A Novena to the Guardian Angels

The whole doctrine rests on one sentence of Christ, at Matthew 18:10: see that you despise not one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven. It is said in defence of children, and it is the only place in the Gospels where the angels are spoken of as belonging to particular people.

In Acts 12, Peter is let out of prison and knocks at the door of the house where the Church is praying for him. The servant Rhoda recognises his voice and is so glad she forgets to open the door, and when she insists that Peter is outside, the people inside tell her she is out of her mind and then say: it is his angel. The point of the story is that the belief was ordinary enough to be the first thing they reached for.

Psalm 91, which the older numbering calls Psalm 90, says that he has given his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. It is one of the psalms of Compline, so a great many people have said it last thing at night for a very long time; it is also, in Matthew 4, the verse the devil quotes at Christ in the wilderness.

Jerome, commenting on that verse of Matthew in the late fourth century, drew from it a conclusion about worth rather than about angels: how great the dignity of the soul, since each one has from his birth an angel commissioned to guard it. The argument runs from the guard to the value of the thing guarded.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 336, quotes Basil the Great: beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life. Basil wrote it in the fourth century, in his treatise against Eunomius, and the Catechism sets it under the plain statement that human life from its beginning until death is surrounded by their watchful care.

The Church has never defined the guardian angels as a dogma. The old Catholic Encyclopedia says as much and calls the belief the mind of the Church rather than an article of faith, and notes that while Basil and others held the guard was given only to the baptised, most theologians have held it is given to every person alive.

Aquinas takes the question up in the Summa Theologiae, first part, question 113. His answer is deflating in a useful way: the guardians are drawn from the lowest of the angelic ranks, and an angel can work on the senses and the imagination but cannot reach the will directly. It can propose. It cannot compel, and it cannot make the decision for you.

The four lines most Catholics learn before they can read were ascribed for centuries to St. Anselm of Canterbury. Scholarship now credits them instead to Reginald of Canterbury, a Benedictine of the same city and much the same time, whose Life of St. Malchus contains a long prayer to the angels closely resembling the one that survives.

The feast is younger than the devotion. Cordova asked leave to keep it in 1579, Paul V authorised a feast and proper office in 1608, and Clement X made it obligatory for the whole Church, fixing it on 2 October for a reason with no mystery in it at all: it was the first day left free after Michaelmas on 29 September. Leo XIII raised its rank on 5 April 1883.