Rudy, thanks for calling today from Sterling Heights, Michigan. How are you?
Hey, how's it going, thank you for taking my call. You bet, Rudy. Fire away. Okay, every time we meet, my
relatives go back and forth on the subject of where we talk about, you know,
we pray to the Saints, and some say that we pray through the Saints, and I tell them,
like, is it possible that we can pray through them? I don't see that, I don't
see how we can pray through them. And I asked a couple of other people, like priests
or something, but they never just give me a direct answer where I can actually back
up what I'm saying to them and go to the Bible and prove my point was, you know,
how we believe, as Catholics, we should-- we ought to believe about praying to
them or through them. Yes, yes. Well, it's--some of this is
semantics...but yeah, we pray TO the Saints. Now, some people don't like...you
know...I think it's an unnecessary sort of quibbling over over terms here, because
they think that if you say you're praying to them, that somehow they're
gods, and that that's not true at all. It's just--if I'm talking to Jerry Usher,
I'm talking to him; if I'm gonna ask him to pray for me, I talk to him, I say "Hey
Jerry, can you pray?" I don't talk THROUGH him, in fact that would be kind of rude.
Think of the Hail Holy Queen, right, or you know, where we say "We fly unto thee,,
O virgin of virgins, our mother," right? And think of all sorts of different prayers
that we pray TO the Blessed Virgin Mary or prayers TO the Saints. All that means
is that we are talking TO them, because they are human persons. When I talk to
Nick in the studio here, I talk TO him; if I'm talking to the Saints I talk TO
them. And so in that sense, we are praying TO them. It doesn't mean they're equal
with God or anything like that, and certainly, Biblically speaking, we have
you know, Revelation 5:8, for
example, we see 24 elders that are depicted as being in Heaven; in fact, all
of the book of Revelation is basically a "revelation" of what's going
on in Heaven. And we have the 24 elders, these are human beings, and they are
receiving--if you check out that verse there, it's in the image of incense, and
the text actually tells you the incense coming up to them are the prayers of the
Saints--so each one of them are receiving these prayers coming up to Heaven, and
obviously they are responding to them. So these prayers, it would be implied, are
being prayed TO them. So I get it though, that some people want to say "through,"
because they don't want to say that the final object of prayer is the saint, and
there is some truth to that, because the end of all prayers, of course, is God; but
we also don't want to fall into the trap of saying we're not praying TO them,
because we are. We are praying to them, but with the proper perspective: asking
them to pray for us; and we're honoring them for the great men and women that
they are. Alright. I actually--I thought that's what you were gonna say, because I just didn't get how praying
through somebody would be possible in that sense. Yeah, it just doesn't--
it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to say that, because that's not the
way we communicate with people. Like I said, I mean it sounds kind of rude to me.
I'm not gonna talk to you, Nick, I'm gonna talk through you to somebody else. You
know, that seems just a bit rude. But as long as--you know, if you
understand the the reason underlying it, you know, we can be sympathetic, but point
out that, hey, no, in our tradition we pray TO Mary and the Saints, properly
qualified and understood. Thanks, Rudy, for joining us on Catholic Answers Live.