And you wouldn’t be alone in that. Baptist minister John R. Rice has a section in his book False Doctrines entitled “Worship of Mary Antichristian.”
Catholics, however, point out that “to worship someone is to acknowledge that the one who is worshiped is divine, is God.” And they do not at all say that Mary is divine. Some excerpts:
“Catholics hold saints in esteem because they are such wonderful images or mirrors of Christ . . . Devotion to the saints comes back to the theology of image: Christ is God’s image, the saints are Christ’s image. We honor them because we desire to imitate them. We pray to them the same as we call upon earthly friends to do a favor for us. . . devotion to Mary has taken many forms, and even has been confused with worship. Church teaching has consistently placed Mary in the company of the saints, however.”
americancatholic.org/features/customs/rosary/mary_worship.asp
I tend to take what people tell me at face value. When a Catholic tells me he doesn’t worship Mary, I believe him, and I can see that there is a difference between honoring a saint and worshiping God. However, as another poster pointed out, while I might not want to denigrate or mislabel the actions of another, I still need to decide what is the proper course for me. That poster quoted a sentence from You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth. It comes from page 29, and in context reads:
“Since God does not approve of all religions [and this section goes on to give the worship of the Pharisees of Jesus’s time as an example], we need to ask: ‘Am I worshiping God in the way that he approves?’ How can we know if we are? It is not any man, but God, who is the judge of what is true worship. So if our worship is to be acceptable to God, it must be firmly rooted in God’s Word of truth, the Bible.”
A site called
gotQuestions.org offers this analysis:
“Catholics argue that praying to Mary and the saints is no different than asking someone here on earth to pray for us. Let us examine that claim. (1) The Apostle Paul asks other Christians to pray for him in Ephesians 6:19. Many Scriptures describe believers praying for one another (2 Corinthians 1:11; Ephesians 1:16; Philippians 1:19; 2 Timothy 1:3). The Bible nowhere mentions anyone asking for someone in heaven to pray for him. The Bible nowhere describes anyone in heaven praying for anyone on earth. (2) The Bible gives absolutely no indication that Mary or the saints can hear our prayers. . . It is clear that praying to Mary or the saints is completely different from asking someone here on earth to pray for us. One has a strong biblical basis; the other has no biblical basis whatsoever.”
gotquestions.org/prayer-saints-Mary.html
Another issue is that the role of Mary and other saints goes beyond the type of intercessory prayer we can ask of our family and friends here on Earth. Of Mary, this is said:
"Is her mediation merely by intercession, prayer for us to her Son and to God the Father? Or does she also play a role in the distribution of graces from the Father through her Son to us? Many today, influenced by Protestant theology, tend to speak of grace merely as favor, and so say grace is not a thing given. But that would imply Pelagianism, the heresy that says that we can be saved by our own power. For if God merely sits there and smiles at me, and gives me nothing, that would mean that I had to do it by my own power.
So we answer, since Mary was associated with her Son in acquiring grace for us, she will also share with him in distributing that grace to us."
ewtn.com/faith/teachings/marya4.htm
There also seems to be a difference in Catholic teaching between what can be expected of intercessory prayer from our friends and what might be possible from certain saints:
"In Acts we read of Peter and John going up to the Temple for prayer and encountering a beggar. Peter says to him, “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I do have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean, rise and walk” (Acts 3:6). Peter makes it clear that he has the power of Christ in his possession.
To be sure, it is Jesus who heals, but Peter holds the right to extend that power. The same can be said of Paul. In Acts 19:11-12 we read, “So extraordinary were the mighty deeds God accomplished at the hands of Paul that when face cloths or aprons that touched his skin were applied to the sick, their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.” These texts are the basis of the Catholic practice of asking saints to help us, of honoring (not worshiping) the bodies and relics of saints."
americancatholic.org/features/customs/rosary/mary_worship.asp
I disagree with the teaching and practice as given in the Catholic quotes above, and I find no Biblical warrant for me to pray to anyone but God, but that doesn’t mean I have to define the actions of Catholics as “worship” when they plainly tell me it isn’t and can differentiate how they relate to God and how they relate to the saints.
