Catholic Prayer

Why pray to anybody except God? It seems to be His Will. We have noticed over the millennia that most miracles e.g. of healing, but others as well, are granted after a prayer to one of God’s servants in Heaven, the Saints.

Many Protestants object to Catholics praying to Our Lady and the Saints. Those who are sincere are genuinely distressed at what they see as idolatry. Their objections, however, are based on misunderstandings.

To debate any topic intelligently we must begin by defining our terms, and then draw conclusions according to legitimate rules of thought. One Protestant friend was recently kind enough to provide a definition based on the analysis of the word for 'prayer' in the Greek Concordance. This, however, does not define the meaning of the English word 'prayer'; it simply explains the meaning in the specific places where it appears in Scripture. This type of definition ignores the possibility of a word being legitimately used with a wider meaning in everyday discourse. If we used the same logic we would have to say that a space ship cannot be called a 'ship' because in the Bible a ship is always travelling through water.

However, for the sake of argument, let us work with this definition: 'Prayer is the addressing of Divine Honour in the form of words, thoughts or feelings to God.'

And the definition of God given in the Catholic Catechism is 'The supreme spirit, who alone exists of Himself, and is infinite in all perfections.'

If we accept these definitions, then it is clear that all Christians pray when they address Divine honour to God. A pagan invoking The Spirit of the Jungle to obtain some favour is probably also praying, although he might not be clear in his mind whether the Spirit of the Jungle is truly supreme. If he thinks of the spirit as simply one among many, without asking whether or not there is one supreme spirit, than by the definition we are using, his incantations are not prayer.

Christians who have grown up with a clearly enunciated body of doctrine are inclined to forget that Paganism never had any such theology; paganism is merely a collection of anecdotes, fables and traditional practices without any real cohesion. The one exception in the Modern world, apart from Judaism and Christianity, is Islam: but this is precisely because Islam is merely the most widespread of the Judaeo-Christian heresies. There is nothing in Islam that has not been borrowed from these sources.

The Christian conception of Heaven, which was never challenged for the first 1500 years after Christ, is that of God the Holy Trinity, enthroned (to use our human analogy) in companionship with the Angels who did not follow Satan, and with the souls of those humans who passed the Judgment. Their bodies have returned to dust until the Last Day, when they will be gloriously reunited with their souls and taken to Heaven for all eternity. In the meantime God gives these souls the power to see what is taking place on the Earth, and to hear the words or thoughts that we on Earth address to them. This is what is meant by 'The Communion of Saints' in the Apostles' Creed. By the definition we have been using, these words are not prayer, they are simply conversations. It might be added that these conversations are not always one way.

In everyday speech, however, it is usual to call a conversation with an angel or saint 'prayer'. This is legitimate because the definition of 'prayer' as used in the previous sentence is 'the addressing of words, thoughts or feelings to God as the Supreme Spirit, or to the denizens of Heaven as His especially favoured creatures.' That is why Catholic prayer to angels and saints is not idolatry