Why do people ask Mary to Pray for them?

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Pathway2

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I am aware of the asking someone to pray for them part, trouble is why not praying to God? God can hear us.
 
Why do you ask your friend to pray for you? Or your mom? Why involve other people at all, if God can hear you just fine by yourself?
 
Because her prayers are particularly powerful. Far more powerful than ours.
 
We pray to God and ask others to pray with/for us. Whether those others are on earth, in Heaven, or both.
 
Because the Bible says we should. In the Bible, our prayers go up to God through the hands of those in heaven (Tobit 12:12, Rev. 8:4, Rev. 5:8), and that includes Mary. If the Bible says she receives our prayers, it implies that they may be directed to her: that’s just logic, because to receive prayers and to be given prayers are all one. Besides, even if Scripture said nothing about it at all, still our holy Tradition receives this practice from the third century onward; and it is not as if God was no longer with His Church in the third century, Who guides us in how to pray. Therefore because of logic, because of Scripture, and because of Tradition we pray to Mary; and there isn’t anything in the Bible that says not to.
 
I think the simple answer is that we can typically use all the prayers we can get… Uniting our prayer with others is like joining your voice with a choir in harmony…which for me is a good thing because I sing off key.

Also, I tend to think of praying with Mary and the other saints rather than praying to as I think all prayer should be pointed to God, but it is fine to pray to an intercessor…

I like the way Blessed John Henry Newman sums it up in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua… "Only this I know full well now, and did not know then, that the Catholic Church allows no image of any sort, material or immaterial, no dogmatic symbol, no rite, no sacrament, no Saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, to come between the soul and its Creator. It is face to face, “solus com solo,” in all matters between man and his God.
 
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Pathway2 said:
I am aware of the asking someone to pray for them part, trouble is why not praying to God? God can hear us.
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It started as a Jewish practice…and brought to Christianity by the first Christians…who where Jews. Here are a few articles…Relics, Saints, and the Assumption of Mary | Called to Communion
The first real blow to this interpretation came when I read Peter Brown’s book, The Cult of Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity.
Brown challenged my view that the place of saints and relics in the church was a mere holdover from paganism, and that the practice was somehow peripheral to true Christianity. Instead, Brown painted a picture of ancient Christianity and paganism in which relics were indispensable to the former, and repulsive to the latter. Far from a holdover from paganism, the place of relics in the Church appeared as something intensely Jewish, Hebraic, and Old Testament. Pagans, like Julian-the-Apostate, found the practice revolting and legislated against it. (Paganism, with its notions of ritual purity, had strictly delimited the realm of divine worship and neatly separated it from the realm of corpses and the dead.)

And the Hebrew pratice…http://www.chabad.org/library/artic...tzaddik-to-pray-on-my-behalf.htm/mobile/false

Is it okay to ask a deceased tzaddik to pray on my behalf?
By Tzvi Freeman
Question:
I was always under the impression that Judaism firmly believed that there are no intermediaries between man and G d, and to pray to the deceased is blasphemous and outlawed by the Bible. If so, why is it permissible to ask theRebbe to intercede on one’s behalf at the Ohel?
Answer:

We see that the Jewish people asked Moses to intercede many times and he accepted their request. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here–so G-d obviously figured it was okay. The Talmud (Baba Batra 116a) tells us that “If there is someone ill in your house, go to the wise man of the city and ask that he should pray for him.” Of course, this person also needs to pray for himself, as his family should as well–and any Jew who knows that another Jew is ill should pray for him. But you need to go to that wise man as well.
We petition them to pray on our behalf–and they do and often their prayers are more effective than our own. After all, we often don’t fathom the seriousness of these problems from our limited perspective as much as they might from their much more lofty view.
Just how ancient and popular is this custom? The Torah tells us that Caleb, one of the twelve spies that Moses sent to spy out the Land of Canaan, made a personal detour to Hebron. What was his interest in Hebron? The Talmud (Sotah 34b) tells that he wished to pray at the cave where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are buried. He prayed there for mercy on his soul and he was saved from the fateful decision of the other spies.
 
Pathway2 said:
So is that why we pray the rosary?
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The Jews regarded the mother as a special intercessor…http://ldsguy2catholic.wordpress.com/
In the Introduction to the book, titled “How I Discovered the Jewish Origins of Catholicism”, essentially giving an overview of his conversion to Catholicism after being a priest in another faith, Dr. Marshall recounts an experience he had talking with a Rabbi in a hospital waiting room (Dr. Marshall was visiting someone as a priest), who told him that Jews believe that “if someone is suffering and you invoke the name of his or her mother in prayer, God will be more merciful in granting your prayer for that person“. Dr. Marshall then goes on to make a connection with the Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary, and goes on from there:
If Jews believed that invoking the mother of someone caused God to be more gracious in answering an intercession, then wouldn’t the name of Mary be worth invoking? Even more, Mary wasn’t just an ordinary mother. She was the only person ever created who could speak to God about our Son. That’s when it hit me. Catholic devotion to Mary is not merely based on sound Christological arguments. Veneration for the Blessed Mother is not just only in the writings of the early Church. Reaching back even further, the Church reveres and invokes the Blessed Mother because it inherited the Jewish custom of showing profound reverence for the spiritual role of the mother in a family. The rabbi’s answer was a surprising confirmation that Catholic customs are rooted in a Jewish understanding of reality.
 
Pathway2 said:
I am aware of the asking someone to pray for them part, trouble is why not praying to God? God can hear us.
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Protestant religions hold that Jesus lived, died, and rose to ascend to His Father in Heaven. Done, over, past tense. They pray to him in heaven, and he will return someday.
Catholics believe that, while the protestant “past tense” view is correct, Jesus left Himself behind in His Church. And on Calvary, he gave to us (and all mankind) His mother to be mother to all of us. Praying to Mary is like asking others here on earth to pray for us. As others have said, Mary’s prayers are most powerful when speaking with Her Son.
 
Another fun watch - intriguing presentation !
Snake on the cross - was a fascinating point.
And the angels on the ark too -
Love how you compared a wedding ring - to a cross on a necklace!
 
Not either-or, both-and.

Praying to Mary is praying to Jesus through Mary.

Since we know the prayer of a righteous person avails much, and since Mary is a righteous person chosen to bear Christ our King, praying through her is like adding even MORE prayer to God.

When we ask Mary to pray for us, it’s like me asking you to pray to God for me. Instead of ‘just me’ praying, it’s you and me. And Scripture says, “Where two or three are gathered in My Name, there I am in the midst of them”. Adding saints like Mary to our prayer is just giving God even more glory.
 
Thank you for your response. I did another one on we love Mary but don’t worship her. I would love for you to watch it. I have it on this forum.
 
It is also a meditation on the birth, life, Passion, and glories of Jesus.
 
So can Mary; “heaven is within us”; so Mary and the saints are also within, since they are in heaven. They intercede to God for us. Just like we can intercede for others.
 
pablope said:
the Church reveres and invokes the Blessed Mother because it inherited the Jewish custom of showing profound reverence for the spiritual role of the mother in a family. The rabbi’s answer was a surprising confirmation that Catholic customs are rooted in a Jewish understanding of reality.
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so does this imply for specific saints for specific means. so If I ask a saint who is a patron saint of finding things. they would do so as it has been a role for them. Or is it as they have experience the experience of being lost and is helping one out?
 
Pathway2 said:
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pablope:
the Church reveres and invokes the Blessed Mother because it inherited the Jewish custom of showing profound reverence for the spiritual role of the mother in a family. The rabbi’s answer was a surprising confirmation that Catholic customs are rooted in a Jewish understanding of reality.
Click to expand...
so does this imply for specific saints for specific means. so If I ask a saint who is a patron saint of finding things. they would do so as it has been a role for them. Or is it as they have experience the experience of being lost and is helping one out?
Click to expand...
I think you are referring to patron saints…

Revelation 14:13
13 And I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord henceforth.” “Blessed indeed,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!”


How Patron Saints Are Chosen
Thus, the patron saints of churches, and more broadly of regions and countries, have generally been chosen because of some connection of that saint to that place—he had preached the Gospel there; he had died there; some or all of his relics had been transferred there. As Christianity spread to areas with few martyrs or canonized saints, it became common to dedicate a church to a saint whose relics were placed in it or who was especially venerated by the founders of the church. Thus, in the United States, immigrants often chose as patrons the saints that had been venerated in their native lands.

Patron Saints for Occupations
As the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, by the Middle Ages, the practice of adopting patron saints had spread beyond churches to “the ordinary interests of life, his health, and family, trade, maladies, and perils, his death, his city and country. The whole social life of the Catholic world before the Reformation was animated with the idea of protection from the citizens of heaven.” Thus, Saint Joseph became the patron saint of carpenters; Saint Cecilia, of musicians; etc. Saints were usually chosen as patrons of occupations that they had actually held or that they had patronized during their lives.
 
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