On Teresa Tomeo’s show the other day, a woman called in and said that there is a Vatican document stating that we are NOT to name our guardian angels. Do you know why? And which document she was referring to?
Popular devotion to the holy angels, which is legitimate and good, can, however, also give rise to possible deviations … [such as the] practice of assigning names to the holy angels [which] should be discouraged, except in the cases of Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael whose names are contained in Holy Scripture (Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy 217).
We can only speculate, but perhaps the practice is discouraged because guardian angels are not our children or our pets. They are creatures of God, with their own personal dignity and vastly superior to humans by nature and intellect. They guard us because it is the will of God that they do so, but we should not presume to know the name given them by God and should not presume to demand a name of them through prayer. If such a name is revealed without our seeking it, that would be a private revelation that should be vetted for supernatural origin by one’s confessor or spiritual director before belief is granted. For purposes of praying to a guardian angel, it would suffice to refer to the angel as “Guardian.”
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