Intercession of the Saints I: Why Bother?
A reader-submitted Frequently Argued Quandary
This was a question submitted by a paid subscriber.
Why waste breath asking for the prayers of the saints (including Mary) if you can just go straight to God Himself in Jesus Christ? Or, in the precise words of the submitted question:
Why, in a Catholic view, would one ever ask for the prayers of Saints if those of Christ are sufficient and most effective?
Indeed, the prayers of Christ are sufficient and most effective. So whence all the to-do about saints?
The standard Catholic reply is to quote from James 5:
Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise them up. If they have sinned, they will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
Apparently the question of why one would bother with intercessors does not occur to James. By my lights, this settles the question from a biblical perspective. Insofar as we’re worried it’s just a bad use of time to ask others to pray for us, Sacred Scripture indicates otherwise. Of course, simply citing Scripture is a bit unsatisfying because we really want to understand the logic at work. We can easily imagine an interlocutor replying, “Granted, this passage assumes that asking for the prayers of people besides Christ is not simply a waste of time or intrinsically disordered. But why?”
James gives two broad reasons to seek the prayers of the elders. You should seek prayer from the elders so you can be physically and spiritually healed. You should seek prayer from the elders because their prayers are specially “powerful and effective.”
The first of these reasons is in keeping with the Catholic principle that God loves to use secondary causes to communicate grace to us. Few have said it better than C.S. Lewis. In his greatest book, Letter to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Lewis asks:
Do you object to the apparent "roundaboutness"--it could easily be made comic--of the whole picture [of prayer]? Why should God speak to Himself through man? I ask, in reply, why should He do anything through His creatures? Why should He achieve, the long way round, through the labours of angels, men (always imperfectly obedient and efficient), and the activity of irrational and inanimate beings, ends which, presumably, the mere fiat of omnipotence would achieve with instantaneous perfection?
Creation seems to be delegation through and through. He will do nothing simply of Himself which can be done by creatures. I suppose this is because He is a giver. And He has nothing to give but Himself. And to give Himself is to do His deeds--in a sense, and on varying levels to be Himself--through the things He has made.
In Pantheism God is all. But the whole point of creation surely is that He was not content to be all. He intends to be "all in all".1
If God had gone to Princeton, He would have been taught the overriding importance of efficiency. Fortunately, this is not how He works. Although it doesn’t jive with American pragmatism or the post-Modernist tendency to reduce everything to mechanics and statistics, God is relentlessly widening the circle of His blessed life. He wishes to catch us up into the divine movement of love and self-gift. When we ask for prayer, we humble ourselves by admitting our vulnerability and dependence on others. And not just any others, but specifically the elders, the “presbuteroi” that centuries of linguistic development would turn into “priests.” It’s not simply the Christian community that James commends us to in prayer, but the ecclesial hierarchy, the Church concretely expressed in her ordained ministers. A gloss of this passage that would bring out this sense would say something like this:
“Sick? Ask your priest for the Anointing of the Sick. Sinned? Go to Confession. For if you ask God for healing, you will not be turned away, least of all when you seek spiritual healing in Confession. Those who follow God always know what to ask Him for, and He listens.”
James is revealing to us how radically dependent we are on others not only for our physical but even spiritual health. The Christian life opens us up to others, the way the Younger Son opens up to the Father by admitting his failure and need for forgiveness. Refusing to open up this way not only puts separation between us and our fellow Christians, from whom we hide, but it denies them a chance to extend us grace and grow more like Christ, more like the Father of the parable. Indeed, we are all called to the same kind of self-gift that the Father makes when he confers his identity again on the Younger Son. When we pray for others, even outside the context of a Sacrament, we make a gift of our time, energy, and attention, acknowledging our own inability to resolve the situation and asking for God’s help. In this little way, we imitate the Father of the prodigal sons, and the circle of love, grace, and self-gift expands. God’s own life takes root among us.
To put it briefly, then, we should ask others to pray for us because it’s how we pry ourselves open to let the light of God’s love and grace into the dark corners we’d prefer to leave unredeemed.
What about the second reason to ask for intercession, that the prayers of a righteous person are specially “powerful and effective”? As my gloss indicates, I think a large part of this is that good people pray for good things, which God likes to give us. But James also tells us that faith is an important part of the equation. The prayer must be offered “in faith.” While the biblical and theological material on faith is enormous, we need only note here that the thrust of the passage emphasizes true healing as healing from sin. The righteous person is, by definition, someone who trusts that God will do good, and that He will not ignore the prayers of His people. When we turn in vulnerability to those advanced in the spiritual life, particularly those entrusted with the sacramental priesthood, we find that God is pleased to work through them, and that He promises us spiritual healing in its purest form—the forgiveness of sins.
Recall that the original question was not why you would pray to the saints for intercession, but why you would pray to them given that you could just pray to Christ. I think insofar as that’s theologically the same as asking fellow believers to pray, we’ve seen satisfactory biblical and theological warrants. All this is well and good, but we’ve been talking for some time now about the value of asking living Christians to pray for us. What about the departed? It is time to turn in earnest to the intercession of the saints.
The first thing you must get completely clear on is that all you ask the saints for is prayer. To quote my own Appendix 2, the saints are not “little semi-autonomous pagan deities.” Catholics may take poetic license, such as in the ditty, “St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and cannot be found.” Taken naively, “come around” might seem to imply an expectation that he’s going to manifest like the ghost of Samuel. In reality, it’s simply a request that he, in his appointment to pray for those who have lost things, would intercede on your behalf. Having cleared the ground a bit, we can get to the real work.
The theological analysis I offered of James 5 centered around things that only the living can do, like offering the Sacraments. What about the saints? Even if we concede that it makes sense to ask for the intercession of mere creatures when we could spend that time praying to Jesus, and even if asking saints to pray isn’t Paganism 2.0, you might still wonder what role they are supposed to be playing in the life of a Christian.
I’ve argued elsewhere that the saints are important for helping us see what it means to follow Christ in different circumstances, professions, personalities, cultures, etc. When we include the saints in our prayer lives, it lifts us out of the present, which in our day is particularly ravenous, consuming every moment with an implacable demand for productivity. Our relationship with the saints carries us up into the time of heaven, the eternal “now” in which we all see Christ and rejoice. We meet faithful Christians from every continent, and we often find that they come from groups we would rather ignore. Those for whom race is a central concept should grapple seriously with the fact that Catholics freely and enthusiastically call upon saints of all colors for aid in prayer. We have been baptized into a new family, one constituted by sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection. When we appeal to the saints, we affirm that we belong first to the Kingdom of God, first to the Body of Christ, and only secondarily to the factions of this world. It’s harder to remake Jesus into a safe, domesticated version of Himself amenable to your culture when He is surrounded by a thousand witnesses who have absolutely no interest in preserving your comfort. This brings us to another point.
The love of Christ for His Body is quite literally stronger than death. If the most profound difference is not between those who are alive and those who are dead, but between those in Christ and not in Christ, why should death sever our communion? By virtue of our shared participation in Christ’s eternal life, we are still bound together in the Church, working for our shared mission to love Christ and make Him known to the world. Death has indeed lost its sting, because it is too weak to tear Christians apart. Joseph Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI, put it beautifully:
[T]he dialogue of human beings with each other now[, in the intercession of the saints,] becomes a vehicle for the life everlasting, since the communion of saints is drawn up into the dialogue of the Trinity itself. This is why the communion of saints is the locus where eternity becomes accessible for us. Eternal life does not isolate a person, but leads him out of isolation into true unity with his brothers and sisters and the whole of God’s creation.2
On a more practical note, if the prayers of a righteous person are “powerful and effective,” those who have been completed in grace are the best intercessors around! What else do they have to do while they await the resurrection of the body?
Another practical point: while I mentioned above how important it is that Christians be confronted with a variety of saints from different contexts, it is equally important that we find saints whose spiritual lives we identify with and can emulate. This is why the institution of the confirmation saint is so beautiful. When a person enters the Church, she picks some specific saint to be a kind of personal patron, and in the eyes of the Church she takes on the saint’s name as part of her own. Liturgically, I am Eric Melchizedek (yes, the one from the Bible). A dear friend of mine chose Edith Stein; others gravitate towards Dorothy Day, or Augustine, or Elizebeth of Hungary. A catechumen I know has already chosen John the Baptist. Chief Seattle, the Native American convert for whom the city is named, chose Noah. There is an opportunity to fix yourself firmly in the story of God’s people, and to enjoy the prayers of someone you admire.
Let me end by trying to preempt one more way this could all be spoiled. You might worry that even if this is theologically air-tight, there is still the risk that we’ll just pay too much attention to the saints and neglect our relationship with Christ. I have two replies.
First, the liturgy of the Church is simply too emphatically Christocentric for this to be a practical problem for any well-formed Catholic. (It would be unreasonable to ask me to defend poorly catechized Catholics. I badly want them to enjoy the riches of their own faith, but I ask in the meantime that we not be judged for them. We might be judged for how many there are, but I counter that Protestants who are formed that poorly usually just leave the Faith altogether, so I am grateful for Catholicism’s ability to help even wandering Christians stay somewhat connected.) For the well-formed Catholic, then, it is impossible to miss that Christ crucified is the center of virtually every Catholic church, that nearly every liturgical prayer including a saint talks about them more than it talks to them, and that they are saints only because God graciously worked through them to glorify His Son. Take, as a sample, this prayer from the St. Gregory Prayer Book for the Feast of St. John the Evangelist (Dec. 27):
Merciful Lord, we beseech thee to cast thy bright beams of light upon thy Church: that she being enlightened by the doctrine of thy blessed Apostle and Evangelist Saint John, may so walk in the light of thy truth, that she may at length attain to the light of everlasting life; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.3
Second, and I develop this more in Appendix 2, the saints are stained glass. We cannot see them properly unless we see Light through them. When we ask them for intercession, contained in that prayer is a deeper prayer that Christ would care for us. We come to a member of His Body for help, a Body that only exists because it is bound together in Him. It’s similar to showing respect for a ruler by treating his servants well. The respect you show them is constitutive of your respect for him. So when I’m frantically searching for a book and mutter “Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony…” my devotional act does not end there but extends to and indeed is rooted in Christ Himself. And so you see that not only Catholic liturgy but the entire Catholic life is unswervingly Christocentric.
In brief, the value of asking the saints to pray for us is that it is a way for us to connect ourselves with Christ’s Kingdom and allow His love to wash the present in the rays of eternity.
Thank you for the taking to the time to address the question! You’ve given me a lot to think about.