The 12 Most Important Things To Know About Angels

As tomorrow is the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, archangels, here is an excerpt from Angels (and Demons): What Do We Really About Them? (Ignatius Press; 2004, sixth printing) by Peter Kreeft:

The Twelve Most Important Things to Know About Them

1. They really exist. Not just in our minds, or our myths, or our symbols, or our culture. They are as real as your dog, or your sister, or electricity.

2. They’re present, right here, right now, right next to you, reading these words with you.

3. They’re not cute, cuddly, comfortable, chummy, or “cool”. They are fearsome and formidable. They are huge. They are warriors.

4. They are the real “extra-terrestrials”, the real “Super-men”, the ultimate aliens. Their powers are far beyond those of all fictional creatures.

5. They are more brilliant minds than Einstein.

6. They can literally move the heavens and the earth if God permits them.

7. There are also evil angels, fallen angels, demons, or devils. These too are not myths. Demon possessions, and exorcisms, are real.

8. Angels are aware of you, even though you can’t usually see or hear them. But you can communicate with them. You can talk to them without even speaking.

9. You really do have your very own “guardian angel”. Everybody does.

10. Angels often come disguised. “Do not neglect hospitality, for some have entertained angels unawares”—that’s a warning from life’s oldest and best instruction manual.

11. We are on a protected part of a great battlefield between angels and devils, extending to eternity.

12. Angels are sentinels standing at the crossroads where life meets death. They work especially at moments of crisis, at the brink of disaster—for bodies, for souls, and for nations.

Why do people think it's stupid to believe in angels?

One reason is a mistake about themselves: the failure to distinguish between (1) sense perception or imagination (which is a kind of inner sensing) and (2) reason, or intelligence, or understanding. We don't see pure spirits, and we can't imagine them. That doesn't mean we can't know or understand them. We can see and imagine the difference between a five-sided figure (a pentagon) and a six-sided figure (a hexagon), and we can also intellectually understand that difference. We cannot, however, sense or imagine the difference between a 105-sided figure and a 106-sided figure. Both look to us simply like circles. But we can understand the difference and even measure it exactly. So we can understand some things we can't see. We can't see qualities like good and evil either. What color or shape or size is evil? Yet we can understand them. We can imagine our brains, but not our minds, our personalities. But we can know them.

Many who deny angels deny or are uaware of the spiritual half of themselves. Angels are a touchstone of "know thyself". So are animals.

Aren't angels irrelevant today? This is the age of man, isn't it?

Yes, this is the age of man, of self-consciousness, of psychology. And therefore it is crucial to "know thyself" accurately today. The major heresies of our day are not about God but about man.

The two most destructive of these heresies—and the two most popular—are angelism, confusing man with an angel by denying his likeness to animals, and animalism, confusing man with an animal by denying his likeness to angels.

Man is the only being that is both angel and animal, both spirit and body. He is the lowest spirit and the highest body, the stupidest angel and the smartest animal, the low point of the hierarchy of minds and the high point of the hierarchy of bodies.

More accurately stated, man is not both angel and animal because he is neither angel nor animal; he is between angels and animals, a unique rung on the cosmic ladder.

But whichever way you say it, man must know angels to know himself, just as he must know animals to know himself, for he must know what he is, and he must know what he is not.

A free 80-minute lecture,"Aquinas and the Angels," by Peter Kreeft can be accessed here: http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/10_aquinas-angels.htm

Bono and the Pope: an encore?

The celebrated rocker knows his way around the Vatican, and he's no stranger to papal audiences (see the photo)

And a report indicates may meet with John Paul's successor later this year:
Bono has been invited to meet with Pope Benedict XVI, along with more than 500 other artists and performers. This group will include members of the theater, art, literature and music communities and they will meet with the Pope at the Sistine Chapel on November 21.

The meeting is part of a concerted effort by the Roman Catholic Church to reestablish the relationship between the Church and art.

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said in a news conference at the Vatican that the meeting is intended to build on the "special historical relationship between faith and art."

According to the bostonpilot.com, along with the U2 frontman, other artists planning on attending include Italian film score composer Ennio Morricone, avant-garde theater director Bob Wilson, and architect Daniel Libeskind.

For Father Steve......

Priest Wins Against Iron Chef....

The Stuff Priests Are Made of...........

June 4, 1962. Navy chaplain Luis Padillo was walking around giving last rites to dying soldiers as sniper fire surrounded him. A wounded soldier pulled himself up by linging to the priest’s cassock, as bullets chewed up the concrete around them. Hector Rondón Lovera, who had to lie flat to avoid getting shot, later said that he was unsure how he managed to take this picture. [See all pictures he took that day]. Norman Rockwell eeriely used this photograph as a template for his Southern Justice painting, “Murder in Mississippi“.

It was taken in Puerto Cabello Naval Base, Venezuela, the city of 80,000 beside the nation’s largest naval base 75 miles west of the capital Caracas . In June 1962, Puerto Cabello was the scene of one of the bitterest fighting in modern Venezuelan history, now known as the Porteñazo.. The bloody struggle between government forces and guerrilla rebels in the naval base who had the support of the residents of Puerto Cabello. Official casualty figures for the military were 47 dead, 89 wounded. But unofficial estimates put the toll, including civilians, at more than 300.

I am struck by the sense of absolute calm in that image of the priest. There is something grounded there, and unflappable, and even daring.

This makes one think of the “Grunt Padre”, aka, Fr. Vincent Capodanno, who was killed in Vietnam:

Father Capodanno went among the wounded and dying, giving last rites and taking care of his beloved Marines. Always watching out for them, as they watched out for him. Wounded in the face and suffering a severe shrapnel wound that nearly severed his hand, during the epic battle of Dong Son in September 1967, Father Vince moved to help a wounded Marine only yards from an enemy machine gun. Father Capodanno died from a machine gun blast taking care of this young Marine. When his body was recovered, he had 27 bullet wounds.

Capadanno

A priest with weary eyes. Fr. Capodanno reminds many of Army Chaplain Fr. Tim Vakoc, who recently died of injuries sustained in Iraq.

Fr. Vakoc stirs ones synapses to recall St. Maximilian Kolbe, the brilliant Franciscan priest who died at Auschwitz, after volunteering to take the place of a man with a family:

In July 1941 a man from Kolbe’s barracks vanished, prompting SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men from the same barracks to be starved to death in Block 13 (notorious for torture), in order to deter further escape attempts. (The man who had disappeared was later found drowned in the camp latrine.) One of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, lamenting his family, and Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

During the time in the cell he led the men in songs and prayer. After three weeks of dehydration and starvation, only Kolbe and three others were still alive. Finally he was murdered with an injection of carbolic acid.

Kolbe’s murder puts in the mind of Bishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated at the altar in the midst of political upheaval.

Speaking of Romero, let's look at Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin Mei, who spent thirty years behind bars, in China, much of it in solitary confinement.

Cardinal Ignatius Kung Mim Mei, in exile.

Cardinal Kung, of course, reminds us of the pope who lived under the jackboots of both nazism and communism and who understood that the answer to flawed, imperfect capitalism or unjust societies was not the crushing of human liberty:

John Paul, naturally, reminds us of this gentle shepherd, the last great man of the 20th century to stride into the 21st with strong effect:

Where do we get such men? Their parents raise them, but as Archbishop Timothy Dolan -himself a man of clear, unambiguous, joyful and powerful faith- tells us, their priesthoods, their willingness to put themselves out there and at risk for the gospel, and for ministry, is a pure gift from God…

The following H/T from The Anchoress:

I especially love the words of Archbishop Timothy Dolan, “This is a pure gift from God, and not an earned trophy. . .His grace lifts up our nature.”

A simple-sounding yet profound mystery. And what he says about the priestly vocation is true for all of our vocations, including the vocation of marriage, the vocation of the single life, even the vocation of the “necessary other,” called to live in an altogether different way than most, with a great deal of sacrificial suffering that -one trusts- may lead to gladness. Our lives are not accidents; we are all of us born for a specific purpose, we are called to particular lives, any and all of which, to be honest, involve service to others before ourselves. We are born who we are. His grace lifts up our nature, and makes living out the lives we are called to live both possible and fruitful, if we let him. If we trust.

Trust is huge. We all think we do it; that we “trust” God. In truth “trust” is difficult and unnatural and something we need to work on, ponder, surrender to, every single day – sometimes every five minutes.

Dolan says, “you will have the very Character of Christ, the High Priest, the Good Shepherd, branded on your heart, as your very identity” and we Catholics understand this to be peculiarly so for our priests. But truly, if we accept our individual callings to live out the vocation unique to each of us – whether that be as a spouse or parent, as a consecrated person or a layperson whose life might even seem to be kissed from the cross with loneliness – and live them out in trust, in faith, and hope and gratitude – but mostly in challenging, difficult, absolute trust, then we will be the people we were meant to be.

And as Catherine of Siena told us, “if you are who you are meant to be, you will set the world on fire.”

This was actually the message of the Second Vatican Council, but it got rather lost in the translation -instead of people understanding just how serious is the call to vocation for each of us, it got mistaught “in the spirit of Vatican II” until it was understood that the priesthood and the consecrated life were “nothing special, no better than being a layperson, or married or anything else.” In fact, what we were supposed to learn was that marriage and the single life were every bit as much pure gift, pure vocation, pure calling, as the priesthood and religious life. Somehow, instead of all being lifted up, together, in the powerful notion of call-and-response, adventure, gift and destiny, the message got garbled until there was instead, diminishment, in everything.

May God, who has begun this good work in all of us, now bring it to fulfillment. And may be pray for each other, and for all of our priests, as we journey.