they get anything done?
Cy Kellett:
What is the deal with angels? Father Hugh Barbour is next. Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host, and we’ve got the feast of Saint Michael coming up. Michael the Archangel.
Is he the highest angel? Is he close to the highest angel? Well, we’ll talk about that. But we want to talk with Father Hugh about what is an angel in order to get a sense of who is Michael and what, in a practical sense, does Michael do for us? Because he is our defender, and we’ll talk a bit about the Saint Michael prayer and all of that. But you can’t talk about angels, especially with Father Hugh, without getting your mind blown just a little bit. These are unbelievable, just beyond our ability to comprehend, creatures. Every single one of them, even the lowest angel. So prepare to get your mind blown as we ask Father Hugh Barbour about Saint Michael the Archangel.
Father, I’m going to give you a really tough question as we go on but I am previewing it for you now, which is, I want to know this. I don’t want you to answer this yet, but as we go along, teasing for the future, how does an angel experience reality if they can’t see, hear, taste, touch or smell? And that’s the only way we know it. Don’t tell me now. I’m going to get to that, because the feast of Saint Michael is coming up. So first, I want you to tell me about Saint Michael.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Happily. I’ll do so happily. Saint Michael is called Saint Michael the Archangel, is the sainted angel among the angels, which is the most venerated, or who is the most venerated, in the Catholic Church. That is, there are millions or maybe billions of angels. I mean, if there are billions of human beings, there are billions of angels. And so, consequently, he receives a special veneration which we don’t really understand the reason why, out of all of these angels in their various orders and hierarchies, why he would be the one that would be chosen for this particular role, just like we don’t know why our Lord picked Peter as opposed to some other follower to be the head of his church, or Saint Joseph to be his legal father on earth, or even the blessed mother. God looked on her lowliness.
So the choice of a person… And angels are persons. They’re persons who are bodiless. They don’t have a body but they exist as true spiritual beings. As Saint Thomas calls them, intellectual substances. They know and they love and they have that center of their being and power.
But he’s the one of whom we have the most indication in the sacred scriptures and in the church’s liturgy. And the other two are Gabriel, we’re acquainted with from the Gospel of Luke, especially. And, of course, Saint Raphael from the Book of Tobit. But considering the number of angels there are, we have very little personal information about the angels as individuals, so it’s an interesting case. Michael, we have the most because of the Book of Daniel and because of various traditions associated with Michael in the Old Testament. And, at least in the new, in the case of the Letter of Jude, there’s one mention there, too, as well.
But the role he plays is a very important one. He’s an archangel but he belongs, according to Saint Thomas, in any case, to the realm of the principalities. The three ranks, the three orders of angels, three hierarchies, and then within them, the different ranks that you have there. And so, we’re used to some of those expressions. Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels. So, they’re three groups of three. And the last three has to do with the care of the human race. And so, the tradition, I’m giving you Saint Thomas Aquinas. There are many other traditions about this because revelation is not explicit, and so there’s a lot of theological reflection about the angels but not that much that we know for absolute certain.
So, Saint Thomas puts him as the highest of the angels of that third group, that is Principalities, Archangels and Angels, who have the care of the human race, either as whole societies or families or regions, however it might be divided. But that’s the way that part of the angelic world is described. And so, he’s the leader of the heavenly host as regard to the protection, defense, and guidance of God’s people among the human race, in view of their eternal salvation. So, he’s viewed as especially as protector of Israel, and then later on, as the protector of the church, since the church is the new Israel.
And so, in a way, you might say he’s the patron of the Church in an external way, by way of defense against enemies, just like Saint Joseph was declared by Pope Pius IX to be the patron of the universal church, but in a more internal way in terms of a spiritual life and growth and holiness. And so, you have those two who give a father’s care to the human race in a particular aspect.
So Saint Michael is, therefore, an angel invoked and venerated because obviously, if God has given him this role, to lead the protection of the part of the angels and defense of the human race, then his role is extremely powerful and efficient. So much so that, when you look, you can tell sometimes about a theological reality based on the errors that come up regarding it. And if you consider the case of Saint Michael, what happens if there are any heresies about Saint Michael? Well, there are some professed by-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, because the son of God.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. Professed by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and by the Sunday Adventists, and by the Mormons, where they hold that Michael is just the preexistent Christ. And you can see the easy jump they would make because he’s the spiritual defender of the human race, therefore in a certain sense a kind of savior. So consequently, he would be identified with Christ before Christ appeared. Course, they hold that Christ is only a very, very, great spiritual being, the son of God meaning the highest of the angels. Now, that’s the word the scripture. The scripture calls angels sons of God, and of course, our Lord would be the first of them but because he really is the son of God, by nature, not simply by an analogy or attribution. So the angels are called sons of God, and so it’s not surprising that these errors would crop up, making Michael the Archangel a divinity, like God the son. Or like God the son.
Cy Kellett:
And so we know of him, or the revelation of him, is connected to his role. There’s a certain way, though, in which reflecting on Saint Michael and relating to Saint Michael, and even having a feast of Saint Michael, is because he’s the named leader. It’s almost… Let me make an analogy. Like if I’m loyal to the Queen, Queen Elizabeth, I’m loyal to the whole country, to all of Great Britain or to the whole Commonwealth, or whatever. So in a certain sense, is that Michael’s role too, to represent, by name, all those that are in part of that work in protecting us and keeping us?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Exactly, and very well put because the phrase which is associated with him is on his shield in much of the western Catholic iconography. It says, “Quis ut Deus?” Who is like God? Which is what his name in Hebrew means. Mi-Kai-El. So he is the angel who represents the angels who resisted the conspiracy of Lucifer and refused to abandon their obedience to God. And so, their motto and his name is, “Who is like God?” Like, who are we to follow, other than the one true God? And so, he exalts the supremacy of God and his power, and the importance of obedience to him, and fights against the rebellion of the fallen angels. And so there’s that special sense in which he is viewed, as the Eastern liturgies call him, the [foreign language 00:08:39], the supreme general or the supreme leader of the angelic host in their battle against Satan.
Now, in the Eastern church, that was taken to mean that he was absolutely the highest of all the angels whatsoever. And that was not taken over in the Western Church because we took the theology of Saint Dennis, who is an Eastern father, wherein the very highest angels don’t have earthly apparitions. They’re just pure contemplatives, the Seraphim, the Cherubim, they just simply surround the word of God and the blessed Trinity with their worship, and they don’t make appearances on earth. And if they do, it’s through other angels of a different or lower order.
And so for us, in the Latin tradition, Michael the highest of those angels who have to do with the care of the human race, and therefore defending us against those angels who fell, who then in their fall, then attempted by their envy to make us fall as well, and succeeded. So that’s our version. But nobody knows for sure. I mean, he may well be the very highest of all the angels. The [inaudible 00:09:43] at Lucifer may have been that one. Who knows? But these are things that are part of tradition, they’re parts of the drama that we’ll know the whole story when we actually know. But our Lord doesn’t want his revelation to concern the angels, principally because that gets us distracted and the natural interest would take away from the deeper mysteries of faith, which are revealed, namely the Trinity and the incarnation.
So, even among the Jews, there was a practice that were developing a praying to Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel in particular, and the rabbis forbade it because they were afraid that they would begin to worship them as gods. And of course, the incarnation hadn’t occurred yet, and the proper teaching of the church and the veneration of the angels and saints, but let’s just say, his veneration was so great in Israel that Daniel says, “Michael the Archangel helped me.” I mean, it’s quite evident the angels are deeply involved in the actions and the fates of men.
And so, Michael’s role is of a defender of the people of God, basically. Now that means, also, that in the tradition, that point at which need a special defense, that is the moment of death, our particular judgment when the demons will to try to accuse us and justify our loss, that he is there to defend us. That’s why he’s often shown with the scales because the Devil’s trying to make an argument against our salvation, and he and our guardian angel, and most of all, our Lord, who is our advocate with the father, excuse our faults and explain them away, but in such ways as for is to understand how great was the spiritual battle over our own individual soul. That there were real demons that hated us and want to drag us down, and that we’re continually helped and assisted by, not only our guardian angel, but also by Saint Michael, and finally, by the intercessions of the savior and all the other saints.
So his other role was one who brought or conducted the souls of the departed safely to their, either temporary fate, or eternal fate. That is either to purgatory or to heaven. And so, he’s venerated that way in the traditional requiem liturgy of the [inaudible 00:12:01]. And then, of course, in a particular way, as I said, as a defender of the Church. And also, early on, as a bringer of healing. We think of Gabriel as being the angel of healing but Michael was much venerated at his shrines in the East for the obtaining of healings of the sick as well.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So in modern times, I don’t know how far back the prayer dates from, but it was given to us by one of the modern popes to pray the prayer of Saint Michael at the conclusion of Mass. So can you walk us through that? How do we end up with the prayer to Saint Michael and what are we doing when we’re praying that prayer?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, it was Pope Leo XIII, and as the story is told… Again, the exact documentation about this is not in the decrees. The decrees simply ordered that the prayer be recited, but then there’s stories as to how the prayer came about, that Pope Leo XIII had a vision regarding the state of the Church for the next 100 years or so and became aware of the idea that Satan and the fallen angels would be let loose in the coming century to fight against the Church.
And the vision, it involved something to do with Saint Michael and his hearing of the claim on the part of the Devil that he would be able to destroy the Church in so many number of years, and our Lord’s response. And so, he wrote the prayer to Saint Michael as coming out of that experience, whether the prayer was directly inspired in his mystical experience there of the struggle between our Lord and the Devil when he was celebrating Mass or whether he composed it himself, but he was very keen on establishing that prayer to prayed after every low Mass. That meant every ordinary weekday Mass in the Catholic world, the priest should pray that prayer. And so, that was the norm until 1964.
But now, you see that prayer coming back in various places. And in the Diocese of Orange, for example, the bishop himself has decreed that the prayer should be said after every mass by the priest and people together, even if it is a Sunday Mass, not just a weekday Mass. And so, we see it reappearing, and again, it’s a prayer of the Church in the conscious of the struggle with the powers of evil in the age in which we actually are living.
So, in that sense, Saint Michael’s role is apocalyptic, that is, it points our attention to the fact that the events predicted regarding the last things in the end of the world are being worked out in our own time, even as they were worked out in other times as well. But we’re very conscious of the fact that they’d certainly be worked out in our time. Whether or not it’s the actual end, all of the elements are there, the spirit of the Antichrist, the opposition to true worship. All those different difficulties.
But it was Leo XIII who did that, and it was removed in ’64, and then now it’s gradually coming back here and there. Saint John Paul II prayed it publicly when he visited the shrine of Saint Michael at Monte Galgano in Italy. No surprise that that’s the shrine nearest to Padre Pio’s shrine, and the one to which was most devoted. Great devotion of Saint Michael there, where, in the fifth century, Saint Michael miraculously consecrated this cave as a church under his title. There’s a whole story behind that. And it became a shrine ever after, and you can still go there and visit the place and venerate Saint Michael there.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so I guess I would like to get just an idea from you of what it means to defend us in battle. So Saint Michael the Archangel defend us battle, be our protector-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right. So let’s say you have a person who, as you said, because every human being is hated by demons. But let’s say this person is attempting to be a good and virtuous Christian person. And so, maybe, this person, because of their goodness, draws the particular attention of the demons.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Envy. Yeah.