Father Pierre Doat, rector of France’s Mont Saint Michel sanctuary since September 2023, describes his role as one immersed in daily wonder and standing in sharp contrast to the secular Western world, where social disintegration and the culture of death reveal a profound disenchantment.

Since his arrival at this landmark of Christendom, which is actually a tidal island in Normandy, this young priest of the Community of St. Martin, a public clerical association of pontifical right, has witnessed firsthand the powerful evangelizing force of St. Michael the Archangel. Building on this rich experience, he recently wrote Le Roman des Anges, a novel that depicts an encounter between Arnaud, a young lawyer grappling with the meaning of life, and his guardian angel at the moment of his death.

Through the recounting of various chapters in the young protagonist’s life, the author distills the Church’s teachings on the celestial world and the role of angels throughout the human earthly pilgrimage, from conception to the passage to eternal life.

Father Doat believes this form of fictionalized narrative resonates well with Western audiences, who often view the angelic world with detachment, or fail to take it seriously.

Exalting the Thirst for Transcendence

“Because of the excesses of modern Western rationalism, which also led the Roman Catholic Church to neglect a whole part of the teaching of the faith., anything to do with the angelic can seem rather unserious, all the more so because it is difficult to convey the Catholic faith in a simple, down-to-earth way on this subject,” Father Doat told the Register.

While he has seen a growing interest in angelic figures among young people, Christian and non-Christian alike, he notes that this fascination is often grounded more in esotericism than in Catholic theology, highlighting the need for re-evangelization.

“This fascinating attraction is undoubtedly the result of the failure of materialism, which has become evident in recent years, as people had been led to believe that the invisible world did not matter anymore — that to be happy you just had to have a nice house and car. Now many people have realized the impasse of this worldview, and are becoming much more receptive to the question of angels, which easily opens the door to transcendence in their lives,” he continued.

This was further attested by the unexpected success of his teaching sessions on Christian angelology at the Mont Saint Michel sanctuary in recent years. The sessions have attracted crowds from all walks of life.

Alongside this field experience came the realization, as he tried to stock the sanctuary bookshop, that there was a lack of literature sufficiently accessible to the general public.

“There are often very intellectual books of theology, or devotional books that only appeal to people who are already convinced, so I had the idea of producing something a little different to spread the teachings about angels in a ‘painless’ manner, without people noticing,” said the young rector.

Vector of Re-enchantment

Drawing on his years as a missionary in Cuba in the 2010s, which developed his pastoral charism, Father Doat readily connects with visitors to the shrine and experiences little miracles on a daily basis, particularly through confessions.

He has often witnessed adult visitors being naturally drawn to the sacrament of reconciliation, even after decades away from confession. He particularly recalls a young man in his 30s who, having not confessed since his First Communion more than 20 years earlier, instinctively approached the confessional after seeing someone else enter. His initiative then inspired his young wife, followed by his parents, grandparents and in-laws, all of whom were rediscovering confession for the first time in decades.

“There’s a very strong link between St. Michael and mercy, which is reflected in all the stories of the archangel’s apparitions,” he said.

Reflecting on the widespread de-Christianization in the West, which he believes does little to foster heavenly apparitions, the rector noted that it is no coincidence that the most recent apparitions recognized by the Church — in particular that of the Virgin Mary with the Archangel Gabriel at Ile Bouchard in France in 1947 — were to children.

“Apparently, in the West, the only people who are still able to see angels are children, because they are not yet consumed by materialism and rationalism, and they still have an enchanted vision of the world.”

In his view, the gradual disappearance of angels from Western consciousness in recent centuries reflects a deepening disenchantment of the world — a trend accelerated by atheistic humanism.

This worldview has blinded human beings to the fact that, in the perfect natural order created by God, benevolent beings watch over them. His novel was designed to remind readers of this, by pointing out that friendship with angels “opens our hearts to the invisible,” making us grow in friendship with God and granting us a more celestial view of the world.

Drawing Inspiration From the East

This phenomenon, he points out, is far less prevalent in the East, where Christians have a cosmological vision of salvation that “preserves them from the lie of materialism.” He thus considers that unlike Westerners, who tend to have a rather individual vision of salvation, Eastern Catholics and Orthodox embrace a more communitarian and cosmological view.

“When your tradition is steeped in Byzantine hymns that speak of visible and invisible creation — of angels, trees, flowers and birds, and so on — you don’t lose sight of the fact that heaven is not for this earth,” he said, convinced that Western Christians would do well to draw more inspiration from their Eastern brethren, who also have a much more elaborate form of devotion to St. Michael.

The archangel’s consoling dimension, for example, is a little-known aspect in the West today, but remains central to popular Eastern devotion.

“St. Michael ‘psychopomp,’ ‘psychostasis,’ St. Michael the comforter ... We kind of left that aside and reduced the archangel to a kind of fighter — a body-built hunk in armor. Yet all these aspects were present in the Western tradition of the first millennium,” Father Doat continued.

In his view, reclaiming the richness of this ancestral devotion is all the more beneficial in that it fosters Christian unity, as even some Protestants are devoted to St. Michael the Archangel.

“We have a real common treasure here, which we must take care of,” he concluded, “and my mission as guardian of a thousand-year-old Christian jewel is precisely to enrich it wherever possible.”