We ask the saints to pray FOR us; we do not pray TO them!
Big difference!
It’s like asking your best friend to pray for you!
Actually, we do pray to the Saints and we do praise them for the witness that they manifested in their lives to Christ etc.
In Christ, matter is sanctified and even divinized. That is the whole point of the Divine Incarnation. By uniting His Divinity to our Humanity, God transfigures, deifies it through Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Grace ennobles us with the power to make a real choice for or against God. God’s love is so great that He wants His Gifts (of Grace) to be our merits. We praise the Saints for their merits and venerate them, their relics etc. This is also reflected in the Acts of the Apostles where the bodies of the Apostles, true Temples of the Holy Spirit, performed miracles by touching, by people throwing themselves into their shadow and the like.
(I do believe, although I don’t have the reference with me now, that the Seventh Ecumenical Council did in fact anathematize any Catholic who refused to invoke the Saints. )
In the Eastern Church, Theosis or the reality of our transfiguration in the Holy Spirit is underscored to the nth degree. The goal of our lives as Christians is the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit - through prayer, sacraments, spiritual reading, the liturgy, fasting, good works etc. Like Christ on Mt Tabor, we too are called to share in His Divinity i.e. “partakers” thereof. Christ lives in His Saints, who are true vessels of Grace, through the Holy Spirit. Christ Himself tells us that “whatsoever you do to the least of My brothers, that you do unto Me.” That was not just symbolic either.
In the Eastern Church, services to the Saints are true Divine services - when we honour a Saint, we honour God Who overshadows and transfigures and lives in that Saint. We cannot invoke a Saint or venerate him or her without giving glory to the Incarnate God Who made them Saints in Him, Who sanctified/deified them in Himself.
This is why icons of Saints always look “the same” - they teach us that the Saint is a Saint because of the degree to which he or she resembled/took on Christ in a real, ontological way through the Holy Spirit.
Yes, we can and do go to God directly. But that is not how God wants us to go. He is the God of Love and He mediates His salvific love and grace to us - first in the deified Humanity of Jesus Christ, then through the Church, the sacraments and through the Mother of God and the Angels and Saints.
Can we go to Christ through Mary? Absolutely! Did Jesus not come to US through her? Did He come directly to us? No, He comes as the Mediator of Salvation and His Salvation itself is mediated to us and then WE become mediators of salvation to others and to the world.
The doctrine of the veneration and invocation of the Saints is intimately tied with the Divine Incarnation (as are icons etc.).
A Saint not only reflects Christ, he/she bears Christ, truly and really - a Christ-Bearer and a Pneumatophor/Spirit-Bearer.
To venerate such is to enter in even more deeply into the revelation that God became Man for us in Christ Jesus.
In fact, the Protestant Reformers were known to emphasize the Divinity of Christ to the detriment of His Humanity - which makes it almost a kind of contemporary Monophysism.
When Christ told John at the Cross “Behold your Mother!” He was saying that to all of us to this day and until He comes again.
The Body of Christ was nurtured by the Virgin Mary. We who are the Body of Christ that is the Church continue to be nurtured by the intercession and example of the Virgin Mary who is truly our Mother.
Alex
), what is the point of having patron saints? also, i’ve heard that the rosary is a devotion to mary but also praying through mary to God. which is true? or are both true?
