INDEED TO THE MAX:
- - -
I fail, at the very least, to see what good praying to someone else for what we are to pray only to God for, is going to do.
Do Catholics really think that God is not going to answer but some redeemed being is? Are they trying to get prayer answered that they are afraid that God won’t answer so they bypass Him?
If God is not going to grant the request for reasons that He alone knows, how is some dead person who is not God going to be able to do it?
When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, He said,.....
Matthew 6: 9”This, then, is how you should pray:
“ ‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Just where is the admonition to pray to dead people, or even living people who have died and are in heaven?
For all the emphasis that the Catholics say they put on the gospels and the dissing for theology that they do to Paul, just where does this concept of praying to saints come from? Where in the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels is that found?
I don't know what "Catholics really think" (in the sort of sociological statistical sense) but I have some idea of what the Church teaches, and the Church would, um, Guffaw to the Max - :-) - over the idea that the Saints were sneaking behind God's back to grant favors to their petitioners.
I'll ask around about where/when the practice doctrine arose. I have no idea of the history of it.