Compassion is one of the greatest of all the virtues
associated with angels. Compassion is what moves us with pity for
the sufferings of another. It is easy to feel compassion
for a starving child or an injured puppy, but it requires angelic
understanding to realize that the most horrible people are the ones
most lacking in love.
The Angel Rahmiel is one of two angels of compassion, along
with the Archangel Raphael, and he is closely associated with that most
compassionate and humble of saints, St. Francis of Assisi. St.
Francis was an aristocratic young medieval playboy, who one day
encountered a leper while riding in the countryside. He was
stricken with such overwhelming compassion that he thenceforth gave up
everything to heal the sick and minister to the needy. He
empathized so completely with the suffering of Jesus that he
famously received the Stigmata - bleeding at the points where Christ's
body was pierced. Upon his death he is said to have become an
angel himself and to have been renamed Rahmiel.
As a member of the Choir of Virtues, Rahmiel may have been one of
the two Angels of Ascention that escorted Christ to Heaven.
If we wish to stop harming ourselves and our fellow mortals by
judging and condemning those poor souls that are lost in vice, we can
pray to the Angel Rahmiel to fill us with the sweetness of his
infinite compassion, that we may empathize with the plight of all
beings that are separated from love.
