A Protestant View of Catholic Beliefs
Billy Graham once said something like: Some day you will read or hear that Billy Graham is dead. Don’t believe it. I shall be more alive than I am now.
Most would agree Billy Graham could carry some clout in Heaven, so why don’t Protestants ask him to intercede? Looking through a Protestant-lens, some reasons include:
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.
Praying to Saints: Part 1
Catholics pray to dead people. Looking through a Protestant lens, that is a logical deduction. Why?
Praying to is different than reciting a prayer of. Catholic Prayers fall into both categories and it may be helpful to separate them. For example, “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me….” is a common quote attributed to St. Patrick. It is a small portion of a long text known as The Prayer of St. Patrick (or The Breastplate of St. Patrick). When prayed, the words are directed to God, though originally the words of another. This would, in a way, be similar to a Protestant reciting The Lord’s Prayer, The Nicene Creed, or memorized meal time prayers. Reciting a “prayer of” may also be used as a guide similar to the Protestant “ACTS of Prayer”: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication.