Praying to the Saints

DAY 268

CHALLENGE

“Catholics shouldn’t pray to the saints. Prayer is an act of worship, which is due only to God.”

In contemporary American English, “pray” indicates an act of worshipping God. However, Catholics do not give divine worship to the saints. The root of the confusion lies in the fact that the English word “pray” is derived from the Latin word precare, which meant “to ask/

implore/entreat.”
By the 1300s, the English phrase “I pray thee” was used as a way

to make a polite request—i.e., “I ask you” (equivalent to “please” or “if you will”). “I pray thee” was later contracted to the single word “prithee,” which is rare in American English but more familiar in British English. Because of the Protestant influence on American English, the word “pray” was eventually restricted to acts of worshipping God. However, this was not its original meaning.

The original sense of the term is preserved in settings like law courts (where the phrase “My client prays that the court . . .” still means “My client asks that the court . . .”) or in Catholic circles (where it indicates asking the saints for their prayers).

If you read the Catechism (or other official Catholic documents), you won’t commonly find the phrases “praying to the saints” or “prayer to the saints.” What the Church normally uses instead is the phrase “intercession of the saints” (cf. CCC 956, 1434), which expresses more precisely what Catholics are asking when they “pray to the saints.” They are asking the saints for their intercession—i.e., they are asking them to ask God to grant their prayer requests.

In other words, they are asking the saints to be prayer partners with them.

They are not giving the saints the worship that is due to God alone. No matter what respect a created being may be due (cf. Exod. 20:12, Rom. 13:7, 1 Pet. 2:17), God is an infinite, uncreated being who is due the supreme form of worship. Catholics do not violate this when they ask the saints to be their prayer partners.