Sooner or later, one of you will take the bait and start protesting and getting excited. If that happens to be your Evangelical interlocutor, then they’ll say something like, “Of course prayer is important — but it’s prayer to GOD! You can’t pray to people! That’s idolatry!!”
Keep calm here and say something like: “I’ve noticed that a lot of Protestants have this misconception, that Catholics pray to saints as if they were God …” and then you ask the vital question: “Tell me, do you have a prayer team at your church? Do they take prayer requests? Doesn’t the Bible say, ‘pray for one another’ and ‘pray for your enemies and those who spitefully persecute you’?”
What fascinates me is that a good number of Protestants can’t see where this is headed. They’ll say something like, “Yes, and our prayer team prays to JESUS! Not to SAINTS!” or “Yes, but what does that have to do with your idolatrous papistry?”
Then you explain that the saints who have died, whose souls and bodies have separated, are still alive with God in heaven. (Evangelicals will grant this readily.) They are therefore still part of the church universal. And they’re part of the Church’s ‘prayer team.’
You might have to explain a little bit about time — that God is not in time, that ‘the church universal’ doesn’t just mean ‘whatever Christians worship in the same building with you Sunday morning’ or ‘whatever Christians happen to be around while you personally are around on earth’ but the whole shebang from a God’s-eye-view, across space and across time. And you explain that ‘pray’ at root means ‘ask’ or ‘beg’, like in Shakespearean English (“I pray you sir, take patience; I have hope.”) It does not refer to an activity that can only piously be directed toward God — it is not the same as ‘worship.’ Catholics do not worship saints.
We ‘pray’ to lots of people all the time — we just use other words for it. Our praying to the saints means asking them to pray for us to God, just like we’d ‘pray’ to the prayer team to pray for us to God. Only we can’t send the saints an email or sign up on their prayer request list, so our asking them to pray looks quite a lot like our asking God for whatever we ask him for.
Xeno wrote:That was pretty much how I was taking it. You're asking someone who is already dead and supposed to be in heaven to pray for you. It just doesn't make sense to me. It used to make sense to me to ask other living people to help you pray for things, but praying to someone who isn't god to take or to additionally pray to god just seems like extra unnecessary steps in the process. These people should supposedly have better things to do than carry your rather insignificant, by comparison, prayers to god for you.
Though I stopped believing in prayer before I stopped believing in god.
Mullet Death wrote:I'm not sure I entirely understand the question? All Christians pray for one another and ask for prayer from one another. Intercessory prayer to canonized saints is nothing more than the logical extension of that thanks to our belief in the "communion of saints." http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04171a.htm
To ask why we pray to saints is to ask why we pray at all.
LastLfan wrote:Mullet Death wrote:I'm not sure I entirely understand the question? All Christians pray for one another and ask for prayer from one another. Intercessory prayer to canonized saints is nothing more than the logical extension of that thanks to our belief in the "communion of saints." http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04171a.htm
To ask why we pray to saints is to ask why we pray at all.
Someone else who knows the apostles creed, i no longer feel lonely
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