Hello! I had a nice time talking to my Catholic friend about praying to saints and contrary to what I have been taught, he told me that Church Fathers encouraged praying to saints! I thought the Church Fathers didn't teach praying to saints, but why do these writing seem to do so? Here are some writings from the Church Fathers: "Atticus, sleep in peace, secure in your safety, and pray anxiously for our sins" (funerary inscription near St. Sabina’s in Rome [A.D. 300]). "Pray for your parents, Matronata Matrona. She lived one year, fifty-two days" (ibid.). "Mother of God, [listen to] my petitions; do not disregard us in adversity, but rescue us from danger" (Rylands Papyrus 3 [A.D. 350]). "[The Shepherd said:] ‘But those who are weak and slothful in prayer, hesitate to ask anything from the Lord; but the Lord is full of compassion, and gives without fail to all who ask him. But you, [Hermas,] having been strengthened by the holy angel [you saw], and having obtained from him such intercession, and not being slothful, why do not you ask of the Lord understanding, and receive it from him?’" (The Shepherd 3:5:4 [A.D. 80]). Here is a writing by Methodius: "Hail to you for ever, Virgin Mother of God, our unceasing joy, for to you do I turn again. You are the beginning of our feast; you are its middle and end; the pearl of great price that belongs to the kingdom; the fat of every victim, the living altar of the Bread of Life [Jesus]. Hail, you treasure of the love of God. Hail, you fount of the Son’s love for man. . . . You gleamed, sweet gift-bestowing Mother, with the light of the sun; you gleamed with the insupportable fires of a most fervent charity, bringing forth in the end that which was conceived of you . . . making manifest the mystery hidden and unspeakable, the invisible Son of the Father—the Prince of Peace, who in a marvelous manner showed himself as less than all littleness" (Oration on Simeon and Anna 14 [A.D. 305]). "Therefore, we pray [ask] you, the most excellent among women, who glories in the confidence of your maternal honors, that you would unceasingly keep us in remembrance. O holy Mother of God, remember us, I say, who make our boast in you, and who in august hymns celebrate the memory, which will ever live, and never fade away" (ibid.). "And you also, O honored and venerable Simeon, you earliest host of our holy religion, and teacher of the resurrection of the faithful, do be our patron and advocate with that Savior God, whom you were deemed worthy to receive into your arms. We, together with you, sing our praises to Christ, who has the power of life and death, saying, ‘You are the true Light, proceeding from the true Light; the true God, begotten of the true God’" (ibid.). What do I make of this?
What one really ought to make of this is that the ancient Fathers supported asking the Saints for intercession. A distinction can be made simply between the orthodox practice of invoking a Saint and the more Romish doctrines forbidden in the Thirty Nine Articles. I would of course defer to some of the more learned students of theology on this site though.
Ah.. yes this is a sophism that my orthodox friends used to constantly bring up, until I raised up this point: How exactly do we know that any of those early Christian inscriptions were from orthodox Christians? I mean when you look at so many early heretics, the donatists, the paulists, the docetists, the arians, the nestorians.... all of these were Christians! And what evidence would it have for us about proper Christianity to find one of the inscriptions of such a purported Christian?.. Observe how insignificant the quotes you presented are... some inscription next to some obscure place; an anonymous papyrus.. where are the great "prayers to the saints" treatises in St. Augustine, or St. Cyril? They don't exist! We have many writings left from the Church Fathers, such as for instance the majestic Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril.. and if we read those lectures, training about apostolic doctrine for a new Christian, a "Catechumen", we find a treatise that is 100% devoted to Christ and not keen on getting distracted on common men and frail creatures who have no redemptive significance
Intercessory prayer to "the saints" is not found in the Bible, therefore it is not a Protestant practice. The Romish system of canonization is also not found in the Bible, and in fact goes quite against the Scriptural definition of what a "saint" is.
I struggle in this area a bit. I have a friend who constantly offers prayers to St Anthony to find her a parking space at the supermarket. Perhaps she finds some comfort in it, perhaps it helps calm her down and minimise the road rage. It is certainly not a practice that I would endorse. however: I also subscribe to the idea that Church is family, and that in Christ death has been defeated. If I can ask for your intercession whilst you are alive, what am I saying if I hold that death precludes the request? For me a logical outcome of my belief in the resurrection is an acceptance of the prayers of the saints. That is not in place of praying to God, but rather the recognition that prayer is the work of the whole Church, living and departed. It is not as if it is the major part of my intercession, but the acknowledgement that we are part of one holy catholic and apostolic church. in the words of the debauched and glorious Dean of St Paul's John Donne: Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me. In the midst of our brokenness, we find wholeness; in the midst of our solitude, we find community; XXII. OF PURGATORY The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God. I don't see what I am speaking of as an invocation of the saints in the terms of the articles, but rather as an acknowledgement of the wider community of faith in which I stand. I am sure that some will want to accuse me of sophism, however I don't think that is fair. When I was in Papua New Guinea we noticed in the community a sense of tangible connection with a spirits of the old folk in the tribe, now dead. We forget our forbears, we forget our history and we are the poorer for it. In the midst of life we are confronted by death, and in dying we are born to eternal life.
Philip's post is well reasoned. I will tell you something about the saints -something for which the definition of 'saint' is irrelevant- they are praying for us whether we ask them to or not. The Apocalypse gives us a picture of the celestial life as one of continual joy, worship, thanksgiving, and prayer. The holy incense of prayer continuously wafts before the throne of God. I do not have a problem acknowledging our brethren who have passed from the church militant to the church triumphant. But all prayer must, in the end, come into focus upon the holy God. Let me give an example, the Angelus: The Angel of the Lord declared to Mary: And she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Behold the handmaid of the Lord: Be it done unto me according to Thy word. Hail Mary . . . And the Word was made Flesh: And dwelt among us. Hail Mary . . . Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Let us pray: Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts; that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ Our Lord. Amen. Here, the format is to include a proper collect to close the cycle of prayer. A collect "through the same Christ Our Lord."
That there were no full-blown treatises is likely true, but that's because the question of the intercession of saints was not a matter of dispute even between orthodox vs. Donatists, Nestorians, etc. The saints you mention above, and many others, make passing mention of the practice, however. Indeed Saint Cyril, in his last catechetical lecture (on the liturgy), says, "Then we commemorate also those who have fallen asleep before us, first Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, that at their prayers and intercessions God would receive our petition. Then on behalf also of the Holy Fathers and Bishops who have fallen asleep before us, and in a word of all who in past years have fallen asleep among us, believing that it will be a very great benefit to the souls , for whom the supplication is put up, while that holy and most awful sacrifice is set forth."
And that's what makes the Rosary such a beautiful prayer. It is scriptural , based upon the life, passion, death and resurrection of Our Blessed Lord while also having a mantra element which assists meditation
without a doubt, I couldn't have said it better myself! And who are we to limit God in His ability to make the prayers known to the Saints.
I understand that the argument for praying to saints is as goes: --That we have someone to pray for us (Mary or saints) as well as someone to pray to (God). Each conveys grace in a different way (supposedly). --That the dead in Christ are alive in heaven. --That the idea of them being burdened by our sufferings in heaven is probably unlikely because God has righteous anger and sorrow, and since their holiness emanates from him, they can feel those concerns as well. However... --I feel that the scriptures in Revelation used to justify the idea of prayers to saints suggests they already do what they can without being asked. Since all their obligations and missions to God are already done as asked by him, they are already offering to us whatever grace can be given to the masses. --Many canonizations related to saints do not have to have miracles (for confirmation) related to whatever the saint was most known for in their public ministry. It can be whatever. If you wanted to make praying to a particular saint a requirement for a certain thing to be granted you take that obligation away from God and one must ask how the saint in question acquired the graces to become known for say, finding keys if there was no saint for such a thing before that person got canonized. --The idea of 'one mediator between God and man' and intercessory prayer makes more sense from a reformed perspective rather than the one proposed that advocates saints. The idea is that on earth even priests who perform the eucharistic sacrifice are provided to us by God and that intercessory prayer is meant to help provide some channel of grace to us by someone who has more faith in an area that we are lacking. I don't see it as applicable to someone who has any sort of faith at all in the supernatural to request a saint's intercession if they do believe in some sort of supernatural realm already. To do so would make them dependent on that saint and take grace and attention away from God, and there is some argument that we help saints increase in grace in the supernatural realm even after death even if its not necessary, but the problem is that there's a favoritism among the saint followers such as with St. Francis that takes the spotlight off of equality of respect to them and very demeaning not just to the others but to God himself. We can simply ask God a simple request which many protestants who do not depend on saints do and find the way out and that is simple enough without complicating it in saint theology. I am tired right now so I can't go further into the apologetics against it that I'd like to (some areas I need to refine a bit) but that's part of my argument.
Indeed so. This is the correct way to ask for the intercession of the saints. I myself am heavily focused on the Jesus Prayer, so I tend not to do this as frequently as most in my church, but there are certain saints I have a devotion to (Sts. Athanasius, Sts. Mina and Abanoub, martyred in their youth and adolescence by Diocletian, St. Anthony the Great, Paul the Hermit, Thomas the Apostle, his disciples Addai and Mari, the Cappadocians, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Severus, St. Jacob of Sarugh, St. Gregorios bar Hebraeus, St. John Chrysostom, St. Jan Hus (a glorified saint in the Orthodox church along with St. Jerome of Prague), the other St. Jerome, St. Irenaeus and Epiphanius, St. Seraphim of Sarov, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, St. John of Kronstadt, St. Tikhon of Moscow, St. Rafael of Brooklyn, and many others, especially our most venerable lady, the Theotokos and ever Virgin Mary, but I venerate these saints because they point to Christ and represent examples of people who have evidently and obviously been glorified, Christians who reflect God’s glory into the world. In the Roman Catholic church however one gets the feeling that there are people who go beyond veneration (doulia) and asking for the intercession of the saints, to worshipping them and praying to them, with the effect that our Messiah, and indeed God the Father and the Holy Spirit, are reduced to merely the three leading figures in a pantheon, in violation of the second commandment. The BCP properly prohibits this while retaining the veneration of the saints, focusing on the Apostles in the early editions of the BCP before expanding the number of “black letter days,” although unfortunately there are some political figures commemorated in, for example, the 1979 BCP, along with those more readily deserving of the honor such as major church fathers.
The 1979 BCP is the Episcopal Church's BCP, not the Orthodox Anglican communion. I should also note another argument that some advocates of praying to saints use. That is, that God wants distinguished people to represent certain arms of God's work when administering certain tasks on Earth. This is why there are ark angels for specific tasks. For example, you have a certain angel like Michael for battle and Raphael for healing, that are not only distinctly biblical (so you know what kind of God they're connected to) but represent a certain task. Also true of the two prophets n Revelation. However, that boundary was already laid out in the Old Testament where people pray to God and he decides which angels to send. Going to far with this concept causes people to become distracted by devotion to specific saints over God, overly dependent and as I mentioned, creates a kind of favoritism. One Anglo-Catholic website I visited says Mary, for instance, was intercessor of graces by her example of obedience to God recorded in the bible and not to the extent the RCC makes her.
Well, it is salvageable, but yes, fair enough. It’s simply a great blessing it was released into the public domain, and the chaps who did the Anglican Service Book have already accomplished the arduous task of converting it all into usable traditional language (even the infamous “Star Trek prayer” is unrecognizable, now having no exceptional astronomic content).
I agree. My wife was Hispanic and I've had enough experience in Hispanic ministry now to recognize that Latin American Catholicism has serious problems with syncretism. I've had many a former Hispanic Catholic tell me that they were raised Catholic but now they're Christian (ie. some form of evangelical or Pentecostal.) As much as I cringe to hear that, I generally trust their sincerity and they may be right after a fashion.
I have some Hispanic heritage. My dad's side mainly. My father was raised a Catholic but became a Protestant. My relatives on his side are still Roman Catholic, but not dogmatically so. They've never had any real problems with our religious differences. I've mentioned Santeria being an example of Latin American Catholic and Folk religion syncretism, though it's more South American than Mexican, but we have that stuff in our culture as well. There's a psychic on Mexican TV who tries to attract viewers by having an altar with Jesus and Mary statues in the back while offering readings.
Of course it was! There was also nothing from that era written on images, and yet we know clearly that the Church Fathers, in majority, rejected worshiping to images... So when today's Roman Catholics point to some patristic-era scrawling of Mary, almost 100% it can be concluded to come from a schismatic or heretical Christian sect, and yet they assume that it for sure comes from "early Catholics"...
I should also add that I am not opposed to having images in the sanctuary (much less to imagery in art); our Anglican church has a couple of beautiful artistic depictions from sacred history... but our devotion is aimed directly at the Holy Trinity, at Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit... we look past all the artworks when it comes time to devote our minds to holy worship, and we only ever bow, kneel, and adore the triune God
The Orthodox Church, Lutherans and Anglo-Catholics also reject image worship; the Seventh Ecumenical Council commends the veneration of icons because our Lord became incarnate and can thus now be depicted, but never worshipped. Nor are the saints ever to be worshipped. In theory the Roman Catholics also hold to this principle; in practice there are substantial numbers of laity who go beyond veneration (doulia, salutation, the same thing we do to relatives, the American flag, superior officers in the military, the Holy Bible, and so on) and engage in adoration - worship; latria, which can be offered only to God. The worst offenders are the Fifth Dogma people campaignig, based on a demon posing as St. Mary, but whose threatening and un-Christocentric behavior is contrary to what we know of the Theotokos, that appeared to a Dutch woman in a state of what the Russian Orthodox call Prelest (Spiritual Delusion), and demanded a fifth dogma be promulgated declaring her Co-Redemptrix. This is, contrary to popular belief, not yet RC doctrine. The second group are the Fatima obsessives, who I am tempted to refer to in jest as as the Fatimids, after the fundamentalist Shia caliphate which reached its nadir under Caliph Al-Hakim, who severely persecuted Christians in Egypt and was if memory serves assassinated by the Mamaluke warriors in order to preserve the peace. Al-Hakim is, as some of you may know, also worshipped as God incarnate by the highly secretive Gnostic Druze religion of Lebanon and Israel. The third and most noxious group of Mariolaters are the Medjugorje people, who conspire with the local Franciscans, who have uncanonically exploited the hallucination of teenagers known to have smoked marijuana in order to retain un-canonical control of the local parish church of St. James, which they were supposed to turn over to the Diocese in the 19th century. Herzegovina, when it was part of the Ottoman Empire, was ministered to by a Franciscan province, but after its liberation by Austria-Hungary in the 1870s, a regular diocesan structure was implemented and the Franciscans were supposed to disband, something they have refused to do ever since, which just goes to show how weak the internal controls of the Roman church actually are. When you effectively take all the rights and privileges of a diocesan bishop and consolidate them into an infallible archbishop, only that bishop (I hate to call him the Pope, because it is an insult to the pious bishops of Alexandria who did not arrogate to themselves the title of Pope in the sixth century but were called it as an honorific starting in the second century; it is my opinion that there are only two Bishops rightly called Pope, His Beatitude Pope and Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria and All Africa, and His Holiness Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria, the former Greek Orthodox, the latter Coptic, and both sharing the name Theodore II in a happy coincidence. Bergoglio is at best the schismatic Bishop of Rome). And thus we also have Papolaters, who take the pretentious title of Vicar of Christ rather too seriously, and other Mariolaters, such as those who fawn over the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is a legitimate icon, which is painted in an Aztec style compatible with Orthodox iconographic standards, and it did help substantially with the evangelization of Mexico and the destruction of the open practice of the evil Aztec religion, which was the most foul and diabolical of cults. But it is now subject to improper veneration or worship in an elaborate shrine; people approach on their knees, which is wrong and should be forbidden, and then are whisked past the icon on an escalator. Wrong, wrong, wrong. To all of this Article 22 applies in full force.