Angels and demons IN SPIRITUAL WARFARE
by FR ANTHONY PILLARI
This talk was given at the Voice of the Family conference Created for heaven: the mission of Catholic young adults in today’s world, which was held in Rome on 2 October 2019.
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e sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith.” (1 Pt. 5:8-9) St Paul declares to us: “Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (Eph. 6:11) But St Peter gave us the very first piece of the armour in this passage where he declares that your enemy is prowling like a roaring lion: “Resist him, firm in your faith”. The devil always wants to scare us and to stir up drama. He is terribly afraid of a soul firmly rooted in faith. Because he knows that the more we live by faith, the less power he has. The devil has no power whatsoever against the Lord and His plans. He knows that he can only harm us to the degree that we separate ourselves or draw back from Jesus Christ. St John says in one of his letters: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” (1 John 3:8) He declares that this was the whole purpose of our Saviour’s mission on earth: to destroy the work of the devil. You see that all throughout His public ministry, our Lord performed exorcisms in different ways. And on the positive side, you see the presence of the holy angels throughout Scripture and in particular in the New Testament. Our Lord speaks of them, you see them in the Acts of the Apostles, for example, when an angel freed St Peter from prison. And each one of you, whether you know it or not, have two angels with you. Each one of you has a guardian angel who God has assigned to you to protect you and guide along the path to Heaven. But according to the Fathers of the Church, there is some-
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one else who has assigned you a personal angel.1 Each one of you has been assigned a personal devil to tempt you throughout your life. In this talk, I will try to give you some idea of who angels are, of who devils are, and some understanding of their activity. It is a vast topic. But I am going to try to present you with some of the key points according to the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, who is known as the Angelic Doctor because of his great development of the theology of the angels, in which he also presents to us the teaching of the Fathers of the Church. And I will be making use of a recent book by Fr Serge-Thomas Bonino, a good Dominican who teaches at the Angelicum in Rome. He is perhaps one of the foremost experts in the world today on the thought of St Thomas Aquinas on angels and demons, and his book would be a good follow up on this topic.2 CREATION OF THE ANGELS How were the angels created? Did God create “first angelic parents” who then had offspring among angels? No. In the New Testament, the Lord tells us that at the resurrection we will be “like the angels in Heaven”, who “neither marry nor are given in marriage”. (Mt. 22:30) God created every single angel directly. How many angels did God create? In the instant of their creation, God made enough angels to provide a guardian angel for everyone who would ever live. That is already a vast multitude. But He did not create only guardian angels. He created many angels for other tasks, chief among them being adoring and praising Him in Heaven. In fact, since this latter purpose was CAL X M A R IA E
