The Ineptness of Guardian Angels

Until the last couple of years, I didn’t know an awful lot about the Catholic faith. Even though I had grown up in an area of Glasgow that had a Catholic secondary school (the British equivalent of high school), my experiences of Christianity were almost entirely Protestant in nature. And when I first came to America, it was the Protestant strain of Christianity that dominated the national media’s coverage of religion, except when it involved priests raping little boys, of course.

But then a new radio station hit the airwaves here in Austin, Texas. Relevant Radio came to town, and it turned out to be every bit as rabidly right-wing as the other Christian radio stations. But it was an interesting change from the usual religious fare on local radio, and I still tune in once in a while, when I am driving around town.

One thing that I quickly noticed is how steeped in superstition Catholic conservatives are. While fundamentalists can be just as credulous when it comes to things like demons, evil spirits, and witchcraft (hence the pogrom against poor old Harry Potter), they tend to stop short of integrating specific superstitions into their religious doctrine. Catholics, on the other hand, are quite comfortable doing it, with the cult they have built up surrounding Mary being the prime example, to the point of claiming that she was “immaculately conceived.”  There is no end to the number of apparitions, divine miracles and interventions attributed to her over the years.

Just the other day I was listening to a priest responding to a question about guardian angels, another superstition they have wrapped into official dogma of the Catholic church. A listener had asked whether it was just believers who had a guardian angel watching over them, or everybody. The priest obviously took this question very seriously, because he had taken the time to look up all kinds of Catholic texts to find the answer. And it was clear from the two or three examples he quoted that the correct answer, according to Catholic dogma anyway, was that only believers have guardian angels.

What’s amusing is that he didn’t accept that answer.  Even though the texts he found were quite categorical in their assertions that guardian angels only watch over believers, he seemed to sense that this would not go down too well with those Catholics who have loved ones who don’t share their faith. After all, what loving mother likes the idea of having a personal guardian angel watching over them if her rebellious teenage child is denied the same protection. So, 1000 years of Catholic teaching be damned, the priest’s final answer was that all people must have guardian angels watching over them.

So, it is true what they say about religion. If you don’t like the answer you get, you’re free to make up another one more to your liking.

He concluded the segment by telling the story of how a friend had once fallen 30ft off a ladder—a fall that should have killed him, supposedly, but he had only suffered a couple of broken bones and some bruising. Because he survived, he concluded that his guardian angel must have cushioned his fall (perhaps breaking a couple of wings in the process?) The only thought that went through my mind was the incompetence of the guardian angel. It would have been far easier to prevent his friend from slipping off the ladder in the first place—perhaps by placing a holy finger on his back to steady him, or by adjusting the position of his feet so they didn’t slip off the rung. If I was God, I would have fired that angel for gross negligence!

But that’s the problem with integrating this type of superstitious nonsense into religion. The more specific you get, the easier it is (or should be) for people to see how silly it all is. It’s one thing to attribute your miraculous survival to providence, or Providence, as in God’s will, (it wasn’t your time to die) but it’s quite another to imagine that there is some invisible friend and protector lurking around you at all times, and yet isn’t quite able to do his job properly when the time comes to take action.

Of course, the truth is that whether or not you survive a 30ft fall is down to dumb luck—how you fall and what you land on. You aren’t likely to survive a 30ft fall, but at least one in ten people do, so it is not unheard of, and there is certainly no need to attribute your survival to anything supernatural.