<em>Gabri-el</em>, 'strength of God'. He appears four times in Scripture and every appearance is an announcement. He explains the vision of the ram and the goat to Daniel (Daniel 8:16) and comes to him again 'about the time of the evening sacrifice' with the prophecy of the seventy weeks (Daniel 9:21). In the temple he tells Zachary that his wife will bear the Baptist, and strikes him dumb for doubting: 'I am Gabriel, who stand before God' (Luke 1:19). And six months later he is sent to Nazareth.
Everything the Church says about him rests on that last errand. The collect of his old feast puts it without ornament: God, 'who among all the angels didst choose the Archangel Gabriel to announce the mystery of thine Incarnation'. His greeting is the first half of the Hail Mary; the Angelus, rung three times a day across Christendom, is the scene he stood in; and the words he was given — 'Hail, full of grace' — are the text from which the Church has argued the Immaculate Conception.
His feast stood on 24 March, the eve of the Annunciation, from 1921 until 1969, when the three archangels were joined on 29 September. Pius XII named him patron of telecommunications in 1951 — the modern extension of an ancient office, since a message carried instantly over a great distance is exactly what he was for.