Question about saints?

[RomanRyan1088]

Ok, i have a few questions. I understand that a saint is anyone who made it into heaven. Well here are my questions:

1. How do we know that ALL the saints have made it into heaven.
2. Why does the church cannonize certian saints, when EVERYONE who made it into heaven is a saint?
3. Can i ask my grandmother to pray for me, because i think she is in heaven.

This is the problem i have, how can i pray to people when i don’t even know they are in heaven?

 

[kmmd]

Here is my understanding:

Everyone who is in heaven is a Saint. There are some lives that have been so extraordinarily exemplary that the Church officially declares that these souls are most certainly Saints and that we may follow their examples as a possible path to holiness.

Your grandmother may well be in heaven. If not, she is certainly in purgatory and therefore on her way to heaven. You can pray both to her and for her. We know that a person’s soul never dies and that we can have a spiritual relationship with those people who have gone before us. I would say a few prayers for her, just in case, and you can speak to her as you did when she was on earth: you and your grandmother can pray for each other. When we pray to the saints we are really just asking them to pray for us. Whether grandmother has “made it home” yet or not, she can still pray for you, just as you can pray for her.

I hope that your prayers will make you feel closer to her now than when she was with you here.

 

[Deacon_Tony560]

The church has a very long road that most saint candidates must travel. Miracles attributed to a candidate are required and investigated by impartial doctors and other professionals. In a few cases, so many cures Etc. were recorded, that a candidate was rushed along in the process…St. Francis, St. Anthony. Before the investigators get into the saint possibilities, a candidate must have lived a very holy and unselfish life. Pages and pages of testimony are given by those who are working for the cause of a candidate. Then there are long sessions with good adversaries who will try to defeat the cause for the saint. (Acting as devil’s advocate.) This process can take years or even more than a century. The church does not take this matter lightly and you can be sure if a candidate makes sainthood, they deserve it.

Deacon Tony SFO

 

[Mandi]

RomanRyan1088:

1. Can i ask my grandmother to pray for me, because i think she is in heaven.

This is the problem i have, how can i pray to people when i don’t even know they are in heaven?

I hope those I love do not make the mistake of thinking I was so good I went straight to heaven.

St. Louis Bertrand’s father was an exemplary Christian, as we should naturally expect, being the father of so great a Saint. He had even wished to become a Carthusian monk until he learned that it was not God’s will for him.

When he died, after long years spent in the practice of every Christian virtue, his saintly son, fully aware of the rigors of God’s Justice, offered many Masses and poured forth the most fervent supplications for the soul he so dearly loved.

A vision of his father still in Purgatory forced him to intensify a hundredfold his suffrages. He added most severe penances and long fasts to his Masses and prayers. Yet eight whole years passed before he obtained the release of his father.

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I do not imagine that your grandmother was not a very good and wonderful women, but it would be more prudent to pray for her than to pray to her.

Souls in purgatory are suffering, we are the only ones that can help them, they can no longer help themselves - it is a great sin to forget the dead. Please let us not make assumptions that those we love are in heaven.

“As there is no hunger, no thirst, no poverty, no need, no pain, no suffering to compare with what the Souls in Purgatory endure, so there is no alms more deserving, none more pleasing to God, none more meritorious for us than the alms, the prayers, the Masses we give to the Holy Souls.”

 

[Mike_C]

Dear Deacon Tony:
“Then there are long sessions with good adversaries who will try to defeat the cause for the saint. (Acting as devil’s advocate.)”

This office was done away with in 1983.

We honor all Saints on All Saints Day (Nov. 1st, or the Sunday after Pentacost in the Eastern Church). We believe that all people in heaven are saints (small “s”). But the Church holds up certain people as worthy of respect, our praryers and imitation by "canonizing " them. (That is, by adding their names to the “canon” or list of people she knows are in heaven.)