Replaced, Not Removed, at Easter

During the Easter season, Catholic practice replaces the Angelus with a related but distinct prayer, the Regina Caeli, a shorter Marian antiphon celebrating the resurrection rather than the Annunciation, a seasonal substitution that reflects the church calendar's broader pattern of shifting devotional emphasis between the Incarnation and the Resurrection across the liturgical year. Popes have recited the Angelus publicly at midday on Sundays from the window of the Apostolic Palace overlooking Saint Peter's Square for well over a century, a practice that has become one of the most visible and widely broadcast public papal devotions, often accompanied by brief remarks on current events before the prayer itself, giving the otherwise private devotion an unusually public and even political dimension in the modern era.

Artists across centuries, most famously Jean-Francois Millet's nineteenth-century painting of peasants pausing in a field at the sound of a distant church bell, have used the Angelus as a subject precisely because it depicts an ordinary, repeated moment of devotion interrupting daily labor rather than a dramatic or unusual religious event. Its continued daily recitation, though now far less universal than in earlier centuries, remains part of the Liturgy of the Hours in some forms and a standard element of Catholic popular piety.