What about praying to Mary or the saints?

Question 60065.

The practice of praying to Mary and to the saints is one of the sharpest points of difference between Rome and the churches of the Reformation, and it is one where I find the Catholic explanation and the Catholic practice do not always match each other.

I want to state the case for it fairly before I disagree with it, because a caricature is not worth refuting. Then I want to look at what Scripture actually says about prayer, about the dead, and about Mary herself, who deserves better from Protestants than she usually gets.

What Catholics say they are doing

The official explanation is careful. Catholics distinguish adoration, which belongs to God alone, from veneration, which may be given to the saints, and a higher veneration reserved for Mary. On this account, praying to Mary is not worship but a request for her prayers.

The argument runs that if I may ask a Christian friend on earth to pray for me, and if those who have died in Jesus are more alive than I am, why should I not ask them? Death does not sever the body of Christ.

That is a coherent argument and it deserves a real answer rather than an accusation. So let me give one.

The gap between the theory and the practice

First, an observation. Whatever the catechism says, the practice on the ground frequently goes further. Prayers addressed to Mary ask her to save, to protect, to have mercy, to be our life and our sweetness and our hope.

Those are not the words of a request for intercession. If I ask you to pray for me I do not call you my hope. Language does not become harmless because a technical distinction has been filed somewhere.

So the first difficulty with praying to Mary is not the theory of veneration but the devotional life it actually produces, which has for centuries slid past the line the theory draws.

The problem of hearing

Now the argument from a friend’s prayers, which is the strongest form of the case. The disanalogy is this. When I ask my friend to pray, he hears me because I am standing in front of him or because I have sent him a message.

For Mary to receive the prayers of millions in every language simultaneously, she would have to be aware of countless human hearts at once. That is not a difference of degree from what a saint on earth can do, it is a difference of kind, and it requires attributes that Scripture assigns to God alone.

Solomon prayed at the temple dedication that God would hear, for you, you only, know the hearts of all the children of mankind. The knowledge of hearts is presented there as what distinguishes God from every creature.

What Scripture says about contacting the dead

The Old Testament prohibition is not ambiguous. Israel was forbidden to seek out mediums or necromancers, and the ban is repeated across the Law and the Prophets. Saul’s visit to the woman at Endor is presented as the final act of a ruined man.

The response is usually that the saints are not dead but alive in Christ, which is true, and that this is not necromancy, which is a fair distinction. But notice that the biblical prohibition never carves out an exception for the righteous dead, and Samuel was as righteous as they come.

I would put it this way. Scripture nowhere records a believer addressing a departed saint, never commands it, never commends it, and does forbid the general practice of seeking the dead. That is a considerable body of silence and prohibition to overcome.

One mediator, and what that means

Paul’s statement is the plainest text in the discussion. There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. The word for mediator, mesites, describes the one who stands between two parties and reconciles them.

Catholic theologians answer that Mary’s mediation is subordinate and derived, not parallel. I understand the distinction and I still think the New Testament’s whole instinct runs the other way. The great news of the letter to the Hebrews is that the curtain has been torn and we may draw near with confidence.

Why would a believer with that access route to the throne of grace choose to go by way of a courtier? The invitation is to come boldly, and with confidence draw near to the throne of grace.

Mary in Scripture, honoured properly

Protestants often overcorrect until Mary disappears, and that is its own failure. Scripture calls her blessed among women. She was chosen, she believed, she magnified the Lord in words saturated with Old Testament Scripture, and she stood at the cross when most of the disciples had run.

Her Magnificat calls God my Saviour, which is a line that has never fitted comfortably with the doctrine of her immaculate conception. Mary knew she needed saving and said so.

Honour her as the New Testament does. As a young woman of remarkable faith, the mother of our Lord, and a sinner saved by the son she bore. That is high praise and it is enough.

What Jesus Himself said about it

There is a moment in Luke 11 that has always struck me as decisive. A woman in the crowd calls out that the womb that bore Him is blessed, and it is a spontaneous and warm-hearted thing to say.

Jesus answers, blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it. He redirects the honour, gently but firmly, away from His mother and towards obedience to the word.

That is not a rebuke of Mary. It is a redirection of devotion, offered by the Lord Himself, and it is the pattern I want to follow when I think about praying to Mary.

Where praying to Mary came from

The practice has a history and it is not an apostolic one. The earliest surviving prayer addressed to Mary, the Sub tuum praesidium, dates from around the third or fourth century, which is already generations after the apostles.

The development gathered pace after the Council of Ephesus in 431 defined Mary as Theotokos, the God-bearer. That definition was about Jesus rather than about Mary, protecting the truth that the child in the manger was God. But the title was quickly taken up devotionally and grew far beyond its original purpose.

So praying to Mary is not something the church did from the beginning and later refined. It is something the church took up gradually, and that history is worth knowing when someone tells you the practice is apostolic.

What praying to Mary costs the believer

My deepest objection is pastoral rather than technical. The system implies, without ever quite saying it, that Jesus is stern and His mother is approachable, so it is safer to go through her.

That is a slander on the character of the Saviour, and it is the very thing the Gospels were written to demolish. This is the man who touched a leper, who let a bleeding woman take healing from Him in a crowd, who wept at a grave, who called children to Himself when His own disciples were shooing them away.

If you think you need someone gentler than Jesus to speak to on your behalf, you have not met Him yet. That, more than any argument about mediation, is why I cannot recommend praying to Mary. It solves a problem that does not exist and creates a distance the cross was torn open to remove.

A better use for the impulse behind praying to Mary

There is something in this practice I do not want to dismiss, which is the longing for a mother’s kindness in the presence of God. That longing is not silly and Scripture does not mock it.

God Himself takes up the image. As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you, He says through Isaiah. Jesus wept over Jerusalem and said He had longed to gather her children as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.

So the tenderness people are reaching for in praying to Mary is genuinely there, and it is in the character of God rather than borrowed from a creature. You do not have to go round the side of the house. The front door is open and the Father is the one who runs down the road.

So, now what?

If you have prayed the rosary for years, I am not questioning your sincerity. I am asking you to test the practice against the text, which is the only authority either of us can appeal to that neither of us invented.

If you are a Protestant tempted to be smug, ask yourself when you last thought about Mary at all. A church that never mentions the most honoured woman in redemptive history is not being faithful to Scripture either.

And whoever you are, take the invitation on offer. You do not need an appointment or an intermediary. Have you ever actually tried simply speaking to the Father in the name of His Son and believing that He heard you? See also whether Roman Catholicism is Christian and the difference between Catholic and Protestant.

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

1 Timothy 2:5, ESV