Do saints have powers beyond intercession?

[Narcole]

I’m currently in the long, slow process of prayerfully reconsidering the Catholic church I was raised in, and I’m finding a large gap between some of the apologetic arguments given here and the ways in which I see beliefs talked about and lived out by Catholics.

One in particular has to do with the power of Mary and the saints. Every defense seems to begin by drawing an analogy between asking a holy friend to pray for us and asking a saint to pray for us. And when it’s talked about in those terms, I’m not uncomfortable with it. But I hear even theologically well-versed Catholics online or in my life talking about their spiritual lives and the saints, and it seems to go way beyond that. They talk about the saints being powerful. They talk about the saints helping us. Especially Mary. I remember hearing Scott Hahn talk about the “love and power of [his] heavenly queen” he experienced in his son’s healing. And I’ve often heard that a particular saint is good at something. Like healing, or helping me find things. The saints seem to be asked for more than just intercessory prayer. Sometimes for miracles, which I would never ask for from a friend, only from God alone. If I pray for a saint to do something like that, it feels no different than treating each saint as a mini-god who has their little thing they’re good at, the same way any polytheist does.

Is there some line between praying for the intercession of a saint and praying TO a saint that these people might be accidentally stepping over, or is this just me? Growing up I believed certain saints had certain powers, not just in an intercessory way, and this seems to be what many Catholics believe. Am I sensing a problem that isn’t there? Do most Catholics have it all straighter in their heads than I did? Or was I right, and it’s okay to pray to saints for THEIR power (even if it was given them by God)?

If someone could help me see the line, and give their opinion on how well educated the average Catholic is about that line, I was appreciate it.

 

[Petaro]

I believe that prayers to saints including Our Lady are intercessory only in value. All power of prayer comes from God alone. When we talk of the power of Mary we are only rationally understanding her special place in the Heart of Jesus, and are reminded by the marriage feast of Cana in the Bible that Our Lady only had to ask her Son for a remedy of a silly social embarrassment for a friend for Jesus to change the timing of the start of His public life.
Now if you consider the triviality of the situation in the general scheme of things, you can recognise the power of such intercession. But no power arose from Our Lady or the saints in their own right but only in their relationship with the Lord alone.
Don’t be confused with talk of St. Jude with lost causes or St. Anthony with finding lost things.
All power comes only from God and His church encourages prayers to the saints for their edification and to encourage us to emulate the lives of our “favorite” saints.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

I’m still a bit too much of a Protestant to put a lot of stock in praying to saints. Although there was one occasion early on in my Catholic walk when I did pray to St. Martha (I think). Someone said she’d always respond in 6 weeks, Martha being busybody Martha, and unable to sit still for a moment, if something needs doing.

I needed a job at the time, and pretty much exactly 6 weeks after I prayed to her (only half believing it), I managed to get a mail delivery contract. If I’d prayed to her sister Mary, she’d probably still be sitting at the feet of Christ, and meanwhile … Just kidding.

So, what do we make of it?

As my old Protestant pastor put it, “They’re doing something up there.” Or as the Bible puts it in Luke 16:10 NIV …

Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.

The saints, who have shown that they can be trusted with very little in this life, are then trusted with much in the next, is how I interpret this passage, at least in a spiritual sense.

I think after a while the glorified saints get to know the mind of God pretty well, and they probably get an almost instantaneous answer from God regarding their requests, which they forward on from people on earth. The real problem is probably lack of faith on our part - do we really trust God, or the saints or both?

I know at times I don’t much like God, and so I’m somewhat cynical about petitionary prayer. But that’s my attitude - not what God and the saints might actually be doing.

Like the old pastor said, “They’re doing something up there.” And if we take the “communion of saints” to mean anything, there should be a spiritual communion between us, each other, the glorified saints, Mary and the Trinitarian God.

I suspect that a lot of the time we don’t really take it seriously. Our faith is too small.