Devotion to the Nine Choirs of Holy Angels: 12 Reasons for Veneration

Review

SECTION ONE Most Catholics can name Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael — and stop there. This small TAN Books volume pushes past that familiar triad and asks the reader to consider all nine choirs: angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim. The book's organizing premise is that devotion to the angelic hierarchy is not a medieval curiosity but a rationally grounded spiritual practice, and it mounts 12 distinct reasons why veneration of these nine orders belongs in a Christian life. The intended audience is any Catholic who has said the prayer to Saint Michael but never thought much about what that prayer implies about the order of creation. It belongs in a parish bookstore alongside other TAN devotional titles: compact, catechetical, and aimed at turning knowledge into prayer. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The nine-choir structure assumes a cosmos that is ordered, hierarchical, and inhabited by rational persons whose existence is not decorative but functional. Each choir reflects a distinct facet of God's goodness communicated downward through creation — a specifically Catholic affirmation that the invisible order is as real and as good as the visible one. The book thus stands on the same anthropological ground as the Catechism's insistence that angels are 'not merely symbolic' but genuine creatures of intellect and will. - **Fallen**: The implied contrast throughout a work on angelic veneration is the fall of a portion of the angelic host — the existence of the nine choirs is rendered more striking by the fact that some angels refused their place in the order. For human readers shaped by concupiscence and prone to disorder, the angels model the perseverance that the fallen will never naturally achieve on their own; their fidelity is a provocation, not merely an inspiration. - **Redeemed**: The book's 12 reasons for veneration are, structurally, an invitation to align human devotion with the heavenly liturgy already in progress. To venerate the nine choirs is to rehearse the posture of adoration that is the telos of redeemed human nature — to practice now, in forma, what the tradition describes as the beatific participation that awaits. - **Justice (adoration and worship)**: The specific virtue trained here is religion as a part of justice: giving to God and to the sacred what is properly owed. The enumeration of 12 reasons shapes the will by giving the intellect distinct grounds for an act of devotion, which is how virtue formation actually works — not by feeling but by ordered practice. - **Prudence (understanding)**: A reader who works through the distinctions among the nine choirs acquires a framework for understanding the structure of creation, which in turn informs how they pray, how they ask for intercession, and how they situate their own spiritual life within a larger order. SECTION THREE Aquinas[^1] in the Prima Pars argues that the superior angels communicate divine perfection to those below them, and that this transmission never collapses the distinction of ranks — 'the superior ever remain in a higher order, and have a more perfect knowledge'[^1] — which is precisely the theological scaffolding that a book on the nine choirs requires to be coherent rather than merely pious. Royo Marin[^2], in his eschatological preaching collected in El misterio del mas alla, makes the same point in pastoral register: each angel constitutes its own species, so that the nine choirs present the contemplative with an 'infinita variedad' of distinct participations in divine beauty[^2] — a datum drawn from Scripture and Aquinas alike. This book, read alongside those two sources, moves from devotion to theology to eschatology in a single arc. ## References 1. Aquinas, Thomas (13th c.). *Summa Theologiae I*. qq. 50-64, introduced by Armando Bandera Gonzalez, O.P. — 'the superior ever remain in a higher order, and have a more perfect knowledge' 2. Royo Marin, Antonio (n.d.). *El misterio del mas alla*. p. 47. — 'cada uno de ellos constituye una especie distinta dentro del mundo angelico'

✓ Strengths

• ✓Frames devotion to angels not as pious sentiment but as a reasoned obligation rooted in the hierarchical order of creation, giving readers theological grounds for a practice they may have treated as optional.
• ✓The nine-choir structure draws on Scripture and Tradition, giving the reader a map of angelic reality that is neither speculative nor sentimental — each choir named and distinguished by its proper function before God.
• ✓By enumerating 12 reasons for veneration, the book trains the virtue of religion (justice-worship) in a concrete, catechetical way: the reader comes away knowing not merely that angels are worthy of honor but why.
• ✓The TAN Books imprint situates this title within a tradition of practical devotional manuals that assume the reader can grow in holiness through ordered, specific acts of piety rather than vague spiritual feeling.
• ✓Angelology as presented here implicitly affirms the unity of the visible and invisible orders — the cosmos is populated by rational persons whose activity touches human salvation, which is a properly Catholic anthropological claim.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠Devotional manuals in this genre can present angelic intercession in ways that blur the distinction between the latria owed to God and the dulia appropriate to angels and saints; the book's fidelity on this point cannot be confirmed from available data.