Why Catholics Need to Talk About Angels Again

By Fr. Francesco Giordano ( articles - email ) | Oct 23, 2026

Last summer, while teaching eschatology to seminarians in Kuching, Malaysia, I found myself spending considerably more time on angels than I had anticipated. The subject arose naturally enough. One cannot speak for long about heaven, judgment, resurrection, or the destiny of the human person without eventually encountering the invisible world. Yet what struck me was not that seminarians believed in angels. It was the persistence and specificity of their questions. Where is an angel? Does an angel experience time? Can he move from one place to another? Can a demon read our thoughts? Can Satan force someone to sin? How can a spiritual creature act upon matter?

Their questions sent me back to St. Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the angels in the Summa Theologiae, but they also made me think about our present culture. We often describe modernity as “disenchanted,” yet human beings seem remarkably unwilling to inhabit a universe composed only of what can be measured. Interest in spiritual beings has not disappeared; it has migrated. Angels and demons have been joined by ghosts, occult forces, cosmic energies, alternate dimensions, and assorted forms of supernatural speculation. Films and popular fiction return incessantly to the invisible world, while people who would never accept traditional Christian doctrine can prove surprisingly receptive to talk about cosmic energies or unseen presences.

Catholics should notice this. If we stop speaking intelligently about spiritual beings, people will not stop wondering about them. Someone else will answer the questions. The Catholic tradition offers something more intellectually satisfying than either materialist dismissal or spiritualist vagueness. St. Augustine begins with a useful distinction: “angel” names an office rather than a nature. By nature the angel is a spirit; he is called an angel because he is a messenger. This immediately frees us from the popular image of an angel as essentially a human being with wings. Christian art must render invisible realities through visible forms, but the angel himself is not a subtler variety of physical organism.

Aquinas takes the distinction further. Because angels have no bodily dimensions, they do not occupy space as bodies do. An angel is present in a place through the application of his power. The angel is present where he acts. This also explains how an angel moves. Unlike a bodily creature, an angel does not need to traverse space by physically moving from one point to another. Rather, through an act of will, he applies his power to a different place. Aquinas explains that such movement can be continuous, passing through intervening places, or noncontinuous, without traversing the space between them (ST I, q. 53, aa. 1–2). The angel's movement is thus governed by his will rather than by the physical conditions that determine bodily locomotion. Yet this does not make him omnipresent or place him outside every kind of succession. He remains a finite creature, capable of being present here and then there, but never everywhere at once.

The same is true of time. God alone is eternal in the proper sense. Following Boethius, Thomas describes eternity as the perfect possession, tota simul—“all at once”—of unending life (ST I, q. 10, a. 1). Eternity is therefore not simply an endless succession of moments. Human beings, by contrast, live through change: we grow, age, remember, forget, deliberate, and learn. Angels again belong fully to neither category. Their spiritual substance does not age or decay, yet succession can occur in their acts. Thomas therefore says that their natural existence is measured by the aevum or aeviternity (ST I, q. 10, a. 5). Their being possesses a stability unlike ours, while their activity can nevertheless have a before and an after.

All of this may sound remote from ordinary Christian life, but it is not. Angelology forces us to confront a question modern culture often avoids: Is matter the whole of reality? Christianity answers no. But Christianity also refuses the opposite mistake of making “spiritual” a synonym for irrational, amorphous, or magical. Angels are not energies, deceased human beings, or lesser gods. They are created intelligences and wills. They are real, but they are finite.

That last point may be the most important one to recover. People who become fascinated by demons frequently attribute to them powers Christianity has never granted them. Satan slowly becomes a kind of anti-God: nearly omniscient, seemingly omnipresent, capable of manipulating every thought and perhaps even forcing human beings to sin. None of this is Catholic. A demon is a fallen angel. His natural intelligence and powers may far exceed ours, but he remains a creature. He cannot create. He is not everywhere. He does not know everything. He cannot know the human heart as God does, and he cannot compel the human will.

Aquinas is especially valuable here because the more seriously he takes demonic activity, the more carefully he defines its limits. Angels can influence the imagination and passions. A demon can suggest, provoke, exploit habits, and present apparent goods in distorted ways. But Thomas insists that the will remains free to consent or resist (ST I, q. 111, a. 2), and when he asks whether the devil can cause a person to sin of necessity, his answer is unequivocal: the devil “can nowise compel man to sin” (ST I-II, q. 80, a. 3).

This also explains why temptation usually works through something that appears good. Evil rarely announces itself simply as evil. Pleasure is good, but detached from love it becomes destructive. Freedom is good, but detached from truth it eventually turns against the person exercising it. Justice is good, but separated from mercy it can become vindictiveness. Zeal is good, but severed from charity it can become cruelty. The demonic strategy is often one of fragmentation: realities meant to belong together are pulled apart. Imagination is set against reason, passion against prudence, freedom against truth, and the individual against communion.

This may be one reason the theology of angels is more culturally relevant than it initially appears. We inhabit a civilization that has become remarkably proficient at separating what ought to remain united: rights from duties, freedom from truth, desire from nature, technology from moral ends, individuality from community. This does not mean that every cultural disorder should be attributed directly to demonic influence. The Catholic tradition wisely speaks of the world, the flesh, and the devil rather than reducing everything to the last of the three. But its account of temptation helps us recognize a recurring spiritual logic in which partial goods become destructive when removed from the order of the whole.

The ministry of the good angels moves in the opposite direction. They act within Providence. They do not abolish freedom but assist it toward the good. They do not replace conscience, prudence, or sacramental grace. Their ministry points away from fascination with themselves and toward God. A spirituality obsessed with secret knowledge, extraordinary experiences, or spiritual superiority is therefore already moving away from the proper character of angelic ministry. The angel serves. He points beyond himself.

Perhaps this is why the questions from my seminarians in Kuching stayed with me. They thought they were asking about angels, but they were really asking about the structure of reality. Is the visible everything? Can spirit act upon matter? How powerful is evil? What remains of human freedom in the midst of temptation? And where is God in relation to all of it?

These are not childish questions, and the Church should not be embarrassed by them. October, when we celebrate the Holy Guardian Angels, is a good moment to recover them. If Catholics cease speaking about angels, people will not cease thinking about spiritual beings; they will simply learn to think about them elsewhere, often with far less intellectual discipline than the Christian tradition provides.

The angels are real, and so are the demons, but neither angels nor demons are gods. They are creatures. However great their intelligence or power may appear beside our own, they too exist within an order they did not create and cannot escape. Every angelic ministry, every demonic temptation, and every human act therefore takes place within a creation whose first and final word belongs not to any creature, visible or invisible, but to God.