₦airaland Forum

Nodogragra4me:
Doctrinal matters:

Can you explain to me how Mary and the saints we are to pray to or asked to pray for us are able to hear us all and do that when they are not omnipresent as the Godhead?

Why is over 80 percent of the documented prayers of the church to Mary and not Jesus Christ who says he is the only way to the father?

As for charities ,I know the orphanages ,old people homes ..I don't know of free hospitals or schools and at any rate , charity should be measured in relationship to many other things .


The church is over a thousand years old therefore should even be more viable in those areas than any other church

First and very importantly there is no where in the Catholic doctrine that says it's a most to pray through Mary or the saint's. Though the Church encourages devotion to Mary and the saints.

Agreed the saints and our mother Mary isn't omnipresent but I'm sure you will agree that Mary and all the saints are with God in heaven and there is nothing wrong in God sharing His nature and qualities with them and even when needed He can give them that ability to hear prayers of the people directed through them.

In revelation 8: 4 the Bible tells us that
And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand.

This is to show that our prayers are taken up to God, God is Holy and our prayers are often filled with selfishness and need's to be purified before getting to God, so angels do that work and I'm sure the saint's aren't idle in heaven sipping Champagne, they partake in the ministry of heaven too just like the angels, if the angels can offer our prayers to God so too can Mary and the saints.

The book of Revelation shows the saints worshipping God, singing hymns, playing instruments, making requests to Christ to avenge their martyrdom, and offering prayers for the saints on earth (Rev. 4:10, 5:8, 6:9-11).


ARTICLE
The Bible Supports Praying to the Saint
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Most “Bible-believing” Christians object to the Catholic practice of praying to the saints. These critics worry that Catholics will go to hell for offending God with a neo-pagan system of worship. They have four main criticisms of the custom, all of which they push forward vigorously.

First, they accuse Catholics of worshipping Mary and the other saints. This violates the first commandment: “You shall not have any other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3).

Additional proof that Catholics worship the saints is that they make statues of them, in violation of the next commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an idol or any image which is in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters which are under the earth; you shall not bow down and serve them because I am the Lord your God” (Ex. 20:4-5). Catholics make statues of the saints whom they worship, thereby committing the double sin of polytheism and idolatry.

The second objection to praying to the saints is that, even if Catholics do not worship the saints, they are at least calling upon the spirits of the dead. Scripture explicitly forbids conjuring the dead in many passages:


“Do not turn to mediums and familiar spirits; do not seek defilement among them” (Lev. 19:31). “The soul who turns to mediums and to familiar spirits to go whoring after them, I will set my face against that soul and cut him off from the midst of his people” (Lev. 20:6). “The man or the woman who becomes a medium or a familiar spirit will surely die; they will cast stones at them; their blood will be on themselves” (Lev. 20:27). “Let there not be found among you one who makes his son or his daughter pass through fire, a diviner of divinations, an occultist, a charmer, an enchanter, one who casts spells, or one who questions mediums or familiar spirits, or one who seeks the dead” (Deut. 18:10-11). Since the saints are all dead, no one is allowed to consult them without breaking these biblical laws.

A third objection is that there is only one mediator with the Father, Jesus Christ. “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, a man, Jesus Christ, who has given himself as a ransom for all, the testimony in its own time” (1 Tim. 2:5-6). Jesus Christ is fully satisfactory as the mediator between sinners and God. No one should ever ask the saints for intercession.

A fourth objection is that the Bible does not instruct Christians to honor the saints, seek their intercession, or keep their relics. Without any biblical injunction to perform these things, a Christian risks displeasing God.

The Catholic Church always has taught that a Christian can worship only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. No creature, no matter how good or beautiful–no angel, no saint, not even the Virgin Mary–deserves adoration.

This is the teaching of the creeds (Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in one God”; Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God”) and the catechisms (Baltimore Catechism, question 199: “By the first commandment we are commanded to offer to God alone the supreme worship that is due him”) and the Church councils (Nicaea, in 325; Rome in 382; Toledo in 675; Lateran IV in 1215; Lyons in 1274; Florence in 1442; Trent from 1545-1563; Vatican I from 1869-1870).

The Catholic Church condemns polytheism and idolatry alike. Pope Dionysius condemned the division of the one God into three gods, for there can be only one God, not three (Letter to Dionysius of Alexandria, A.D. 260). Pope Damasus I condemned the worship of other gods, angels, or archangels, even when God gave them the name of “god” in the Bible (Tome of Damasus, approved at the Council of Rome, 382).

John Damascene’s Apologetic Sermons Against Those Who Reject Sacred Images gives an authentic presentation of the Catholic attitude towards statues and pictures of Mary and the saints: “If we were making images of men and thought them gods and adored them as gods, certainly we would be impious. But we do not do any of these things.”

The Baltimore Catechism, question 223, confirms this by teaching: “We do not pray to the crucifix or to the images and relics of the saints, but to the persons they represent.”

Catholic doctrine absolutely rejects the worship of anyone but God and rejects all worship of statues, whether of Christ or the saints. What the Church does allow is praying to the saints in order to ask for their intercession with the one true God. The Church also allows one to make statues to remind a person of Christ or the saint:

“Further, the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints are to be kept with honor in places of worship especially; and to them due honor and veneration is to be paid–not because it is believed that there is any divinity or power intrinsic to them for which they are reverenced, nor because it is from them that something is sought, nor that a blind trust is to be attached to images as it once was by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols (Ps. 135:15ff); but because the honor which is shown to them is referred to the prototypes which they represent.

“Thus it follows that through these images, which we kiss and before which we kneel and uncover our heads, we are adoring Christ and venerating the saints whose likenesses these images bear” (Council of Trent, Session XXV, Decree 2).

This mirrors the Old Testament attitude. Soon after they received the commandment prohibiting the making of images for worship, the Israelites were told by the Lord to “make two cherubim of beaten gold; you will make them for the two ends of the covering [of the Ark of the Covenant]” (Ex. 25:18). After many Israelites suffered punishment in the form of snakebite, at the Lord’s instruction “Moses made the bronze serpent and he set it upon a pole, and it happened that if a serpent bit a man, and he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived” (Num. 21:9).

The gold cherubim and the bronze serpent were not objects of worship. The cherubim symbolized the presence of God’s angels at the Ark of the Covenant, and the bronze serpent was God’s means of healing the people of poisonous snakebite. So too do Catholics make statues to represent the presence of the saints and angels in churches, homes, and elsewhere.

The Bible teaches that the attempt to contact the dead through seances and mediums is a serious sin. The Catholic Church, being a Bible-believing Church (actually, of course, it’s more than that–the Catholic Church is the one and only Bible-writing Church), condemns all forms of superstition and conjuring the dead.

The Baltimore Catechism explains the seriousness of the sin of superstition: “Superstition is by its nature a mortal sin, but it may be venial either when the matter is slight or when there is a lack of full consent to the act” (question 212).

When the Catholic Church encourages devotion and prayer to the saints, in no way does it intend for its members to practice some form of superstition. Never does the Church instruct the faithful to conjure the spirits of the saints to carry on some two-way communication. There are no seances that try to make them appear, speak messages, tap tables, or anything of the sort.

The faith of the Church is that the saints are not really dead, but are fully alive in Jesus Christ, who is life itself (John 11:25; 14:6) and the bread of life who bestows life on all who eat his flesh and drink his blood (John 6:35, 48, 51, 53-56). The saints are alive in heaven because of the life they have received through their faith in Christ Jesus and through their eating of his body and blood.

The book of Revelation shows the saints worshipping God, singing hymns, playing instruments, making requests to Christ to avenge their martyrdom, and offering prayers for the saints on earth (Rev. 4:10, 5:8, 6:9-11).

Because they are alive, we believe that we can go to them to intercede for us with God. We do not need to see apparitions or hear their voices in order to believe they will pray for us in heaven. We trust that the saints will accept our requests for help and will present them to Christ for us.

The Catholic Church has always believed that Jesus Christ is the one mediator between God and man. It is the death and resurrection of Jesus alone by which people are saved.

In 449 Pope Leo the Great wrote his Tome against Eutyches, who taught that Jesus Christ had only one nature, not two. (This was the heresy of monophysitism.) In the Tome, which the Council of Chalcedon accepted as the authentic Catholic teaching on Christ, he quotes 1 Timothy 2:5 as the authentic Catholic doctrine: “Hence, as was suitable for the alleviation of our distress, one and the same mediator between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus, was both mortal and immortal under different.aspects.”

The fifth session of the Council of Trent (1546) laid out the belief in Jesus the one true mediator as the norm of Catholic faith: “[Original sin cannot be] taken away through the powers of human nature or through a remedy other than the merit of the one mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, who reconciled us to God in his blood, having become our justice, and sanctification, and redemption.”

The schema of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Principal Mysteries of the Faith, drafted for the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), includes the unique mediation of Jesus Christ as one of these principal mysteries: “Truly, therefore, Christ Jesus is mediator between God and man, one man dying for all; he made satisfaction to the divine justice for us, and he erased the handwriting that was against us. Despoiling principalities and powers, he brought us from our longstanding slavery into the freedom of sons.”

These quotations from official Catholic documents give unambiguous proof that the Church believes Jesus Christ and no other is the one mediator between sinful humanity and the righteous God. How does the Church integrate this essential doctrine of the faith with the belief that we can pray to the saints?

First, God expects us to pray for one another. We see this in both the Old and New Testaments.

In a dream, God commanded King Abimelech to ask Abraham to intercede for him: “For [Abraham] is a prophet and he will pray for you, so you shall live” (Gen. 20:7). When the Lord is angry with Job’s friends because they did not speak rightly about God, he tells them, “Let my servant Job pray for you because I will accept his [prayer], lest I make a terror on you” (Job 42:.

Paul wrote to the Romans: “I exhort you, brothers, through our Lord Jesus Christ and through the love of the Spirit, to strive with me in prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the disobedient in Judaea and that my ministry may be acceptable to the saints in Jerusalem, so that in the joy coming to you through the will of God I may rest with you” (Rom. 15:30-32).

James says: “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects” (James 5:16-17). Thus, according to Scripture, God wants us to pray for one another. This must mean that prayer for one another cannot detract from the role of Jesus Christ as our one mediator with God.

Second, the reason that Christians have the power to pray for one another is that each person who is baptized is made a member of the Body of Christ by virtue of the Holy Spirit’s action in baptism (1 Cor. 12:11-13). It is because the Christian belongs to Jesus Christ and is a member of his Body, the Church, that we can make effective prayer.

The reason we pray to the saints is that they are still members of the Body of Christ. Remember, the life which Christ gives is eternal life; therefore, every Christian who has died in Christ is forever a member of the Body of Christ. This is the doctrine which we call the Communion of the Saints. Everyone in Christ, whether living or dead, belongs to the Body of Christ.

From this it follows that a saint in heaven may intercede for other people because he still is a member of the Body of Christ. Because of this membership in Christ, under his headship, the intercession of the saints cannot be a rival to Christ’s mediation; it is one with the mediation of Christ, to whom and in whom the saints form one body.


Regarding the documents about Mary your claim is not accurate before in the Mass which is the highest form of Catholic prayers, Mary is not mentioned not more than thrice and She is mentioned together with the apostle's, Mary is the first Apostle. And moreover any honour given to Mary is honour given to her son Jesus. When Elizabeth praised Mary, what did Mary did? She sang the magnificant (My Soul's glorifies the Lord).

Bros the Catholic church gave us the Bible, there is no teaching in the Catholic church that the Bible contradicts. It may not be written explicitly but if you dig well you will discovery the bible doesn't condemn any Catholic teaching.

I will love for us to examine all of your doctrinal issues in more details if you will permit

Nodogragra4me:
Wouldn't have been easier and better for posterity of you had listed some of the charities like orphanage then questioning my claims

I was a Catholic ,married in the church with her marriage certificate ..I doubt if you have more than baptism card as proof of your membership .

I did holy communion and confirmation and passed in both csthescism classes with high grades ...a block rosary men and even mother of divine love centre secretary

First What was your reason for leaving the Church?
Secondly, the Catholic Church runs the biggest Charity organization in the whole world. CARITAS. Every society in the church does one form of charity. Virtually all the Convents run a charity. To begin to mention the Charity's the Catholic church runs is like to begin to try count the number of stars in the sky.

Thirdly become you were once a Catholic doesn't mean you know everything about the church, in fact I can bet you don't. Because if you did you won't ask how many charities the church runs. Even Moslems and non Catholics don't even bother to argue that

Sincerely I'm a Catholic and truth be told the collections are now way way too much that the essence and sanctity of the mass is beginning to get lost.

But the truth is a true Catholic will never stop going to the mass for any reason and another good thing about the church is you won't be forced to give, so there isn't any excuse for not going to church.

God has blessed Amanda so it's proper she also appreciate God by donating to the Church.