Very good points. Our prayers to Mary or any Saint do not stop there, they plead for us to God the Father. Since they are purified, their prayers are purified as well.
Heb 4:14 Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. 15 For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. 16 **Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. **
**Our Father who is in heaven**, Hallowed be Your name. 10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 `And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]’“Mediator: One that mediates, especially one that reconciles differences between disputants.” Amen, this alone is Jesus Christ!
How do you know God desires us to pray to dead saints?
The Lord Never taught anyone to pray to humans, only to God the Father.
They are not dead, they are alive in Christ. To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, right?How do you know God desires us to pray to dead saints?
Eph. 3:14-15- For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,
What do you think folks who get to Heaven do all day? Ignore us here on Earth? You can say that they praise God. And that is true. But is God not concerned about what happens to us on Earth? So why shouldn’t folks who get to Heaven be concerned about what happens to us on Earth? So why should their communication to God not involve a respect for God’s will which in turn involves what happens to us here on Earth?
True.
True. But we only know of those whom the Church cannonizes. The rest we don’t know of.
Offcourse, I assumed you knew that when I called them saints. My question is how can they hear us and why are we not taught to pray to them by Jesus and the Apostles?
Again, like most Catholic only doctrines this is an extrapolated, rationalized doctrine with Zero direct references or commands from Jesus or the Apostles!
Jesus teaches them how to pray and it is ONLY to the Father! No disciple asks Stephen, James or Mary to intercede for them. No ECF mentions prayer to those saints in heaven.
Pray for, not pray to one another. It is assumed that the fervant prayer of a righteous man, is spoken about a living, breathing earthly being. Certainly the Jews never understood that prayer needs to be mediated by those in heaven.
Yep, and to elaborate a bit, Christ doesn’t have much good to say about those who just cry “Lord, Lord!” all day and night, and who do not obey his commandments. One of those two great commandments is to love others as yourself. Do saints in heaven obey this commandment or not? Do they restrict their love to those others in heaven, or do they also love those on earth? If they love those on earth, do they not do what is in their God-given power to aid those on earth? Do they not love all whom God loves, and desire the salvation of all as does God, and desire to do everything possible to help those whom God loves to attain sanctification and salvation?
Hi,
Allis, our OP asked what Catholics believe about intercessory prayer. The first sentence of your post is correct:
When confused, go to the Catechism!
Kaycee: if a man is kneeling at his bedside and his wife is kneeling on the other side of the bed and both are in prayer – then is the man praying to his wife?
Please demonstrate that this is true.
How do you know God desires us to pray to dead saints?
How do you know they don’t? Whether you are a sola scripturist or not, this is an issue of faith. This is something the early Church embraced. Beyond that, there have been countless miracles from the intercession of the Saints in heaven, leading these individuals closer to the heart of the Lord. Satan does not cast out Satan.
The Lord Never taught anyone to pray to humans, only to God the Father.
In case you are ignorant or just playing dumb, “praying” to the Saints is merely asking for their intercession to God, just as I would ask you for your intercession before the Lord. “Praying” is probably an inappropriate word to explain this belief.
Jews don’t pray to saints. The were given the very “Oracles of God”
We both agree the Jews had a lot of things wrong, particularly after Christ came. Many of them didn’t even believe in an afterlife.
The Apostles never teach praying to dead saints. No one ever is commanded or seen to be praying to St. Stephen or St. James or any other martyr.
The Apostles never taught to use the Bible alone as the final and sole rule of faith either. They did, however, teach us that the Holy Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood or Christ, that Baptism is regenerative, that there is a valid line of apostolic succession with they started, and that we are not saved by “faith alone.” Of course, these are different issues for another post.
The ECF’s know nothing about prayer to saints.
Origen
But not the high priest [Christ] alone prays for those who pray sincerely, but also the angels . . . as also the souls of the saints who have already fallen asleep (Prayer 11 [A.D. 233]).
Cyprian of Carthage
“Let us remember one another in concord and unanimity. Let us on both sides [of death] always pray for one another. Let us relieve burdens and afflictions by mutual love, that if one of us, by the swiftness of divine condescension, shall go hence first, our love may continue in the presence of the Lord, and our prayers for our brethren and sisters not cease in the presence of the Father’s mercy” (Letters 56[60]:5 [A.D. 253]).
Methodius
“Therefore,** we pray [ask] you**, the most excellent among women, who glories in the confidence of your maternal honors, that you would unceasingly keep us in remembrance. O holy Mother of God, remember us, I say, who make our boast in you, and who in august hymns celebrate the memory, which will ever live, and never fade away” about 300 AD
“And you also, O honored and venerable Simeon, you earliest host of our holy religion, and teacher of the resurrection of the faithful, do be our patron and advocate with that Savior God, whom you were deemed worthy to receive into your arms. We, together with you, sing our praises to Christ, who has the power of life and death, saying, ‘You are the true Light, proceeding from the true Light; the true God, begotten of the true God’” about 300 AD
Pectorius
“Aschandius, my father, dearly beloved of my heart, with my sweet mother and my brethren, remember your Pectorius in the peace of the Fish [Christ]” (Epitaph [A.D. 250]).
Augustine
A Christian people celebrates together in religious solemnity the memorials of the martyrs, both to encourage their being imitated and so that it can share in their merits and be aided by their prayers. (Against Faustus the Manichean [A.D. 400]).
There is also be prayer to St. Joseph believed to be over 1900 years old.
Yes, my friend in Christ, the early Church believed in the intercession of the Saints (whether they were right or wrong). This includes those responsible for affirming which books belonged in the Bible at the coucil of Nicaea.
This is my own personal opinion, but if I can’t trust that God would use a competent, orthodox, and Biblical authority through which to help birth the New Testament, I cannot accept the Bible itself.
I believe that God chose to establish a valid apostolic authority from the beginning, and not to allow His people to saunter in doctrinal darkness for approximately 1,500 years. If God allowed that, what would that say about God? Not something good…
The Church came before the Bible, not the other way around.
How could John hear every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea? Heck, he wasn’t even a perfected saint in heaven yet.
No, your response like so many Protestant-only doctrines ignores the complete deposit of faith left witht the Church. Unless you were there, you don’t know all that Jesus or the Apostles taught. Only the Church knows this.
Stop trying to kidnap the word “pray”. You know darn well (or you certainly should, having spent so much time here) that praying to the saints is an entirely different matter than praying to God. Stop trying to impose your terminology on us in place of our own terminology.
We are told to pray for one another. How do we know how to pray for each other unless we are told what to pray for? Just who is the “great cloud of witnesses” in Romans 12:1? What are they doing?
Sorry, I was attempting to be brief. I hoped you knew all the places where we’re told in the Bible to pray for one another.
So I can assume you never ask anyone to pray for you? When someone says, “Will you pray for me?” you reply, “Sorry, I can’t. You’re only supposed to pray to God, not to me.” And again, you’re trying to say that those in heaven are not alive which is false. The Jews certainly didn’t care much for Jesus when he was on earth, either. Why should their opinion on who I ask to pray for me make any difference to me?
You have to make an awful lot of assumptions to deny the communion of saints.
Thank you, Mike. That is truly moving. And it is true. My priest once told me, when I was sorting all this out about the Saints, that the Saints are our friends. They are in the company of the Almighty, they love us, they want to help us, and most of all they want to do God’s will.
That followed about 3 months or so after I began reading, attending Mass, and reading the little abbreviated book “Life in Christ.”
