In his speech last night to the Democratic convention, Vice President Joe Biden referred to fallen soldiers as “fallen angels.”
Biden said, “And tonight — tonight, I want to acknowledge — I want to acknowledge, as we should every night, the incredible debt we owe to the families of those 6,473 fallen angels, and those 49,746 wounded — thousands critically — thousands who will need our help for the rest of their lives. Folks, we never — we must never, ever forget their sacrifice and always keep them in our care and in our prayers.”
While of course the sentiment is laudatory, the language is not.
A “fallen angel” is an angel who has gone bad. “The Church teaches that Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: ‘The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing,'” reads a line from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
