Brought to Santa Fe, NM in 1625
Cathedral Basilica St. Francis of Assisi
Praying to Saints: Part 2
Viewed through a Catholic Lens, it is accurate to say Catholics don’t “pray to dead people.” Some of the prayers are what Protestants call “intercessory,” because someone is standing in the gap for another. When the prayers slide from intercession to supplication, the lens becomes blurry. Asking a saint or angel to provide something may seem like God is excluded and His divine attributes transferred to created beings.
In hope of clarifying these issues, my future-son-in-law wrote the following analysis of The Hail Mary Prayer:
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now,
and at the hour of our death, amen.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. This is the greeting of Gabriel to Mary in Luke’s Gospel, so simply quoting Scripture (Luke 1:28). The Greek word for ‘full of grace’ is often translated by Protestants as ‘highly favored,’ but at that point it’s a matter of tradition. Many of the early writers of the Church (within the first 300 years of Christ) translated it as ‘full of grace,’ and it is their early witness that Catholics look to.
Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Quoting Scripture again: Gabriel calls Mary blessed among women (in the same verse mentioned above), and Elizabeth’s greeting is repeated here (Luke 1:42). This is justification enough to call Mary blessed, but then Mary also foretells this in the Magnificat, the part that begins ‘My soul magnifies/proclaims the Lord’ (Luke 1:46). In Luke 1:48, she says, ‘…. From now on all generations will call me blessed.’ (NIV)
So, this first half of the prayer is a salutation of Mary, entirely based on the Bible.
Holy Mary, mother of God… The reason we call her holy is because Gabriel called her ‘full of grace’ (Luke 1:26) and God favored her by asking her to bear His only Son. Furthermore, Catholics (and everyone, up to and including Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli), venerated Mary and believed she was in Heaven.
… pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen. Here, we are simply asking Mary to pray on our behalf to God. Simple petition for prayers.
I realize that the whole question of the veneration of Mary is troublesome for other reasons, but this prayer perfectly shows how Catholics ask for intercession: the beginning is a Biblical formula, followed by a prayer request. No fluff, nothing on the side.”
(Next week will further address the topic of praying to saints.)