If we take the concept of requesting things as being prayer, then Jesus did, indeed, pray to Mary. He also prayed, in the same sense, to the immoral Samaritan woman at Jacob's well at Sychar. Does that imply that faithful Christians should be praying to her, as well?
As long as we don’t worship her, absolutely. Worshipping the Theotokos was the heresy of the ancient sect known as the Collyridians documented by St. Epiphanios in his encyclopedia of heresies known as the
Panarion, meaning “Medicine Chest” or “First Aid Kit.” It is also prohibited by the canons of the Seventh Ecumenical Synod in Nicaea.
But she is due veneration (doulia), indeed, extreme veneration (hyperdoulia); refusal to venerate her was the error of the opposing sect documented by St. Epiphanios, known as the Antidicomarians. In addition, refusing to recognize her status as Theotokos leads to the Christological error of Nestorianism, since it contradicts the idea that in His incarnation, Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, having put on our humanity by being conceived in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit, and that His humanity is united with His divinity without change, confusion, separation or division, and so if we say that St. Mary is not Theotokos, we are left with the problem of who exactly she gave birth to, and the result is a separation or division between the humanity and divinity of our Lord that leads to greater degrees of Nestorianism, which even the Assyrian Church of the East, which venerates Nestorius, and John Calvin, reject (indeed Calvin acknowledged, relucatantly, her status as Theotokos).
Interestingly what prompted Nestorius to develop his flawed Christology and to promote the idea that the human Jesus was a separate person from the divine Logos, the two united by a common will, was a desire to discourage veneration of the Theotokos; Nestorius was basically a crypt-anti-Dicomarian.
There are two Collyridian sects alive today that I am aware of, one of which is the Palmarian Catholic Church located in the deserts of Southern Spain, at Los Palmar de Troyes, which was founded by an antipope Gregory XVII in the 1970s and is now on their fourth antipope I think. They initially sought to attract traditional Roman Catholics alienated by the abolition of the beautiful Tridentine Mass, but then wound up radically changing the faith as soon as they put themselves in a position of power over these people, because their Pope claimed to have prophetic visions, and on the basis of these, not only was money solicited, but also doctrine was changed, so that the Palmarians engage in actual Mariolatry, believe in the real presene of Mary in the Eucharist, and also rewrote the entire Bible. Additionally, they also abolished the Tridentine mass based on a revelation of their first Pope (who was blind and claimed to have Stigmata, which he liked to display), in which he claimed he was told to abolish all of the liturgy except for the Institution Narrative (which in Christian churches tends to quote the account in 1 Corinthians 11 and in the Synoptic Gospels, but since the Palmarians rewrote the Bible, who knows what it looks like).
The other Palmarian group is a small organization within the Roman Catholic church that promotes adoption of the “Fifth Dogma” based on the supposed private revelation to a Dutch woman named Ida Peerleman, who was visited by an apparition claiming to be “The Lady once known as Mary” who demanded, using threatening language and gestures, that the Catholic church declare her to be Co-Redemptrix. The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith repeatedly declared these apparitions as “Not worthy of belief” and not likely to be of supernatural origin*, because, needless to say this does not sound like our glorious lady Theotokos, who in all widely recognized apparitions, has behaved in a manner which is loving and non-threatening and consistent with her behavior in the Gospels; rather, it reminds me of “Jibreel”, the supposed appearance of the Archangel Gabriel to Muhammed who gave him the verses of the Quran and squeezed him in a way that made it difficult to breathe when he did not immediately comply (allegedly, all of the verses came from Jibreel, but I suspect that actually, only the first few encounters Muhammed had were with this entity, based on the strange nature of the earliest chronological suras in the Quran, and the fact that the later ones read like Muhammed was attempting to remember what he had learned of the Bible and of Christian teaching when he, earlier in his life, had spent some time with an Arian or Nestorian missionary, combined with his best recollections of various bits of Arabian mythology and folklore concerning Alexander the Great, and personal fantasies, and I think the “Satanic Verses” controversy is evidence of this - the devil is known for getting people started in something like the Quran and then once satisfied that they are stuck and cannot easily back out of the situation without being killed, which would have happened with Muhammed had he tried to recant the Quran or had stopped producing Suras, abandons them. We know that the devil and his demons will appear as “an angel of light”, even trying to impersonate God where possible, and will deceive if possible even the elect, for the devil prays like a roving lion, as the Holy Apostles St. Paul, St. John and St. Peter warn us.
Nonetheless, there are Catholics who choose to ignore the warnings of the CDF (now called the DDF) that the visions of Ida Peerdeman were not legitimate, including unfortunately one bishop of Amsterdam who wanted to capitalize on the phenomenon, after Peerdeman’s supporters branded the apparition “Our Lady of Europe.” Perhaps he was hoping for pilgrimage, similiar to the pilgrimage experienced in Medjugorje by the contumant Franciscans who have for decades been supposed to vacate the local parish church of St. James and transfer control of it to the Diocese of Mostar (indeed, the Franciscans were first instructed to transfer control of the parishes to the newly established diocese after it ceased to become a missionary province under Propaganda Fide and instead became a regular diocese following the annexation of Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary in the late 19th century, but they are still there, well over a century later, and while there were hopes that Pope Francis would finally put a stop to it, that did not happen unfortunately. Meanwhile, the late Bishop of Mostar who was serving at the time the apparition supposedly happened was vilified in a slanderous manner in a film starring Martin Sheen in the early 1990s, which sought to depict him as a corrupt bishop in league with the communist government of Yugoslavia.
Note that my post is not intended as anti-Franciscan in any kind of general way; rather my criticism is only of the Franciscans in the province which operated churches in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina during the period when that country was ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The RCC used to set up special mission provinces in countries that were not majority Roman Catholic, which were supervised by the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), who was according to many accounts the second most powerful bishop in the Vatican after the Pope (and due to his red cassock and choir dress was called “the Red Pope” because of the scale of his assignment, which included both missionary work and also operating churches in any country that was not Catholic or with a satisfactory stable relationship with the Roman church allowing for normal diocesan operations). Thus Propaganda Fide in turn relied heavily on the mendicant religious orders like the Franciscans, Dominicans, Servites, Carmelites, and also the Jesuits (who are a religious order but not a mendicant religious order), to provide clergy to operate churches in these places, where conditions were dangerous and the quality of life and standard of living often quite lacking. And the problem in Herzegovina began when it became part of Austria-Hungary, but the particular group of Franciscans did not want to give up operating it in order to be reassigned to some other place in need of their services.
It is possible that some at Medjugorje take an approach which could be regarded as Mariolatry in violation of Roman Catholic doctrine, since really the entire thing was repeatedly deemed illegitimate by the diocesan bishop whose job it was to determine whether or not it was a legitimate apparition. However, lest anyone use either this example or the example of Ida Peerdeman as an excuse to bash Roman Catholics, I regard the conduct of the CDF and the Bishops of Mostar as exceptional and exemplary and courageous in both cases, and a very large number of Catholics are opposed to what happened in Medjgorje and are completely opposed to the group advocating for the Blessed Virgin Mary to be declared “Co-redemptrix.”
Additionally it is highly unlikely that anything will come of the agitations of the supporters of Ida Peerdeman, since as a matter of highest priority the Roman Catholic Church remains actively engaged in ecumenical dialogue with the Orthodox and several Protestant churches, and the Orthodox would terminate this dialogue if such an error were promulgated as official doctrine, and likewise I suspect most, perhaps all of the Protestants in dialogue would also leave the table. Also it seems probable that declaring the Theotokos to be co-redemptrix would cause a schism within the Roman Catholic Church.
