Praying to the Virgin Mary and Saints

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Periwinkle27

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In a recent conversation with a Lutheran friend, she mentioned that she could never be Catholic because Catholics pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and to Saints. The Ten Commandments say clearly that one should not have other Gods before the one true God.
I could only answer that we do not PRAY to the Saints and to the Virgin Mary, but ask for intercessions. Yet, when I look at my prayer booklets, it says “Prayer” to St. … I could not defend my faith. I am not even sure I have any semblance of an answer that is even partially correct.
I am sure this kind of question pops up periodically but I am inept in navigating this site…could not find a window into which I could type my question so that an answer would pop up, thereby avoiding repetition.
In advance, thank all of you who are willing to answer.
God Bless.
 
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Ask her if she will pray for you.

She will say “of course”!

Then ask her, if she died tonight and woke up in heaven, would she stand before the Throne of Grace and ask God to still help, bless, guide you?

She will say “yes”!

The others in heaven are the same way, they are praying for us before that throne!
 
www.catholic.com

Praying to Dead Folks

Believers on earth are initiating prayers which the saints and angels in heaven are receiving. Is this the necromancy condemned in Deuteronomy and Isaiah? Absolutely not! This is New Testament Christianity.
www.catholic.com www.catholic.com
 
I am not Catholic but I think Catholics say that prayer to the saints is more in line with old English “I pray thee for your intercession…” and not prayer in the adoration sense, which is directed only to God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Catholics please correct me on this if I misspoke.
 
You’re correct, Tommy.

The word prayer is not originally directed to God alone but refers to communication. If you check your Shakespeare, often one of his characters will say to another (and not to God alone), “Prithee, friend, do thus and so”, "Prithee’ being a contraction of ‘pray thee’.

I find it strange that many non-Catholics (and some Catholics do) are so eager to dump a broad and centuries’ long meaning of a word for a recent narrowing.

Prayer is communication. Ultimately all our communication is directed at God anyway, who is not only the source of all of us “In Whom we live and move and have our being” but the ‘end result’ of all our lives, thoughts, words, and actions, whether for good or ill.

No Catholic thinks of a saint as being equivalent to God.

Any powers that we have on earth (gifts of the Holy Spirit) aren’t going to ‘cease’ when we get to Heaven, any more than Jesus ‘ceased’ being "Jesus of Nazareth’ once He ascended to Heaven. So any gifts we have come from God to begin with, right? We freely accept and then use them (or we abuse them, free will) but they are always from God. He doesn’t ‘take them away’ when we die.

Any person in Heaven is united perfectly with Jesus, “seeing directly, not as in a glass, but face to face”. So any actions the person does in Heaven are done through Jesus, just as they are on earth.

The difference is that on earth we are not capable of doing His will perfectly. We do our ‘human best’ but we stumble sometimes and fall. Still, none of us on earth would refuse to ask another person, “pray for us” by thinking, “even though your prayer isn’t perfect”.

In Heaven we WILL be perfect, united with Jesus, capable of doing His will perfectly.

Do you think that once we get to heaven we’ll just want to sit around contemplating our navels so to speak, cloud-surfing, hitting the harps, and ignoring all that we have done on earth to try to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves?

In Heaven we will see our obligation to God and our neighbor perfectly.

Do you think that in Heaven we won’t WANT to be praying for those still on earth? Our neighbors who, because they are not in heaven, are in danger, who need our help most, because we can act through Jesus perfectly?

Gosh sakes, even the earliest Christians knew this. In the catacombs you will find examples of people PRAYING TO MARTYRS. . .praying to their friends who had already died for the Faith. It goes back in ‘written form’ that far, it goes back to St. Paul, it goes back to St. John and the Cloud of Witnesses.
 
So, we are all one body with Jesus at the head. What’s the head of the body? It’s the central nervous system. When you stub your toe, it hurts because your brain told you it hurts. Likewise, when you “pray” to saints it all goes through the head of the body in Jesus. It’s never something that is done outside or apart from him. Through Him with him and in him.

For people who are bible only…

The prayer of the righteous availeth much (James 5:16)

When you die your spirit is made perfect (Heb 12:23)

So when you do the math here, it makes sense to ask perfect people from the Church triumphant in heaven to pray for you.
 
Tommy999 said:
I am not Catholic but I think Catholics say that prayer to the saints is more in line with old English “I pray thee for your intercession…” and not prayer in the adoration sense, which is directed only to God, Jesus, and Holy Spirit. Catholics please correct me on this if I misspoke.
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Exactly!..
 
Periwinkle27 said:
In a recent conversation with a Lutheran friend, she mentioned that she could never be Catholic because Catholics pray to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and to Saints. The Ten Commandments say clearly that one should not have other Gods before the one true God.
I could only answer that we do not PRAY to the Saints and to the Virgin Mary, but ask for intercessions.
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I think, at least to many in the pews, there is significant misunderstanding that goes in both directions, particularly here in America.
I see nothing in modern Catholic teaching that even looks anything like worshiping the Blessed Virgin. Intercessory prayer is not the same as prayers to God.
Periwinkle27 said:
I am sure this kind of question pops up periodically but I am inept in navigating this site…
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😂😂. Join the club. In so many ways, the current CAF system in far more difficult than the old one.
 
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“I’m praying to St. Anthony” or “I’m praying to Mother Mary” is shorthand for saying, “I’m asking St. Anthony and Mother Mary to pray to God for me.” As others have explained, this is just like asking a living person on earth to pray to God for you, like we do in Prayer Intentions subforum.

We don’t treat Mary like a god. We don’t worship her. We don’t think she has powers of her own other than what God specifically tasks her with doing. Mary also has zero desire to be a god or to take the place that rightly belongs to her Son. She would not want us to treat her like a god.

Your Lutheran friend has made this common mistake because she never bothered to actually learn the truth about Catholic prayer and what Catholics believe. Someone probably told her Catholics treat Mary and saints as Gods, or she and her fellow Lutherans just assumed this because they saw people kneeling in prayer in front of saint statues.

There’s lots of Catholic apologetics on the web explaining this Catholic practice and showing that it even has a scriptural basis, for example here:


Unfortunately, most Protestants who complain about Catholics praying to Mary or praying to the saints have closed minds and aren’t interested in understanding, so don’t feel bad if you provide your friend with the best answers in the world and she continues to repeat the same tired old point. Haters gonna hate.
 
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The saints are in Heaven and can help us. So why not pray for help? Also, remind your friend that ALL Christians prayed for saints’ intercession until Luther came along about 1500 years after Christ. It is very unfortunate that Luther took away the people’s helpers.
 
Didnt martin luther himself cry out to St Anne when nearly struck by lightning ?
 
That was before his theology shifted in a Protestant direction.

The Lutheran position is that saints pray for us, but we should not invoke them as they are not mediators of redemption.
In our confessional document, The Apology of the Augsburg Confession , Article 21,we confess: “Our confession approves honors to the saints. For here is a three-fold honor to be given. The first is thanksgiving . For we ought to give thanks to God that He has shown examples of mercy; because He has shown that He wishes to save men; because He has given teachers or other gifts to the Church… The second service is the strengthening of our faith ; when we see the denial of Peter we also are encouraged to believe the more that grace truly superabounds over sin, Rom. 5.20. The third honor is the imitation , first, of faith, then of the other virtues, which everyone should imitate according to his calling… Besides, we also grant that the angels pray for us [Zch 1.12]… We admit that just as the saints (when alive) pray for the Church universal in general, so in heaven they pray for the Church in general. However, no passage about the praying of the dead exists in the Scriptures, except the dream taken from the Second Book of Maccabees (15.14). Furthermore, even if the saints do pray for the Church, that does not mean they should be invoked.”

Unlike Catholics, Lutherans do not believe it is proper or scriptural to offer prayers to saints or to view Mary as in any sense a “mediator” between God and human beings.
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Prayer today is basically considered an act of faith in God. An act of worship. Catholic and Protestant can agree upon this. But, for some strange reason, Protestants tend to give a word one meaning and deny the fact that most words have multiple meanings. Therefore they deny the fact that prayer has another very important definition. And it is still seen in books which are written in the ancient language. One of those is the King James Bible:

Luke 14:18 And they all with one consent began to make excuse. The first said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go and see it: I pray thee have me excused.

Notice that in this verse, the word “pray” is used in the sense of petition, beseeching or begging. And this is the other sense which the Church recognizes in the word, “prayer”.

Therefore, today, there are at least three religious senses to the word “pray”.
  1. We can pray to God in the sense of praise, worship or adoration.
  2. We can pray to God in the sense of petition or request.
  3. This one requires a bit of further explanation. As we have seen, a prayer or request can be addressed to anyone, God or man. In the Old Testament, prayer was addressed to God and man. But prayer was not addressed to the dead, faithful or not.
However, there is a New Dispensation in the New Testament. Jesus has shown us that those who die in the state of grace are counted amongst the living:

John 11:26And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die….

To prove this, Jesus spoke to Moses and Elijah on the top of the mountain:

Matthew 17:1 And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, 2 And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. 3 And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him.
4 Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias.

And Scripture tells us that all the Baptized are now on top of that mountain with the Saints:

Hebrews 12:21 And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake:) 22 But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, 23 To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, 24 And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.

And so, in the New Testament era, we can make prayers of praise and petition to the Saints who went before us to the heavenly Kingdom.

We do not worship them, but we do acknowledge the love of God towards them as we do towards all our fellow men.

cont’d
 
cont’d

So what is worship?​

In our explanation of the word “prayer”, we used the word “worship” a couple of times already. Like prayer, worship has a meaning which is universally accepted and another which is no longer used frequently, an archaic sense.

To worship is to acknowledge and praise God’s authority and power over us. In today’s world, worship is only directed to God.

However, worship was not always exclusively directed to God. We can see this in the ancient text of the King James Bible where Joshua worships the angel:

Joshua 5:14 And he said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the Lord am I now come. And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant?

However, Joshua was merely showing reverence for an authoritative figure. In older times, in America and Britain, Kings and Judges were referred to as “your worship”. Because of the recognition of their authority and power.

The online dictionary says:
archaic honor given to someone in recognition of their merit.
[as title] (His/Your Worship) chiefly British used in addressing or referring to an important or high-ranking person, especially a magistrate or mayor:
we were soon joined by His Worship the Mayor
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Today, we no longer use the word, worship, to describe the honor we give anyone but God. Instead we use the words reverence, honor and veneration.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that prayer and worship have much in common. They are almost synonymous when it comes to prayer directed to God. Prayer directed to God is the worship of God. Because any prayer directed to God acknowledges and praises His power and authority over our lives.

Indirectly, prayer directed to the Saints is the worship of God because in doing so, we also acknowledge the great thing which God has done through that Saint. Much like when we praise a painting. When we praise a painting we indirectly praise the painter who made the painting. When we praise a Saint and acknowledge the holiness of the Saint, we indirectly acknowledge the God who made the Saint.

I hope that helps.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Your Lutheran friend has made this common mistake because she never bothered to actually learn the truth about Catholic prayer and what Catholics believe. Someone probably told her Catholics treat Mary and saints as Gods, or she and her fellow Lutherans just assumed this because they saw people kneeling in prayer in front of saint statues.
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I think you are generally correct here. She may well have heard the bolded, and it may also be true that some Catholics’ practice sometimes is indistinguishable from latria.

In any event, IIRC, 20 years ago the signing of the JDDJ was accompanied by a call for greater local contact between Lutherans and Catholics. I guess that wasn’t particularly successful.
 
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Periwinkle27 said:
she could never be Catholic because Catholics pray to Mary,
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Your question has been answered thoroughly. You can also tell your friend that Catholics are not required to do any of that sort of prayer. I am a Catholic-leaning Protestant and have no issues whatever with it. But if I did nothing would be held against me by priest or church.
 
CelticWarlord said:
You can also tell your friend that Catholics are not required to do any of that sort of prayer.
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I’d be careful with that, since if a Catholic shows up for Mass and the Confiteor is going on, he’s certainly expected to pray it along with the congregation, and it includes an invocation to Mary and all the angels and saints, asking them for prayers.
 
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