Angels-ANGELOLATRY

“Angelolatry” is the veneration or worship of angels. Historically,
because in the great missionary faiths of Islam and Christianity, there
has been a tendency for the older polytheistic deities to reemerge as
angels, angelolatry has often been rejected as a form of idolatry.
Throughout the ages this has led to great debate.
Within traditional Christianity, the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325
declared belief in angels a part of dogma, which apparently caused an
explosive renewal of angel veneration. As a consequence, in 343 the
Synod of Laodicaea condemned the worship of angels as idolatry.
Later, in 787, the Seventh Ecumenical Synod reinstated a carefully
defined and limited cult of the archangels.The earliest devotions, both in the East and the West, centered
primarily on the archangel Michael, with liturgical feasts and prayers
to Michael mentioned as early as the fourth century. Belief in the
angelic cult of faith grew throughout the following centuries, and
claimed among its proponents theologians including St. Bernard of
Clairvaux (d. 1153), Pierre Caton (d. 1626), Johannes Tauler, and
Ludolph of Saxony. Associations and confraternities were formed to
honor angels and angelic devotion blossomed.
By the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, angelic devotion
took several forms: associations and societies such as the Archconfraternity
of St. Michael Archangel (erected in 1878 by Leo XIII),
and the Philangeli “Friends of Angels,” founded in England in 1950 by
Mary Angela Jeeves; patronages; publications, such as L’Ange gardien,
put out by the Clerics of St. Viator, France; liturgical and nonliturgical
rites or practices (e.g., masses that honor specific archangels); and
prayers, invocations, and novenas (namely the Litany of All Saints,
the prayer in the Communion of the Sick, and the blessing of homes).