Praying to Saints

[paul becke]

There is an awful lot of that in these columns isn't there ? In effect, 'straw men' argumentation. Refuting questions that were never part of the belief or argument of the other poster.

 

[jamesbond007]

The scriptures do not condemn praying to saints. It’s kneeling before statues that is prohibited by the scriptures. Kneeling before statues is not necessary for prayer.

. Scripture does not instruct believers in Jesus to pray to anyone other than God either. This thread has gone from the preachy Catholic dogma to what is actually practiced.

Pope Francis Prays Before Madonna Statue In Cuba

The pope has condoned praying TO saints and praying BEFORE statues and KNEELING before statues. Past popes have done this. This happens with Catholics more often than not and no one is appalled. Instead, people take a lot of pictures, get excited and end up doing the same.

God is a jealous God, so let's heed his warning .

"You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 eYou shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am fa jealous God, gvisiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,"

Exodus 20:2-5

Not only that, God sent a plague for worshiping the golden calf.

Exodus 32

 

[BNR32FAN]

. Scripture does not instruct believers in Jesus to pray to anyone other than God either. This thread has gone from the preachy Catholic dogma to what is actually practiced.

Pope Francis Prays Before Madonna Statue In Cuba

The pope has condoned praying TO saints and praying BEFORE statues and KNEELING before statues. Past popes have done this. This happens with Catholics more often than not and no one is appalled. Instead, people take a lot of pictures, get excited and end up doing the same.

God is a jealous God, so let's heed his warning .

"You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 eYou shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am fa jealous God, gvisiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,"

Exodus 20:2-5

Not only that, God sent a plague for worshiping the golden calf.

Exodus 32

Prayers for intercession and supplication are not worship. The topic of the thread is not about the kneeling before statues. I agree no one should kneel before statues but prayers to the saints for supplication is not forbidden in the Bible. So that passage of scripture doesn’t necessarily apply to prayers to the saints.

 

[paul becke]

Then there is no reason to pray to her if she is not in any way a mediator.



Worship is giving glory to God, no? Do we not give God glory by praying to Him?
See, I do not pray to my brother who is alive. Why would I do that if he were to die?
It would be turning him into God.
The safer play is to pray directly to the Lord Jesus Christ (Which is what Scripture shows us).



I said to you that it is CLOSE to necromancy. Yet, "spiritualism" which is a general term for communicating with the dead is associated with mediums, and necromancy, etc.

Well, as a devout Catholic reconverted to the faith, I thought that of a very nice woman I knew who talked incessantly of Mary but it seemed to me, not of Jesus (other than the normal invocations to God and, more specifically, to the respective, divine persons of the Holy Trinity. However as time has passed and I learnt more, I'm not so sure now, but am more inclined to believe what a saint or spiritual author stated, namely, that you cannot honour Mary without, so to speak, automatically honouring God, and that, duly, even more.

However, I must say that I do think a bond of love and understanding with Our Lady is a special gift given only to the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and maybe to a few 'oddbod' mavericks. But scripture itself mentions her only briefly most of the time, and that, almost in passing. Although she seems permanently in the limelight compared with St Joseph !

Yet, it's all there if we reflect, as we should, on the utterly, utterly extraordinary role played by Our Lady as a mere creature who gave human birth to the God who had created her (!) (and who suffered with him so closely in his sorrows and final agony), together with the billions, perhaps trillions of, not stars or even constellations, but galaxies in our universe - and that only in the limited part of the universe our very high-tec telescopes can reach.

However, in their arguments, many of our Protestant posters seem to make no allowance for personal knowledge directly-infused by the Holy Spirit, such as precisely this personal knowledge of the family-type role played among us by Our Lady, the saints and even the Holy Souls in purgatory. And yet it is the Holy Spirit who coordinates the strands of our intelligence all the time, when we are 'thinking straight'.


Catholics teach Mary is co-redeemer along with Christ.

In Matthew 11:11 Jesus said, "Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."

Now, according to Jesus, who is the greatest?
Is it Mary? No. It is John the Baptist who is the greatest.



Okay. You say she is a queen. You have a rosary and hail Marys. You have statues of her everywhere and we see many Catholics bow down to statues of her. Come on now. Who are ya kidding?



I remember when I was a kid. I remember talking with a childhood friend of mine who said he prayed to Mary and it was so good. I told him to pray only to God. This was long before I accepted Jesus as my Savior. But I knew enough about prayer in my liberal Christian home to know that you pray to God alone. I told him to pray to God. But he didn't want to do that. Mary was more effective for him in his prayers. So yes. Mary can take the place of God. Don't kid yourself.

 

[jamesbond007]

With the danger of going out on a tangent: Yes, Mary is called "Advocate, Auxiliatrix, Adjutrix and Mediatrix" (the Apostolic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, 62). It is true that many Catholics call Mary "Mediatrix of all graces" and Co-redemptrix (co-redemptress), but these are not dogmatically defined. Catholics are free to disagree, as long as they do not deny Mary's intercession and mediation in general. In fact, many people thought that pope St. John Paul II - a very Marian pope - would declare the dogma of Marian coredemption. But he did not. Personally, it think that the title "Mary, mother of the Church" more accurately describes the relationship between Christ, Mary, the Church and salvation.

Maybe you are right in that it is not Catholic dogma since I've experienced Catholicism as a child, but not practiced it as an adult. I think it's dangerous to replace Jesus as the sole mediator and redeemer. What it leads to is confusion and souls being lost. The following explains what ends up being practiced.

I found this and think it explains from a Catholic view. What do you think?

Mary, Mother of Salvation | Catholic Answers

 

[jamesbond007]

Prayers for intercession and supplication are not worship. The topic of the thread is not about the kneeling before statues. I agree no one should kneel before statues but prayers to the saints for supplication is not forbidden in the Bible. So that passage of scripture doesn’t necessarily apply to prayers to the saints.

Small potatoes. It must be important to you because you keep repeating yourself like a faulty recording when in practice it is not what happens. You miss the big question of the OP -- "Why don't these people pray to God instead?."

 

[Netgear]

Jesus said put your treasures in Heaven and not on this Earth, right?
Does not Scripture say that we are the temple of God?
Yet, we have massive structures built in the RCC and great accumlation of wealth.
Yes, at one time God allowed temples to be built.
But we are under a New Covenant, with new commands.

Jesus also said to beware scribes who love to go about in long flowing robes and seek attention. When I read that verse in Scripture I cannot help but to think of popes through out history and even now. They love attention and go about in long flowing robes. This alone should be reason enough to throw out Catholicism. But there is even more. So much more that makes it obvious that what they do is not even remotely biblical,, my friend.

Thing is, Jesus did say that we have to pick up our crosses and follow Him. The Catholic Church is very much hated and despised but it still stands. Jesus said the gates of hell would not prevail againt His church.

 

[DamianWarS]

So you know why you'd pray someone here on earth to pray for you, but you don't know why you'd pray someone in heaven to pray for you. Interesting.

But, why in the word would you think it's wrong to do it? That's what we're talking about - not whether or not you see the point, but whether or not it's wrong to do. Our bretheren in heaven aren't dead, they are alive in Christ; it's not necromancy, or divination, or any such thing; it's not an act of worship to pray someone in heaven to help us. It's exactly the same as asking help from our brethren here on earth. So why do you think it's worng?

You're avoiding a direct answer. I don't value prayer to the saints, and it would seem you do but you can't tell me why and keep redirecting. You may say it is the same as asking someone to pray for you but we have yet to establish the values behind this asking which we may differ on... so what are the values? "It's the same as asking someone else"... ok I heard you the first time and let's get that out of the way but what is the value behind it, why are you asking?

 

[BNR32FAN]

Small potatoes. It must be important to you because you keep repeating yourself like a faulty recording when in practice it is not what happens. You miss the big question of the OP -- "Why don't these people pray to God instead?."

I repeat myself because people keep saying that praying is worship. I didn’t miss anything in the OP I already addressed that question. The Bible doesn’t tell us everything we can do it tells us everything we can’t do.

 

[chilehed]

You're avoiding a direct answer. I don't value prayer to the saints, and it would seem you do but you can't tell me why and keep redirecting. You may say it is the same as asking someone to pray for you but we have yet to establish the values behind this asking which we may differ on... so what are the values? "It's the same as asking someone else"... ok I heard you the first time and let's get that out of the way but what is the value behind it, why are you asking?

The question is not whether or not you see the value in having other people pray for you. If you don't, then you don't - although it's a great loss for you.

The question is "is it forbidden to pray people to pray for us", and the answer is quite obviously "no". Then the question is "does the bible give us any reason to think it's wrong to pray our departed brethren in heaven to pray for us", and again the answer is "no". If you have a coherent biblical reasoning to conclude otherwise, than please provide it - and no, the fact that you don't get why someone would want to do it doesn't count.

 

[Albion]

Prayers for intercession and supplication are not worship.

Many times it is, however, although you are correct that it does not have to be so.

The topic of the thread is not about the kneeling before statues.

I agree. That interjection about kneeling and statues just junked up the discussion.

 

[Netgear]

John 21:25
25 But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

This why we have Apostolic succession and Sacred Tradition.

 

[Albion]

John 21:25
25 But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

This why we have Apostolic succession and Sacred Tradition.

Actually, no. We have Apostolic Succession because of the need to rely upon the authenticity and credibility of the pastor/evangelist/bishop. And we have Sacred Tradition because some of the older churches needed term to justify the non-Scriptural doctrines they were creating. Holy or Sacred Tradition, so-called, is simply a theory that says God is giving us additions to his revelation in Scripture if there is some highly-valued opinion that's held by church leaders but which has no basis in Scripture.

 

[Albion]

.

 

[S.O.J.I.A.]

I wrote a long post and 'accidentally' deleted it, so now I'll be as brief as possible. I'm surprised you do not see the connection.

You are scoffing at our being endowed with the divine nature by adoption, just as the Pharisees whom Jesus was upbraiding were tacitly doing in their admonishment of Jesus' disciples over their failure to understand that all the laws on the Sabbath and everything else were framed to subserve the needs of man, not the other way round. Likewise our ability, technically-speaking, to have a mountain move into the sea. Thus, it should not require too great a leap of the imagination to believe that as adopted sons of God in heaven, we should be virtually omniscient, at least concerning God's creation now and in the after-life in heaven. In fact,St John Vianney was said to have the gift of omniscience, and though barely able to pass the exam for the priesthood, was visited in his little village by many of the crowned heads of Europe for Confession and presumably to consult him on wars and other matters of state.

But more interestingly, imho, was the testimony of Fr Joseph Geraci in this YouTube video-clip, concerning his feeling of omniscience - even of feeling that he was actually a part of the very things, such as love and peace, that he was experiencing :

As regards, more specifically, divine-level multitasking, however, some NDE'ers have attested that they were able to watch their life-review, simultaneously, both from their own viewpoint at the time, and from the viewpoint of the people they had interacted with and hurt/harmed in various ways.

where In scripture are we told that we will acquire God's divine attributes?

we have biblical data of Jesus saying that God will give us the power to move mountains if we have faith in Him. where does He tell that we will have omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence?

 

[Netgear]

Actually, no. We have Apostolic Succession because of the need to rely upon the authenticity and credibility of the pastor/evangelist/bishop. And we have Sacred Tradition because some of the older churches needed term to justify the non-Scriptural doctrines they were creating. Holy or Sacred Tradition, so-called, is simply a theory that says God is giving us additions to his revelation in Scripture if there is some highly-valued opinion that's held by church leaders but which has no basis in Scripture.

Thats YOUR view. Obviously a non Catholic view brother

 

[Albion]

Thats YOUR view. Obviously a non Catholic view brother

On the contrary, I merely relayed the historical record/facts to you since it seemed to me that you were not aware of them but had nevertheless stuck your neck out to say...

This why we have Apostolic succession and Sacred Tradition.

 

[JF Seabastian]

Some value tradition over the scripture... traditionally Catholicism and I guess a few other faiths have prayed to saints

Lots of people value traditions over Scripture; however, it is not a Christian thing, nor is it a Catholic thing. Catholics do value Holy Tradition, but it must not be contradicted by Scripture to been accepted as Holy Tradition.

 

[Netgear]

On the contrary, I merely relayed the historical record/facts to you since it seemed to me that you were not aware of them but had nevertheless stuck your neck out to say...

I disagree.

 

[JESUS=G.O.A.T]

Lots of people value traditions over Scripture; however, it is not a Christian thing, nor is it a Catholic thing. Catholics do value Holy Tradition, but it must not be contradicted by Scripture to been accepted as Holy Tradition.

Praying to saints contradicts scripture though

 

[JESUS=G.O.A.T]

Lots of people value traditions over Scripture; however, it is not a Christian thing, nor is it a Catholic thing. Catholics do value Holy Tradition, but it must not be contradicted by Scripture to been accepted as Holy Tradition.

Praying to saints contradicts scripture though

 

[JESUS=G.O.A.T]

Lots of people value traditions over Scripture; however, it is not a Christian thing, nor is it a Catholic thing. Catholics do value Holy Tradition, but it must not be contradicted by Scripture to been accepted as Holy Tradition.

Praying to saints contradicts scripture though