A reader writes…

I saw a comment on a Facebook feed that puzzled me. Someone has 10,000 guardian angels and he prays to them daily.

I’m a bit puzzled by this, because I thought each person had only ONE special angel assigned to them to guard them throughout their life. I’ve prayed to Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, the warrior angels, and my guardian angel, but I always thought I had only one guardian angel. I’m perplexed.

I think this is one of those things where you have to remember the all-important AWAK (Anybody With a Keyboard) Rule of the Internet. The proper response to all such claims is that Anybody with a Keyboard can say anything they like on the internet and you have no obligation whatever to believe them since they could be anything from a psychotic to a cat accidently walking across somebody’s open laptop. If some complete stranger claims to have 10,000 guardian angels, he’s entitled to his opinion. As to the number of guardian angels a person has, as far as I know the Church has no definitive teachings on this, though the Catechism does speak of “an” angel protecting each person. I don’t really see the point of more than one, but that’s just me. The Church’s angelology is fairly fuzzy, teaching the reality of angels and a bit about their mission and encouraging us to cultivate a relationship with them through prayer. But beyond that, there’s not a lot of doctrinal detail (though there has been a lot of speculation. My recommendation: read up on what the Catechism has to say about angels and don’t sweat what some guy with a keyboard says.