We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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There’s a reason ancient churches such as St. Peter’s in Rome are located where they are. It’s not that such places are scenic. It’s because that’s where a saint or martyr was buried. Church buildings subsequently were built because the people of God were already meeting there to pray, listen to scripture, celebrate the sacraments and ask the saint buried there to pray for them. This was no small part of why the early Christians gave pagans the willies and periodically wound up as martyrs themselves. For Christians usually met at night (since that’s when slaves had free time and many Christians were slaves), in a graveyard, and they were said to eat somebody’s body and blood—all while speaking to the dead!
You’d think people would have gotten the general gist of what Catholics are really up to in the following 2,000 years, but one of the main things that still gives people the willies is confusion over what is going on when Catholics say to Mary, “Pray for us sinners!”
I can relate to those with the willies. When I first got married to my cradle Catholic wife, I wanted nothing to do with that stuff and begged her to leave off what I took to be the dangerous pagan practice of praying to Mary. As I had been taught to think, prayer to the saints was indistinguishable from séance or summoning the dead and was therefore forbidden by scripture. As near as I could tell, the whole thing was occultism. Her prayers to Mary and the saints genuinely worried me, particularly since scripture seemed to plainly condemn it:
And when they say to you, “Consult the mediums and the wizards who chirp and mutter,” should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living? To the teaching and to the testimony! Surely for this word which they speak there is no dawn. They will pass through the land, greatly distressed and hungry; and when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will curse their king and their God, and turn their faces upward; and they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and they will be thrust into thick darkness. (Isaiah 8:19-22)
This wasn’t helped by my various encounters with uneducated Catholics who sometimes got fuddled and saw no problem with things like horoscopes and divination. So it seemed obvious to me that the Church had somehow lost track of the Ten Commandments and fallen into a foggy sort of occultism.
Until, that is, I took the time to find out what the Church actually said about both occultism and prayer to the saints. As I discovered, the Church actually was quite aware of the dangers of the occult. For example, CCC 2115-2116 said:
God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints. Still, a sound Christian attitude consists in putting oneself confidently into the hands of Providence for whatever concerns the future, and giving up all unhealthy curiosity about it…
All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to ‘unveil’ the future (cf. Deuteronomy 18:10; Jeremiah 29:8). Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.
That was a surprise to me. Why was the Church teaching us to regard necromancy, divination, horoscopes, and the rest as sins against the First Commandment (“You shall have no other gods before me”) if, as I had supposed, they had forgotten the First Commandment? If the Church warns us to avoid the occult then why does she pray to saints?
The answer of the Church turned out to be straightforward. We pray to saints because the saints aren’t dead, because they aren’t replacements for God and because they remain our brothers and sisters in Christ.
It’s like this: there are three states of the Church, but only one Church. The Church exists here on earth, in purgatory, and in heaven. Death does nothing whatever to sever that communion, which is why we can pray for the dead and they can pray for us. As the Catechism says:
958 Communion with the dead. “In full consciousness of this communion of the whole Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the Church in its pilgrim members, from the very earliest days of the Christian religion, has honored with great respect the memory of the dead; and ‘because it is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins’ she offers her suffrages for them.”[1] Our prayer for them is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective.
959 In the one family of God. “For if we continue to love one another and to join in praising the Most Holy Trinity – all of us who are sons of God and form one family in Christ – we will be faithful to the deepest vocation of the Church.”[2]
This, after all, was at least part of the point of the story of Jesus’ reply to the Sadducees, who rejected the notion of the resurrection of the dead and hoped to catch Jesus in his words and show him up for a fool:
The same day Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection; and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies, having no children, his brother must marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother. So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife? For they all had her.” But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” (Matthew 22:23-32)
It was also, in part, the point of the story of the Transfiguration, when the extremely dead Moses illustrated Jesus’ point above by appearing with Elijah and speaking with Jesus in the hearing of the apostles (Matthew 17:1-8).
Of which more tomorrow.
[1] Lumen Gentium 50; cf.2 Maccabees 12:45
[2] Lumen Gentium 51; cf. Hebrews 3:6
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