nyj
Goodbye, my puppy
- Feb 5, 2002
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Yes, we pray to Mary, the saints and the angels. HOWEVER, the idea of prayer differs between Catholics and Protestants. Simply defined, "to pray" means "to ask".
Hence, if I ask you to pray to God for me, I have prayed to you. That is how Catholics understand the term.
Do we worship Mary, the saints and the angels? No, definitely not. We honor and respect them for their exceptionally holy lives, and they serve as role models for us, but worship is reserved for God alone.
So why pray to Mary, the saints and angels? There are several verses in the Bible (Old and New Testament alike) which show that 1)we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses - which leads us to believe the saints and angels are aware of our actions here on earth, 2)Jesus speaks about guardian angels seeing the face of God - showing a connection between heaven and earth, 3)prophets long since "passed away" petitioning God for mercy on Israel - found in the deuterocanonical books, but still representative of both Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox belief, 4)when we die, we are not dead, but alive in Christ, part of the One Body and all will be revealed - a clear argument against prayer to the saints being "contacting the dead".
Given all this (and that was an extremely short outline), Catholics believe that prayer to the saints is efficacious, and that it's sort of an extended "prayer chain". We ask them to add us to their prayers and worship of God, which we know from reading Revelation.
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