The Night School with Jean Danielou, SJ

Feb 27, 2024    Rick Ganz

In Part I, we had a narrative introduction to the work and mission of Angels - of a particular Angel, Raphael, at work among human beings - in the biblical Book of Tobit. In Part II, we are taken into a broader, deeper description of the Angels and their mission by the learned Jesuit Fr. Jean Danielou, SJ in his book published in 1953 (and still in print) The Angels and Their Mission.


With an accessible style and motivated by spiritual zeal to communicate clearly and movingly, Fr. Danielou gets us to notice how widely present are the Angels in the Bible, and very significantly present in the life and work of Jesus. We are shown how seriously the greatest of the early Christian teachers (the "Fathers of the Church" as they are called) took Angels and wrote about them.


The Angels were there all along, but nearly all of us have overlooked them, thinking them a fanciful decoration (a symbol for something else, etc.), things not worthy of our attention.