what about this:
""holy mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.""
this is exactly how the Pagans of Makkah used to pray, they used to talk to Mannat, Alat, even Abraham and say "O mannat pray for us to Allah" "O Ibrahim pray for us" etc
in Islamic definition it is worshiping.
Sa what about it?!!
Catholics no more worship Mary than Moslems worship Mohammed.
Esteem does not equate to worship.
We fully recognize that Mary is not divinity, just as Moslems recognize that Mohammed is human, like her even.
Now maybe Moslems are of the type not to afford their most saintly the highest respect, esteem and honor, as Catholics do to Mary. Maybe they are of the type that believe that there are no people in heaven and that all are dead, and there is therefore a complete disconnect between the earthbound and those in heaven. Maybe they are of the type that they find it sacrilege to ask someone else to pray for them to God, but as Catholics we are not so inclined.
We pray for others, and want others to pray for us all the time. We especially want the most saintly, those most close to God in their words and their deeds, to pray for us.
So if that is worship, then we worship many, many, many, many others, and not just Mary.
We ask people to pray for us. That is what we do. If Moslems and others are not so inclined, then that is their perogative too. As long as they don't carry on implying that we who ask others to pray for us are therefore worshipping them as we worship God, then all the power to them in declining the prayers of the most saintly among us.
We do not worship Mary as a Moslem may worship God. We do not worship Mary in the normal sense of the word 'worship', but only by the special Islamic definition of the word, as you are now defining it.
Please always be clear then that Islam now defines 'worship' something other than the normal usage, so that you do not continue to mislead and deceive others about what it is that Catholics actually do.
We ask Mary—and everybody else that might want to— to pray for us yes.
But we do not therefore believe that Mary, (and everybody else too), is therefore a Goddess on that account.
Honest Muslims really ought to make themselves clear on that point, when they state without qualifications that Catholics and EO worship Mary. It is dishonest to use the word 'worship' to make it appear as if Christians worship Mary as a goddess.
And we do not differentiate from the saints that have passed on, and the saints that walk the earth now with us. For Jesus himself answers the Saducees that the God of Abraham and Isaac is a God of the living and not the dead.
Abraham and Mary are as alive as you and I, more so even, the stain of sin removed from the souls of the eternally saved!
That is the good news of the Christian gospel. Life in God carries on, erases the stain of sin and the sting of death.
We understand God to be a God of the living and not of the dead, that the saint are alive in Heaven and very close to God indeed—though still human of course— and that we can beseech saints to pray for us on our behalf.
If such veneration and connectedness to good people of all ages is outside of the scope of Islam, that is all well and fine.
But if the implication of Koranic passages is that we equate Mary the same divinity as we do Jesus, then the Koran is clearly in error.
Mainstream orthodox teaching of the universal catholic church has never taught that Mary is anything but a humble girl who gave birth to the Lord our God, Christ Jesus of Nazareth.
So it now becomes a lie for Moslems to imply and to carry on saying that we worship both
Mary and Jesus without differentiation.
We do not.
We
worship Jesus, who is the one True God, creator of the heavens and the earth, of all things seen and unseen,
and we
pray to Mary.
