Chapter XLI: Devotion to Saints

PRAY to the saints. They stand in the presence of God, and are His dear friends. They have gone through what we will have to go through. They know well our dangers and our trials. Let us pray for their intercession, and they will pray for us.

Let us imitate their virtues, their humility, patience, meekness, charity, etc. What flesh and blood, by the grace of God, has done, can be done again by the same grace. To think of the saints and examine their lives is a wonderful encouragement to us.

I cannot understand why those outside of the Church should entertain so much repugnance to the doctrine of the intercession of the saints. It seems to be the very first and foremost of all their objections to our Holy Faith, that we pray to the Blessed Virgin and the saints, and yet nothing is more natural and more in accordance with reason and religion, or more consoling and encouraging.

How often we hear such expressions as these: “You Catholics are idolatrous; you pray to the saints. You Catholics place the Virgin Mary and the saints in place of God; in place of the Saviour. Do you not pray to them?” “Yes.” “Well, then, what need is there of further proof? You confess all that we have accused you of.” “Not at all; we pray to the saints, but it by no means follows that we put them in any way in place of God or of our Saviour.

If it did follow, then it must equally follow that we are guilty of idolatry if we ask a friend or pious acquaintance to pray for us. We put that friend or acquaintance just as much in the place of the Saviour, when we ask his prayers, as we do the saint when we ask his prayer. Every prayer to the Blessed Virgin or the saints is a prayer for their help, or for their prayers with God, or what is called “intercession”; there is nothing about it, in any way. that goes beyond the help or intercession of a friend in this world.

“But how do we know they can hear our prayers? Is not that making them equal to God, to suppose them to know everything that goes on in the world, in all its different parts at the same time?”

No, it is not. I know a vast number of things that go on all over the world, a short time after they happen, by looking into the newspaper of a morning; but I know very little after all; and if a saint, whose soul is with God, in His very presence, should look into God’s all-knowledge, and see there, as in a mirror, all that is going on in the world, that he cares to know or is interested about, or all about the salvation of all the souls struggling in the world, it would not be much, after all, compared with the infinite wisdom of God. People who make such objections ought to think a little bit on God’s infinite wisdom, and they will answer their own objections without troubling any one else with them.

The Scripture tells us we are encompassed with a cloud of witnesses. “And therefore we also having so great a cloud of witnesses over us, laying aside every weight and the sin that surroundeth us, by patience let us run to the fight proposed to us” (Hebrews xii. 1).

Who are those “witnesses over us”? Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and Moses, and all those who in old times lived by faith in God’s fear, and are now dead. These, as well as the prophet Jeremias, are they who are “Lovers of their brethren and of the people of Israel,” and “who pray much for the people and for all the holy city” (2 Macc. xv. 14).

And, indeed, our own hearts tell us how proper and right it is that our friends in the other world should know and feel in regard to all that interests our eternal salvation. We rejoice in the thought that a mother, or sister, or brother is watching over us from the heaven of happiness, and helping us in our troubles.

I have heard it myself from the lips of Protestant ministers, in their prayers at funerals, and all the bystanders approved of it, although it was nothing more nor less than the Catholic doctrine of the intercession of saints which these same people are so shocked at in the practice of the Catholic Church.

Think over the example of the saints, particularly of those which instruct you the most and excite you most strongly to the love and service of God. Thus you will keep up the “communion of saints,” and draw down upon yourselves many blessings.