Let’s get the obvious out of the way here: praying to dead people as though they are God is wrong, idolatrous, and blasphemous.
Alright—I hope that was a sigh of relief! We are, in fact, not intending to tread heretical ground today.
The teaching is this: Saints in Heaven are connected to saints on Earth through Christ, and they still pray to God. Therefore, asking for the “prayer of a righteous person” who’s in Heaven isn’t any different than asking a friend to pray for you on Earth.
This is a pretty frequent point of confusion for so many people who ask me about Catholicism, and I absolutely get it. Part of this is the Catholic Church’s use of the word “prayer” to describe talking to the Communion of Saints (which just causes unnecessary confusion, in my opinion). Part of it is also just that there are some… wild speculations out there about ancestor-worship, idolatry, and intercession. It also doesn’t help that, like Apollos, there are plenty of ill-informed Christians who don’t understand the actual Catholic teachings but still speak about them with authority.
Correcting False Assumptions
In my sophomore year of college, my Fall Honors seminar was led by both of the Catholic professors in the program. It was also the semester that we were covering medieval Christian texts—it was, needless to say, very Catholic. Drs. Favale and McCullough did an excellent job of explaining context and answering questions we had without imposing their views or assuming we held similar ones.*
One such time was when we encountered prayer to the Saints in one of the texts we were reading—well, multiple texts, actually. The Early Church was pretty big on intercessory prayer!
When we asked about it, Dr. Favale explained it like this: if we’re all one Body, and Jesus conquered death, that means even Christians who have died are connected in the Body—otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to say that “neither death nor life […] will be able to separate us from the love of God”. To say that we’re not connected to the Saints who have passed on, then, is cutting Christ’s sacrifice short—did He conquer death, or didn’t he?
O Death, Where is Your Sting?
Now, the nature of this living-and-dead connection is debatable. Obviously, just “being connected” to Saints in Heaven doesn’t naturally lead to the conclusion that we can speak with them—but we do see examples throughout Scripture of this connection between the living and the dead being far more than just a vague “we’re all connected in Christ”!
Elijah and Moses are present on Earth for the Transfiguration. Abraham can speak to the rich man in Hell, and he sees what the rich man’s family is doing. Paul prays for a man who has died: “may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that Day” (2 Tim. 4:18). Saints around God’s throne offer up prayers as incense—what might they be praying for?
I don’t write this as a formal argument for the Catholic-specific teaching of prayer to the Saints; there are hundreds of theologians and scholars who’ve already done that! All I hope to impart here is simply this: that the belief that those who have died in Christ are still present in the Body, and that we are connected with them, isn’t idolatrous or heretical or crazy. Death isn’t an impenetrable divide anymore.
It’s All about Christ
It took me a very, very long time to get from “we’re more deeply connected to the Saints than other souls, living and dead, through Christ” to “it’s not totally out there to think Saints could hear us” to “I guess, if they can hear us, they’re probably praying for us”. It’s okay if you’re sitting there thinking Those are crazy jumps! How could anyone ever get there? I totally get it, and I’m not trying to convince you of every stepping stone here—I just hope it makes sense that, once you recognize that the veil being torn means the line between death and life has been forever blurred, a whole bunch of other stuff starts blurring, too.
Prayer to Saints does not replace prayer to Christ. Like I said at the beginning—it’s like asking friends to pray for you here on Earth. If you’re only ever asking others to pray for you and never praying yourself, you’ve got a problem, whether your friends are alive or dead.
Acknowledging the fullness of the unity of Christ’s Body can look like acknowledging the Saints—but what it should always, always look like is that unity carrying you closer to Christ Himself.
* Let it be known that my Catholic professors definitely did not coerce me or encourage me to become Catholic! I did all this investigation pretty much on my own; they were happy to answer questions occasionally, but the most “coercive” thing they ever did was pray for me—interpret that as you will. 😉
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