Who Is St. Raphael the Archangel, the Patron Saint of Travelers?
The patron of travelers spent the entire journey pretending to be an ordinary traveling companion.
There is no patron saint of vacation. There could hardly be one: paid time off and travel for pleasure are modern inventions, and the Church’s lists of patrons were largely settled centuries before anyone thought to take a week at the beach.
There is, however, a patron saint of travelers, and the oldest of them is not a saint in the way most saints are. He is an archangel, he is named exactly once in Scripture, and in that one appearance he spends an entire journey disguised as an ordinary young man looking for work as a guide.
Named once, in a book not everyone has
Three angels are named in the Bible: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Michael and Gabriel turn up in books everybody’s Bible contains. Raphael appears in the Book of Tobit.
Worth being clear about this straight away, because it matters to a lot of readers. Tobit is part of the Catholic and Orthodox canons of Scripture. It is not in Protestant Bibles or in the Hebrew canon, where it sits among the books usually called apocryphal or deuterocanonical. So whether you have ever met Raphael depends a good deal on which Bible you grew up with.
His name is the key to everything he is invoked for. Rapha-El, in Hebrew, means “God heals.”
The journey
The story is one of the warmest in the Old Testament, and it is genuinely a road story.
Tobit is a devout Israelite living in exile in Nineveh who has gone blind. Needing to recover money he once left with a relative far away in Media, he sends his son Tobias to fetch it. Tobias has never made such a trip and needs a guide, so he goes looking for one. A young man presents himself, says his name is Azariah, and says he knows the road. Tobit hires him. The two set out, and the family dog goes with them, which is the sort of detail that tells you this was written by someone who had watched people leave on journeys.
Along the way things happen. At the river Tigris a great fish lunges at Tobias, and his companion tells him to seize it and keep its gall, heart, and liver. It seems an odd instruction at the time.
At Ecbatana they come to the house of Sarah, a kinswoman of Tobias, who is in a desperate situation: she has been married seven times, and each husband has died on the wedding night, killed by a demon. Azariah tells Tobias to marry her, and to burn the fish’s heart and liver in the bedchamber. He does, the demon is driven off, and Sarah and Tobias live. On the journey home the fish’s gall is smeared on Tobit’s eyes, and the old man sees again.
Then the guide tells them who he is. “I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord.”
He had been there the whole way.
Why he is patron of what he is patron of
Every one of Raphael’s patronages comes directly out of that story, which is unusually tidy. He is invoked by travelers, because he walked the road. By the sick and by physicians and nurses, because his name means God heals and because he handed a young man the medicine. By the blind, because of Tobit’s eyes. And by people hoping to marry well, and by matchmakers, because of Sarah.
He also has a quieter reputation as the patron of happy meetings, which is the loveliest of them and the hardest to put on a medal.
Three honest notes
He was never canonized. There was no cause, no investigation, no miracle presented to a Roman congregation, because the process the Church uses applies to human beings who lived and died. Raphael did neither. Angels are venerated as saints by ancient custom rather than by decree, which puts him in a very small category.
Tobit’s genre is debated, and that is a different question from its authority. Many scholars read it as a religious narrative set in the Assyrian exile but composed considerably later, and point to details in it that sit awkwardly with the history of the period. The Church receives it as inspired Scripture regardless of how one classifies the storytelling. Those two things are worth keeping separate rather than letting one settle the other, in the same way that what is documented about Sts. Anne and Joachim is small while what has grown around them is not.
The pool at Bethesda is tradition, not text. There is an old and widespread devotional identification of Raphael with the angel who troubled the healing waters in John’s Gospel. It is a natural guess given his name, and it is not stated anywhere in the passage. Tradition, clearly labeled, and none the worse for it.
Seven stand before God, and the Church names three
That line Raphael speaks, about being one of seven who stand before the glory of the Lord, is the root of the old idea of seven archangels. Various names for the other four circulated in antiquity, drawn from books the Church did not receive as Scripture, and public veneration has generally been kept to the three the Bible actually names. It is a small instance of a habit worth noticing: the Church tends to stop where its sources stop, even when the speculation is interesting.
His feast is September 29, kept together with Michael and Gabriel. That is a relatively recent arrangement. Before the calendar was revised in 1969 he had a day of his own, October 24.
The companion on the road
If you are going somewhere this summer, Raphael is the one to ask, and the reason is better than the patronage label suggests.
He does not appear in that story as a protector hovering overhead. He appears as a fellow traveler: someone who says he knows the road, carries his own bag, walks the whole distance, and turns out at the end to have been sent. Whatever else the Book of Tobit is doing, it is making a claim about ordinary company on a long trip, and about who might be walking next to you.
Safe travels. Reported healings are his department too, if the drive goes badly.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.