To be Catholic is to think of oneself as having been adopted into “the whole family in heaven and earth”, as St. Paul teaches. Naturally, all Christian believers see themselves thus: but to be Catholic is not only to have an especially vivid sense of being in this family; it is to carry on one’s entire life of faith, and hence of one’s prayers, in no other context at all.

This view of things issues, often, in forms that may set on edge the teeth of non-Catholic believers. Hail, Mary, full of grace: everyone knows that salutation. To Catholics it is as natural as greeting one’s own mother. To many Christians it looks like idolatry: this charge is sometimes made by zealots who perhaps have not paused long enough, ever, to find out just what this mode of address might mean among Christ’s faithful.

Or again, a non-Catholic may have heard (even, alas, as an expletive) some quick reference to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. This may arouse in him the suspicion that the Catholic Church has introduced onto the stage two additional figures by way of edging the Lord himself ever so slightly off center and of diluting his exclusive honor with an honor spread out between two nondivine figures.

And yet again, what is a Christian to suppose when he overhears a group of Catholics saying in chorus, “Holy Michael, pray for us. Holy Raphael, pray for us. Holy Agatha, pray for us”? Fie. Don’t Catholics know that we may “come boldly to the throne of grace”, and that we are to “let our requests be made known unto God”, and that there is only “one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus”? Why this circuitous route? Why this multitude through which Catholics seem obliged to force their way in order to come to that Throne with their prayers?

No doubt the most colorful, and even jolting, way in which non-Catholic Christians come upon this Catholic exultation in the whole family in heaven and on earth presents itself in the images that may be found in many Catholic churches.

To be sure, thousands of parish churches were stripped of their images in the wake of the Second Vatican Council; and it is therefore not unusual for a Methodist or Baptist to find very little to offend him as he steps inside a Catholic church. “Why, this could be our church!” might even be heard, although a closer look will reveal a certain arrangement of furniture, with an altar at the center of focus, that may not fit comfortably with non-Catholic categories.

On the other hand, especially in Austria, Bavaria, and the Latin countries of the world, one is likely to find oneself having stumbled into a dizzying panoply of statuary and painting as one enters a Catholic church. Anyone who has ever visited one of the great cathedrals in France or England will, of course, have found statuary: but in the gothic cathedrals, the statuary is unpainted and made of the same gray stone as the rest of the building. Indeed, the figures probably form unobtrusive elements in the pillars, the doors, or the tympanum. Somehow this twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century display seems restrained. Protestant sensibilities are not rudely smitten, although many a tourist, lost in admiration in a gothic cathedral, has perhaps had to cope with a small voice at his elbow reminding him of the commandment in Exodus interdicting graven images. Heigh ho: Must we jettison all of this serene and regal display? It looks as though we must, but it is all so noble, so beautiful. [1]

But in Austria or Spain a crowded universe leaps upon one’s sensibilities when one comes into a church. Riotously painted plaster ceilings and walls and pillars, with—can it be?—figures who sail far too near the pagan wind for orthodox comfort, capering among the painted and billowing clouds. Or polychrome statues of the Virgin and saints with their eyes cast soulfully up into the ozone. Or worse, crucifixes that go so far as to hail us with horribly gaunt, twisted, hacked, and bloodied figures of the Savior in agony. And, introducing a note of the macabre into it all, perhaps a glass coffin with a recumbent and desiccated figure visible or, as it may be, a skeleton grinning there.

This itinerary seems to have brought us a very long distance from our topic of Catholics at prayer. But what one sees under these startling auspices in such churches is merely the unfurling of the interior vision that the faith of every Catholic presents to him.

The vision may be adumbrated in the following manner: in our own history here on this earth, we have become familiar with the figures of the great kings. They themselves are crowned with gold and robed in purple and ermine. The orb and scepter are in their hands. The throne upon which they sit is of damask and gold. Gems adorn everything. Nothing seems too costly to be brought into the service of expressing the majesty of these kings.

But—are they alone in their majesty? Do they sit, solitary, surrounded by empty space? No. They are surrounded by their court, and on their right hand is the queen in vesture of gold, as the psalms will have it. Ducal coronets glitter, and the great earls and barons stand in attendance with their insignia of rank.

Rank. Perhaps that is the word that may supply the clue necessary to open up the Catholic vision of God’s majesty to non-Catholics who worry that the ancient Church has stolen away the exclusive glory of God and has distributed it among a great multitude of interlopers.

The “rank” of the noble men and women who throng the earthly king’s court is, of course, derived from him. The duke’s dignity not only does not subtract one farthing from the king’s majesty: it augments that majesty, as though to say, “See, see what nobility this sovereign bestows. See how he raises his servants to share his glory.” The awe that comes over us upon the entrance of one of the great barons into the presence glances immediately from his armor straight to the figure on the throne. The great ladies of the court, so serene in their fathomless dignity, decked with the vesture that, even in its richness, is scarcely adequate to the nobility that crowns them—they gaze on our awe with eyes that say, “To him. To him be all honor and majesty and might and blessing.”

This is the Catholic vision of God’s majesty. He is not a niggardly sovereign, sitting upon his riches like a dragon on a hoard, sullen and wary lest anyone snatch the smallest coin from the heap, thereby subtracting that sum from his exclusive prerogative. There are, alas, widely espoused theologies that talk of God’s glory as though this were the picture and that grudge any spilling-over of that glory onto any creature. To listen to such theologies is to conjure the spectacle of a great king, solitary in his splendor and served by thralls, sycophants, and helots, forever groveling, forever scourged by their masters with, “Give him the glory! Be careful to give him the glory!”

It is an ironic refrain, of course, since the whole point of the splendid assembly of nobles is that indeed the sovereign receive the glory. To that extent the slave-driving master’s refrain is technically true. But there is something parsimonious about it all. Give him the glory, as though any remnant of cloth on me that is not a filthy rag somehow calls in question that glory.

But the grimmest khans, sultans, and pharaohs in their tyranny have not grudged their glory thus. The greater their retinue, the greater their splendor.

It is thus, says the Roman Catholic Church, with God’s glory. He is a God who crowns us with glory and honor (see Psalm 8). He is a God who has raised us and made us to reign with his own Son. He is a God who exults in ennobling his servants and who has made them his own kin, brought them into his banqueting house, and unfurled the banner of love over their heads.

This is what his bounty purposes for all who will receive him. “As many as received him, to them gave he the power to become the sons of God.” Sons of God? Lord: I am not worthy that you should come under my roof. Make me as one of your hired servants. Let me hunt with the dogs for the crumbs that fall from your table.

You are to sit at my royal table, says his bounty to us all. You were indeed poor and wretched and blind and naked, and so covered with wounds and bruises and putrefying sores that there was no remedy for your condition—no remedy, that is, but my grace. But now you are washed, you are healed, you are clothed with the righteousness of my own Son, the Prince of Glory. Your tunic, your armor and spurs and robe and the very diadem that glitters on your brow: these you have from me, because I love my only begotten Son and wish to present him with this guerdon for his suffering. He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied. I have adopted you and made you coheirs with him of all my glory.

This is the picture of things that we find in Scripture and that is kept so vibrantly alive in Catholic vision and piety. All of us are heirs with Christ. But in a great many of us, the first inklings of the glory that attaches to that inheritance are scarcely visible yet. On the other hand, there are figures among his followers who do exhibit to us all, in the ardor, purity, and zeal of their obedience to him, just what that glory is going to look like. From among this number of the faithful, the Church has named many to be designated “saints”. Of course that title may be applied to all who are in Christ Jesus: St. Paul often uses the term when referring to the Christians in such and such a city. But in the particular usage at work when the Catholic Church speaks of the roster of saints, the notion is that in these figures we may see in a particularly clear and splendid fashion just what the Divine Charity looks like when it is wholly embraced by one of us.

These “saints” who have gone before us are there, in the heavens and in the Roman “martyrology” (the roster of all of these saints, whether or not they were martyred); but they are not mere decorations in the heavenly temple: they are, says the Church, living members with us, the Church here in pilgrimage through history, in the one single Mystical Body of Christ. The Resurrection of Jesus overthrew death’s sovereignty, and so we Christians deny that we are separated from those who have gone before us by the impassable abyss of death. No: we, with them, are one, living, interceding company of the redeemed.

Interceding? How interceding?

The answer to this query, and hence to the question non-Catholics have about the role the saints play in Catholic prayer, lies again in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. When he arose from the grave, he not only overthrew the kingdom of death: he arose to pursue his office as our Great High Priest (see Hebrews 2:27, 3:1, 4:14, 5:10, passim). We are the priestly Body of which he is the Head. A priest’s office is to offer sacrifice and to intercede for the people. Jesus Christ has offered that Sacrifice for us all, and it is forever present on the heavenly altar. We, his priestly Body, share in that ministry. With him, and with all those who are his, from the patriarchs and John the Baptist on down, we stand offering intercessions for all men. The picture of the Head alone interceding, with his Mystical Body banished from that which the Head is doing, is grotesque, in the Catholic view. God in his superabundant mercy has drawn us—us!—into the life of his Son, not merely (as some theologies seem to imply) in a juridical way, or not merely in some technical “status”. No. As is always the case with the Divine Mercy, it is an actual state of affairs into which we, the beneficiaries of that Mercy, are drawn. We are to join Jesus Christ in his intercessory ministry in behalf of the Church and the whole world.

This “we” includes the saints as well as us here on earth. Or let us put it the other way around and thus gain a more exact picture: they are there, with the High Priest, made one with that ministry; and we, too, also begin, during our pilgrimage here, to enter into that ministry.

To be Catholic is to grasp, and reckon on, this great web of intercession, binding heaven and earth. Prayers go up before the Throne of the Most High like the smoke of incense, continually, from the High Priest and from all his priestly people, or, in the other metaphor, from the Head and his Body. All of us, here below and those gone before, are one, living, praying company.

Hence, says the Church, to ask St. Joseph or St. Anthony for his prayers is no more odd than to ask my brother here on earth for his prayers. If I ask you for your prayers for me, you do not say, “Why are you asking me? I’m not a comediator. There is one God and one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Take your prayer requests to him. To ask me to pray for you is to interfere with the exclusive prerogative of Jesus. It is to weasel a human comediator between you and the one Mediator.”

All Christians—Orthodox, Brethren, Mennonites, and Methodists—would deprecate this parsimonious line of thought. We are supposed to pray for one another, we would protest. That sole mediatorship of Jesus, far from banning us in the interest of his exclusive prerogative, draws us in and makes us full participants.

Indeed, says the Catholic Church. That is why Catholics understand the saints to be full participants in the mediatorship of Jesus. Their participation no more subtracts from his ministry than the glory that shines upon them subtracts from his glory. It is all his, forsooth. There is one fountainhead from which we all have drunk and from which we bear refreshment to parched souls. SS. Joachim and Anne, pray for me. SS. Simeon and Anna, pray for us, that we may also be fortified in patience, as you were through your long decades of waiting for the promise of Israel. St. Ignatius Loyola, pray for us that our hearts may burn as yours with zeal for Christ’s gospel. St. Francis de Sales, pray for me, that I may be spurred to follow the way of holiness as you taught it.

But we have no reason to suppose that the saints who have gone before us can hear us, or even that they are aware of our existence: thus the protest from many non-Catholic believers.

The Letter to the Hebrews calls them “witnesses” (12:1), a Catholic might answer; and a witness is someone who is watching something. Oh (the rejoinder might run), that simply means that their lives and martyrs’ deaths witness to God’s faithfulness by way of example to us. That too, our Catholic might reply: but take care with your adverbs there. “Simply” is a perilous word to bring into play on the divine mysteries. You are sure, are you, that the text simply means that? The difficulty there is that you have the whole tradition of the ancient Church seeing things otherwise. Don’t be too punctilious with your private exegesis.

To ask one of the saints for his prayers is of one seamless piece with our asking each other to pray for us. The precincts of the Divine mercy cannot be parceled out with addition and subtraction, with my siphoning off this bit of Jesus’ priesthood when I venture to pray for you, and you pocketing that much of his merit when you lay down your life for me with such generosity day after day (one is thinking of one’s spouse here). There is only gushing superabundance here, immersing us all, filling us all, and sweeping us along in the tide of that amplitude overflowing from the Father himself.

But what about these images before which I see Catholics kneeling from time to time when I peer into a church in Mexico or Italy? That, surely, violates the Second Commandment: we are not to make any graven image.

The Catholic Church hears that Commandment, as all of Israel heard it, and as the Reformation heard it. What was being forbidden there? we may ask. If it is a blanket prohibition of all “representing” of things in heaven or on earth, as Islam has it, then of course we will all have to jettison not only our icons and statues but also our Hummel and Meissen figurines and the little carved ships that sit on our mantelpieces: we must also get rid of our children’s stuffed animals and their porcelain dolls. These are not, of course, all “graven”: but they are all “likenesses”. What can it mean?

The Hebrews, the very recipients of that law, then went on, under explicit instructions of the God who issued the prohibition in the first place, to make golden bells and pomegranates for the hem of their high priest’s garment, and the figures of golden cherubim for the mercy seat in their Tabernacle. In the wilderness God commanded Moses to make a bronze serpent (Nb 21:8-9). Solomon’s temple, erected under divine instructions, displayed twelve oxen holding up the immense basin for washing. Was this all in violation of the Commandment?

No, the Jews would say. And No says the Church. The command prohibits the worship of such images. “Thou shalt not bow down to them or serve them.” There is the distinction.

If a child in a Christian household brings home from his art class a small soapstone penguin graven in a first halting attempt at sculpture, the Christian parents do not smash the figure in an effort to be faithful to the Ten Commandments. Probably the penguin will be set in a place of honor in the house. Trouble would arise, however, if they were to come upon their child saying his prayers to the penguin. “Dear penguin, please help Papa to take me to the beach on Saturday.” Gentle expostulations would be put forward to the effect that this sort of thing won’t quite do, and that prayer . . . , etc., etc., etc.

But there is precisely my point, urges our non-Catholic tourist. I see people kneeling in front of statues and lighting candles. That is worship, pure and simple. Catholics worship statues.

It is indeed true, the Church might reply here, that multitudes of poorly instructed Catholic faithful have not altogether grasped the distinction between what they are doing at this image of St. Anthony or St. Lucy and what they do when they kneel in the Lord’s presence. Here they are asking for help, and for this saint’s intercession, as any Christian will ask a fellow Christian for help or intercession. And we find our Catholic kneeling since that is the customary attitude of Christian prayer. All prayer ascends to the Father: it does not stop at St. Anthony. He, like your fellow Christian here on earth, with whom you share your burdens, is a “mediator” in precisely that sense: he is a personal, interested presence, we might say, exhibiting to us, and bringing to us, in his own unique fashion, Christ’s priestly presence.

It may be recalled in this connection that such a counting upon the prayers of those who have finished their earthly race is not a “late” custom: non-Catholics often suppose that all sorts of questionable practices were introduced into the Church in the Dark Ages of Merovingian France, or in the high Middle Ages, when most Christians in Europe were illiterate peasants upon whom almost any fraud could be perpetrated quite handily. Who can deny that abuses of faith were indeed thus perpetrated: but this drawing upon the prayers of the saints is not one of them. Very early in the Church, the Christians were in the habit of seeking the help and intercession of those, especially the martyrs, who had won their crown and who stood in the presence of the High Priest himself.

Further in this connection, we may remind ourselves of the ancient maxim abusus non tollit usus: the abuse of a thing does not annul its right usage. A confused peasantry that has only the dimmest notions of the differing attitudes (asking for help or worshipping) at work when we kneel in prayer does not nullify the validity of our asking the saints for their help or prayers, any more than global lechery nullifies the proper usage of the marriage bed. If anyone wishes to cry out in protest against what he sees at the various shrines crowding the Catholic churches of the world, his cry should be only “Dear Church! Instruct your people!”, not, “Down with this custom!” And even here, reticence ought no doubt to guard one’s zeal for putting things straight: the piety of simple souls—of all souls, actually—is a fragile and secret thing, and for me to rush busily upon the prayers of the crone as she unburdens her heart to St. Lucy is to put myself in the gravest peril of sacrilege. Unless I am in the office of shepherd to that soul—bishop, pastor, or spiritual director—the warning to me will probably be “Stay clear.”

All of this brings us back to our original assertion: to be Catholic is to think of oneself as having been adopted into the whole family in heaven and earth. Or, if the vocabulary of adoption is not on the tip of our tongue, then say that Catholics see the realm of prayer as including that whole family. It is not just me, an isolated petitioner, venturing into the precincts of the Throne, although the lavish invitation from that very Throne to “come boldly” does indeed ring across the threshold as I approach. But to be Catholic is to see the precincts as thronged, not merely with my fellows in the redeemed hosts forming, as it were, a decorative assembly attending on the Majesty: it is to see them all eagerly sharing in the welcome that Grace holds out to me and eager to unite their ceaseless intercessions with my agenda of requests.

But where, exactly (a non-Catholic might want to know), is your warrant in Scripture for such a vision? It is appealing, to be sure: but is it not merely fanciful?

The Catholic reply would perhaps be twofold here. First, though there may not be a passage in the New Testament where the details here envisioned are spelled out, we may bring to bear all that the New Testament teaches about how God’s grace not only saves us but draws us into its own operations, so to speak, so that we become joint heirs with the Son of God and are called a nation of priests, sent out, like apostles, as bearers of the news of that grace (God could do this by himself if he chose, but he does not thus choose), and, beyond all telling, actually draws us into the deepest mystery of all, namely, the suffering of Christ himself. “I am crucified with Christ”, says St. Paul; and “I fill up that which is behind of the suffering of Christ.” Not to mention the ceaseless injunctions in the New Testament that we pray for each other, when surely Jesus Christ’s prayers alone are a thousandfold sufficient for the needs of the entire universe. And not to mention the glimpses, vouchsafed to us as the curtain on eternity is drawn back here and there in St. John’s Apocalypse, of the throngs of saints and angels around the Throne. We hear them call out their exultation now, as the victory over death and the devil and hell unfurls, and we seem to hear them as having shared, up to the point of this victory, the intercessory prayers of the Son of God as he prays until all these things are accomplished.

“We seem to hear them.” Is that a flaw? The text does not spell out for us the doctrine that the saints in heaven pray for us. This, then, brings us to the second of the elements in a Catholic’s reply to one who wondered whether this picture of the interceding saints might not be a tissue of fancy. Here the Catholic draws on the Church’s tradition. The apostles told the Christians to hold fast to the traditions handed down to them. Not all of those traditions were spelled out on the leaves of the writings that eventually came to be recognized in the Church as the “New Testament”. The apostolic Church knew nothing of Luther’s sola. Sola Scriptura? Why do you say that? St. Paul calls the Church “the pillar and ground of truth” (1 Tim 3:15). The fact that the Church, from very early on, has, in her liturgy and in her piety and in her teaching, held fast to the courage to be drawn from this awareness of the saints’ prayers is the footing upon which Catholic and Orthodox (and many Anglican) Christians rest their practice in this connection. To ask for St. Lucy’s help, or for the prayers of St. Anthony, is to take one’s place in an immensely ancient lineage of Christians who have also done so.