Sts. Michael Gabriel and Raphael

On September 29 the Church honors the three Archangels named in Scripture: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. The day, traditionally called Michaelmas in the West, was from early medieval times the feast of St. Michael alone — the apparition of the Archangel on Monte Gargano in Italy, around 490, gave the Latin Church its great Michael shrine, and the September 29 feast commemorated that apparition. Paul VI joined Gabriel and Raphael to the day in the 1969 calendar reform, so that all three named Archangels are now honored together.

Michael — "Who is like God?" — is the warrior of God, captain of the heavenly hosts, the angel who in Revelation 12 casts Satan out of heaven. The earliest Christian shrines in his honour were built by Constantine on the Bosphorus in the early fourth century, and the cult spread rapidly. The apparition on Monte Gargano, where the Archangel is said to have consecrated a cave-shrine himself, made Monte Sant'Angelo in Apulia the oldest Michael shrine in Western Europe — a UNESCO World Heritage Site, visited by pilgrims from at least the sixth century, among them Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, and Bridget of Sweden. From there the cult spread to France: in 708 the Archangel appeared to Bishop Aubert of Avranches on a tidal islet off the Normandy coast and instructed him to build a church. That islet became Mont-Saint-Michel, the great Norman abbey that has drawn pilgrims for thirteen centuries and is still one of the most visited Christian sites in France.

Gabriel — "God is my strength" — is the messenger, the angel of the Annunciation who came to Mary at Nazareth, the same angel who had come to Daniel and to Zechariah. His shrine-places are therefore the shrine-places of the Annunciation: the Basilica of the Annunciation at Nazareth and, in the West, the Holy House of Loreto, where tradition holds Gabriel appeared to Mary inside the dwelling that the angels carried to Italy.

Raphael — "God heals" — is the angel of the Book of Tobit, who travels with Tobias and heals his father Tobit's blindness, and who at the book's end reveals his own name: "I am Raphael, one of the seven who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord" (Tobit 12:15). His cult is smaller but ancient; his feast, kept on October 24 before 1969, is now joined with Michael and Gabriel on September 29.

The Archangels' feast has been the patronal feast of innumerable churches and institutions since the Middle Ages. Rome keeps it at Castel Sant'Angelo — the papal fortress on the Tiber whose name recalls the Archangel's appearance to Pope Gregory the Great in 590, when Michael sheathed his sword over the mausoleum of Hadrian as a sign that the plague had ended. The great bronze statue of the Archangel on the fortress roof, modelled in 1753 by Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, still stands with the sword in hand, watching the city that once took the sign from him.