Pagan Idols
of Roman Catholicism
How the Saints are False Gods
INDEX-----INDEX-----INDEX
SAINT-WORSHIP
ATTACKS DIVINE LOVE
INTRODUCTION
The bizarre Catholic
practice of honouring saints has aided that religion to have such tremendous
clout over the world because it offers divine beings to its audience which they
can identify with. The lack of saints to
be adored in Protestantism has led to that faith not being as successful as
Catholicism. Saint worship appeals to
the polytheist in people. They want more
than one God but don’t want to admit it.
Everything about saint-worship
smacks of ignorance and superstition.
Saint worship is blasphemous if you believe in God.
THE IDOLS OF THE SAINTS
In Roman theology, there are three types of worship. Latria, Dulia and
Hyperdulia.
The worship of latria is the
worship due to God alone. It is supreme
worship.
Dulia is the inferior worship
given to the saints. In reality it is
supposed to be God who gets all the worship for even saint worship is done for
his sake. The Catholics claim that in
honouring the saints they are honouring God for they are as close to him as a
Siamese twin. Latria is due to God
because he is infinitely good and would do infinite good for you. It is just what you owe him. The Church preaches that you owe no creature
that adoration and that it is unjust to God and idolatrous to confer it on a
creature. The Church does not just
honour the saints by praying through it but actually addresses prayers to the
saints exactly in the form as used for God.
For example, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I give you my heart and my
soul. Jesus, Mary and Joseph assist me
in my last agony. Jesus, Mary and Joseph
may I breathe forth my soul in peace with you.
Sweet Heart of Mary be my salvation.” This is real worship.
Hyperdulia signifies the
special kind of dulia which is reserved for the Virgin Mary alone. It just means that she is singled out for
most of the worship of dulia. Hyperdulia
is expressed in the popular Catholic motto: “To Jesus through Mary”. Even when the Catholic prays directly to
Jesus he means for Mary to get involved and to become the channel through which
his words to Jesus are delivered. The
result is that the Church can only allow it to look as if you were directly
praying to Jesus or God but in reality that is not what is happening. Clearly, no Protestant who believes the saints
cannot hear you or that God wants us to go to him directly and that it is
idolatry and mistrustful of God not to can pray with a Catholic. They cannot even do the Lord’s Prayer
together. The Catholic Church has
Protestants praying with her during her ecumenical and charismatic services which shows great deceit on the part of the
Catholic Church. The idolater who
believes in God and puts barriers up between him and man is far more dangerous
and crafty than the one who is openly and obviously idolatrous because his
errors are harder to see through and his power to mislead people is
increased. The Church and reason both
agree that error that contains a large dollop of the truth is more dangerous
than error that does not for it looks more reasonable.
A saint is a person who is now morally perfect and is enjoying eternal life in Heaven with God after being nearly perfect in life. The saint would do infinite good for you just like God would. What you intend not what you do determines what you deserve so the saint deserves latria the same worship due to God. Dulia is blasphemous and unjust for they deserve more than that. If God commands dulia then he is immoral and the saints can’t be great either when they are his close friends who see dissenting from him as a sin. If you want to be devoted to saints then become a polytheist.
The Bible says Christians should pray for one another. Rome says that this means they are allowed to pray to saints or to ask saints to pray for them. Suppose you are a Christian and a Christian friend comes and kneels before you, imploring you with great devotion to pray for him. Would you allow him? How would you react if he calls you his advocate, his hope, his life and refuge just like the pope calls Mary these things when he prays the Hail Holy Queen? What if he thanks you for the many graces you conferred on him and for delivering him from hell? Suppose he tells you that he confines his salvation to your care and pleads with you to stay with him until you see him safe in heaven? Does that sound like asking a fellow believer to pray for you? Of course not! That kind of prayer and confidence is nothing less than divine worship and it should be directed only to the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet that is exactly the kind of prayer that Catholics offer to Mary and the saints.
If you call yourself Catholic then have the integrity to call yourself a polytheist. If you consider polytheism to be evil and pagan, then confess that the apparitions of Lourdes and Fatima and Medjugorje are probably counterfeits from Satan for they advocate the rosary which advocates the heretical prayer, Hail Holy Queen.
SAINT-WORSHIP ATTACKS DIVINE LOVE
According to
Roman Catholic theology, a saint is a person who has lived an unusually holy
life and who has gone straight to Heaven at his or her death. The pope decrees that a person is a saint
after the Church has “thoroughly” investigated her or his life and the miracles
done though her or his intercession. No
one can be canonised without having done some miracles. God, it is supposed, does miracles in
response to the invocation of the person’s intercession in order to show the
Church that he or she is a saint.
Catholics pray to saints so
that they will ask God to bless them on their behalf.
Is this practice
rational? Does it fit into the doctrine
that God is perfect love and infinite might like a glove or does it crush it?
Catholics choose one or more
reasons out of six to pray to saints and not one of them is sensible and fails
to offer an indignity to the Almighty.
* Reason One. This seems to be the most theologically
acceptable and decent reason because it looks as if praying to a saint doesn’t
necessarily deny that God is all merciful and all good and all knowing and the
only person you need. It holds that just
as you may ask others to pray for you so you may ask the saints and angels and
this is not praying to them but praying to God through them. In this theology you don’t say “Holy Mary
Mother of God I pray to you” but “Holy Mary Mother of God pray for me” or “Holy
Mary Mother of God I pray through you to God.
That is, you take my prayer and take it to God for me.” This would be like sending Johnny a text
message but you sending it to Mark so that he can do it for you so you are
talking to Johnny through Mark. It
doesn’t look at all sensible and implies that somehow you are afraid to
approach Johnny directly. It implies you
are hiding behind Mary. This insults the
mercy and the all knowing nature of God.
You
should ask others to pray for you not because you believe it will help you but
because you believe it will help them to open themselves up to God so that they
can love you better. Prayer is mainly
for changing the heart. To ask a saint
to pray for you is to insult the saint for the saint doesn’t need to pray for
you. Also the saint just praises God and
though the saint wants God to help you she or he will leave it between you and
God. True reverence will require that
you do not ask them to pray for you.
There is no need to read on, praying to saints
puts them before what is right and before God.
It attempts to make idols of them.
It is presumptuous to ask a saint to pray for you for how do you know
they can hear you and that they can listen to billions of prayers at once? They would have to be Gods to do that. If Mary is praying for you but without
knowing much about your circumstances then you should not be praying, “Holy
Mary Mother of God pray for me now and at the hour of my death” but “God hear
the prayers of Mary for me now and at the hour of my death.” I would remember too that if she is praying
for me know it isn’t just me she is praying for. She would be praying for everybody on earth.
* Reason Two. The Lord is more likely to answer your prayer
when you ask a saint to pray for you because the saint is and was holier than
you and deserves God’s blessings more so he will answer the prayer for the
saint’s sake. You might not get what you
want but you will get as good if not better.
Radio Replies says that
God loves Mary more than anybody on earth so he will be more ready to answer
the prayers she makes for us when we invoke her intercession (Vol 1, Question 1410).
This and the previous theory
show their errors more plainly when it is seen that all favours asked of God
are ultimately spiritual ones for even gaining temporal goods will affect you
spiritually. God only answers prayer if
they will be of spiritual benefit to you.
The theories present a God who encourages us to sin by withholding the
power to resist sin by leaving us without the spiritual benefits until a saint
is invoked. Instead of God they give us
Satan. God is not so concerned about
merit after all.
If God answers all prayers in
accordance with his promise then the theory is untrue.
If God answers because a saint
deserves it or asked him then this is the main reason he is doing it and not
because it is the best thing to do for you and everybody. A saint’s merit does not come before what is
best on earth. Is God honouring St Lucy
more important than helping a sick baby at the behest of prayer?
God might only humour the saint
when it is for the best but please understand it is motive that I am worried
about here. God has a bad motive for
doing good for he is putting the lesser motive before
the better one. This makes the saint
superior to God and able to persuade him to sin.
If God answers any prayer, it
must be for the best. But if the saint
had not asked and offered some merits it would not have been answered. So answering was not for the best after
all. God answering prayer for a saint means
that God can evilly do wrong. The saint
is actually better than God for at least doing something for you but just as
evil for adoring the monster God as a perfect being. The saint is deceitful and so is God for
having frauds in Heaven.
This reason implies that you
should visit allegedly holier people on earth and ask them to intercede for
you. But that would be the sin of
encouraging them to be self-righteous.
The Bible wants humility.
* Reason Three. It is simply easier to pray to God at times through
a human being than to pray straight.
Some declare that we should
pray to the saints for it is easier to pray to human beings. They say our prayers will be better and
therefore more powerful.
Why is it easier? Because the saints know what life is like and
God doesn’t? This attitude denies the
knowledge of God and that he became a man, Jesus Christ, who understands us
(Hebrews
And if the saints do not pray
for you until they are asked they are not much.
* Reason Four. We can ask saints to pray for us when we are
too busy to do it ourselves.
That is just laziness for
nobody is too busy to think about God and it is superstition to take the saints
for mugs. One quick prayer is as good as
many so there is no need for it. Such
petitions would disgust the saints. They
will not reward them by doing what you ask.
The Devil might for an evil purpose.
It is a sin to ask for help
when you mean, “God, thy will be done!”
It would be more rational and less selfish just to say what you mean or
should mean. Anybody that asks for help
is not asking for God to do his own will but God’s. If that is all God wants to hear then this
eliminates all the reasons for saint-worship.
The saint is not going to petition God to assist you in passing your
driving test when all the saint does is ask God to do his own will. Why pray to saints when they ask that all the
time anyway?
Reason Five.
To honour the saints is not to detract from the honour due to God but to
double it for God is being honoured in himself and in his work in his
saints. He is being honoured in his
saints (page 17, The Great Means of Salvation and of Perfection). We pray to the saints to double the honour
prayer offers to God. Its
just another way of praying only to God.
In honouring God you are
honouring his perfect goodness which means you are necessarily and automatically
honouring him in his saints. You don’t
have to talk to the saints to honour this goodness or to honour it more. The silliness of this reason implies that
anybody that prays straight to God is insulting him. You would need to pray to yourself to honour
the goodness God does in you if there were any validity in it!
* Reason
Six. God has decreed to answer some
prayers only if a saint is invoked to pray them for you or with you.
This would be arbitrary of God
for he is well able to do without the saint playing a part. But obviously, since God is allegedly boss he would only let the saints influence him if he wanted
to be influenced. The notion of a God
who knows all and who can do literally anything wanting to be influenced by
creatures is totally incoherent. At most
he could only pretend to be influenced. It
is only imperfect beings that don’t know all that can be influenced. Influence is trying to direct their attitude
and improve their knowledge and direct their thinking.
Some Catholics admit that praying to saints
would be blasphemy and make creatures better than the creator if he is
influenced by them but not if he tells them he wants them to influence him to
do things. But the absurdity in this is
in saying that God can be influenced when it is not the saint that causes him
to do what the saint asks but his own decision to listen to the saint which was
made before he was asked. In other words,
when God gives the saints the power to influence him what sense does it make to
say that they truly influence him? It is
like somebody saying, “I gave Joan a watch and told her to give it to me for my
birthday. And she gave it to me as a
gift.” It is not Joan who gives the gift
but you give it to yourself through her.
So the Catholics have failed to deal with the problem they admit would
exist if saints could tell God what to do.
The reason denies that the
saints really intercede. Intercession is
a person trying to get God to do something for another but with this he has
decided to answer the prayer for an arbitrary reason and not really because he
was asked for it was him that decreed the asking would prompt him to act. To put it another way, if I arbitrarily
decide to give X a present if Y asks me to and I tell Y to ask me to then it
was not Y but me who got me to do it.
There is no intercession in that.
It is crude silly play-acting. It
is worse for God who knows the saint is good and will ask him.
The Church of Rome says the
saints are advocates for us with God.
Advocate implies pleading with a being who is
reluctant to do what you want. The Bible
says that Christ is advocate (1 John 1:9). Here it means that Christ paid God the price
for our sins which God would not forgive without it so he was a real advocate
and dealt with a being reluctant to save us unless he got paid. The saints cannot be advocates unless God
does not want to hear the prayers they and we offer but reluctantly gives in.
It makes no sense for the Lord
to hear some prayers and not hear others just because a saint wasn’t asked to
ask him for we know that all prayers are chiefly spiritual and ask for the same
thing: that the will of God may be done.
God will always answer this prayer.
If he is perfect then he is evil if he does not do his own will. He holds everything in existence and runs
everything so he is bound to do his own will always.
If God is almighty and gives
us grace then we need only ask him once in our lives to help us all our
lives. One prayer suffices. Reason 1 for saint worship denies this. Therefore it calls God unreasonable and
difficult.
If God helps you because the
saint asked him to then he wouldn’t have bothered if the saint had not. He always does what is best for he is perfect
so not helping you would be for the best.
Yet this theory of saint-worship has him doing what he shouldn’t do over
a saint’s request. The saint is happy with
God who promises that there is no pain in Heaven so the saint won’t be offended
or hurt if God refuses. God and the
saint are portrayed as diabolical. The
saint is stronger than God when he can get God to do what he would rather not
do if he is good. The saint is the real
God here. To ask the saint to sin by
telling God to turn aside from perfection is insulting the saint. When the saint won’t plead with God for you
unless she or he is asked it shows she or he is no saint at all but a cold
monster. This God had arbitrarily made
himself subject to capricious saints. A
God who exposes us to the danger of falling into sin for nothing is an evil
God. Praying to saints
means considering God sinful.
One thing that praying to
saints implies is that God is at the mercy of the saints and that they are the
real gods. The almighty would not be
under the creatures he has made.
Those Catholics who say they
are only praying to God through the saint not to the saint and that they are
not asking the saints to influence God for them are unbelievably hypocritical. Why say, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for
us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
Amen”, when you are praying to God alone? There is no point in using this formula. It would be insulting the saint by offering
deceit. You would say, “God listen to
Holy Mary praying for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen”, if the adoration of God were all that
mattered.
Some will contend that if we
must love God only and love others just for the love of him then God might
decree that we must love certain saints to get certain results. No.
God loves us infinitely and totally and deserves all our love so we owe
all our devotion to him and to no one else and we are to love and help others for
his sake which is really just using others to love him with. When we are to love God only it is silly to
pray to the saints for it would be the same thing to pray directly. Invoking saints is just using meaningless
words that they aren’t interested in listening to or meant to listen to. When you say, “
Don’t buy the Catholic lie that God might
choose to answer a prayer through a saint to honour a saint on earth. This lie is told in Radio Replies (Vol 1, Question 1408) which contradicts itself, which it
does very often, by saying that Pope Pius XI could have been wrong to attribute
his recovery from sickness to St Therese of Lisieux
(Question 1329, Radio Replies 3).
First of all, the level of glory in Heaven is static (Question 792, Radio
Replies Volume 3) so the honour is not real for it does the saint no
good. Secondly, the Church says that
prayers offered through people who were not saints at all but sincerely thought
to be are still efficacious. Thirdly,
God might only seem to have answered the prayer. It could have been something that was going to
be sent anyway whether it was requested or not.
What use is God honouring a saint on earth when nobody knows if it is
honour or not?
The very fact that the Bible
condemns many beings as false gods who should not be prayed to though all they
did was intercede with Gods who were greater than them indicates that
saint-worship is bad. Though the beings
were called gods they were the same as saints.
Roman Catholicism is a polytheistic religion for it has many gods. Hinduism is full of demigods who are just
like the Catholic saints. The pagan Gods
did not necessarily know all that happened on earth. They were like men and women with magical
powers. Catholic saints are more
powerful than they. They are Gods and
contradict the Bible rule that there is only one God and that the gods of the
nations are nothing.
We have proved that prayer to
saints is illogical and since Catholics know of the true God the Christians
would have to say they are worse than pagans.
To honour the saints excludes invoking their intercession. It is Protestants who don’t pray to saints,
not Catholics, who really respect them.
The saints cannot accept such so-called worship so it must belong to
demons. If such prayers are answered
then the Devil must be answering them simply because God would not foster any
activity that puts him down.
By now you will have read
undeniable proof that saint-worship is evil and blasphemous and
superstitious. Yet there are saints
whose bodies allegedly have never decayed and which exude a lovely smell. There are allegedly miracle-working bones and
relics of saints. There are saints who
appear to the living in visions and who work many miracles. All these wonders must be hoaxes if there is
a God for he would not endorse saint-worship.
If there is no God then Satan could be behind them. The miracles could logically imply that Satan
is God.
SAINT-WORSHIP
BIBLICAL?
The Roman Catholic Church claims to find her doctrine that saints should
be prayed to among the doctrines of the Bible.
Protestants, following the Reformation, reject this claim.
We are going to prove that the
Catholic Church is wrong.
Tobit
The Second Book of Maccabees,
There is a good reason to hold
that these books do not belong in the Bible at all. But even if they do they still cannot defend
saint-worship. These verses are often
abused by that paragon of integrity, the Roman Church.
Another spurious work, Sirach, says that we must praise the saints (44:1). You can praise your father without praying to
him.
The Bible calls on the angels
to praise the Lord. But it also calls on
the sun and moon to do it. When it does that so it is not literal invocation of the angels. The calling on creation is simply wishing
that all of it will honour God. It is
poetic hypothetical language. Calling
the angels to praise God is not asking them to do so or looking for
intercession for they are praising anyway.
If you can ask them to praise that does not mean you can ask them to
intercede or to pray for you or praise for you.
In Revelation, an angel is
stated to present the prayers of the faithful to God by laying them on his
altar (8:3,4) and other heavenly beings offered
incense that stands for the prayers of the world (5:8).
The Revelation says that the
saints are Kings and Priests to God, which might imply you
can treat them as Gods and pray to them.
But the fact is, they take all their direction from God and will what he
wills so they are not Gods at all. They
are servants but are treated like kings.
You can be a king without having power.
They are kings in the sense that they get their own way which is God’s
way and they feel like kings for righteousness is perfect freedom and they are
honoured by God. They are priests too
but only because they offer love as a sacrifice to God so they are not kings
for if they were kings like independent divine rulers they wouldn’t have to be
subservient to God. The Catholic
doctrine that Mary is Queen of Heaven is blasphemous because all females in
Heaven are queens and all males are kings.
God says the saints rule with him in Heaven but that is in the same way
as a government will rule with the king except that in Heaven the saints are
totally submitted to the will of God and are making him supreme and the first
in their lives and thoughts and feelings so they are totally one in love and
unity and friendship. They are so close
to God that they feel like kings and they feel so free and they know what right
and teach it which is the main job of a king.
Daniel 8:17 does not say that
Daniel bowed before an angel in worship for it does not say that he threw
himself on the ground in worship. The
verse says he was scared.
Joshua
And the mere fact that some
people chatted with angels who appeared to them in the Bible does not prove
that saint worship right for they don’t appear to us.
But what
about guardian angels? This idea
was inspired by Jesus saying that the angels of children look on God in
Heaven. But these angels might not pay
any attention to our prayers because they get their orders from God.
The doctrine that the saints
in Heaven and on earth and in Purgatory are in communion and make one Body in Jesus
Christ does not prove that we should pray to the saints. The Catholics argue that if you don’t pray to
the saints then you don’t believe in the doctrine of the communion of saints or
that people should pray for one another.
Does the communion of saints which comprises
the Church on earth as well as the Church of the Saints in Heaven mean that I
can pray to somebody in
Should I pray to some Catholic,
who could “hear” my prayer though the action of the Spirit which might just be
a feeling that somebody needs his prayer, wandering in
If it is true that the
communion of saints means that the saints in heaven help the Church on earth by
prayers then why are there patron saints?
Why do you have St Patrick taking a special interest in
The Bible praises the virtues
of the saints. That is not worship. You can pay homage to the president by
praising him when he is not there.
The saints doing miracles by
their prayers (Acts
The rich man prayed to Abraham
(Luke 16) but this does not prove that saints should be prayed to. The rich man was in Hell so we don’t have to follow
his example. Likewise, you could talk to
a saint in a vision but that is not what Catholics praying to saints do at all.
We can petition others when
they are alive but that does not mean we can talk to them when they die for it
may be wrong to and not possible for them to hear you. Reason says that saints would pray for all
but we can’t infer from this that they should be prayed to.
SAINT WORSHIP FORBIDDEN
Praying to saints is heresy according to the Bible though the Catholic
Church encourages this worship though regarding it as giving lesser worship for
full adoration belongs to God alone.
When the Devil told Jesus he
could have all the kingdoms of the world if he would just worship him his
meaning was that Jesus must worship him as owner of the kingdoms of the world
and not as God. Satan would have offered
Jesus the universe had he wanted the worship due to God. So Satan was looking for the inferior worship
that Catholicism offers to the saints.
Jesus quoted the Bible saying it said God alone is to be
worshipped. Jesus said that this worship
was forbidden because the Bible said so.
He did not say it would be wrong for the Devil was evil – you can give
legitimate inferior worship to an evil being.
His point was that God alone is to be adored and there is to be nothing
that gets any worship but him Jesus said
that only God was to be adored indicating that Satan wanted him to continue
praying to God and adoring God but to give him some worship too. That was the reason for the only.
The Bible says that the angel of
the Lord told John the Revelator to worship God only
when he worshipped him (Revelation 22:8,9).
It is hardly likely that an
apostle of God who had just received a staunchly anti-idolatry revelation would
knowingly adore an angel as God. You
cannot worship unless you are thinking of what you are doing. You have to know what you are doing. To worship by mistake is not to worship at
all because it is not what you really intend.
John meant to give the angel inferior worship but the angel said it was
idolatrous and forbidden”. Otherwise it
would have been enough just for the angel to say, “You know not to be doing
that” instead of explaining to John why he couldn’t do it as if he didn’t
know. The angel told him not to do that
but to adore God alone. Had it been a
mistake there would have been no need for the angel to do that because John
didn’t need an explanation as to why it was wrong. It was not a mistake. Perhaps John thought that the angel was an
apparition of God and was set straight.
But why would he think that? He
couldn’t have thought it for the angel had been standing before him a long
while before he worshipped him that time and also the angel had told him he was
an angel.
Hebrews 4 says that as God did
nothing but rest on the seventh day so those who enter the salvation of God
will do nothing but rest. This forbids
saint-worship for the saints just lie and bask in the
glory of God. They will not plead for us
in Heaven.
The Bible and Jesus say that
we are to love God with all our strength and therefore others only for his sake
(Matthew 22:37) so strictly speaking there is no such thing as inferior worship
in the biblical Christian religion. Honouring
the kind is just honouring God when it is only done for God. To really mean to give inferior worship is to
be an idolater. The command bans it. The command was first given in the Law of
Moses. The first commandment forbids
others Gods and the second forbids bowing down before anything in Heaven or on
earth and bans idols. This forbids
giving any honour or worship to images of God or the saints. It forbids honouring the saints for bowing
before them is as bad as doing it before statues. Worship is always sincere or it is not
worship. God will push such worship away
like an abomination. Sincerity is not
enough for him. The Church says that
praying to saints is not against the first commandment for the worship they get
is entirely different and inferior to that given to God. But the Jews who turned to pagan gods often
would have thought the same thing that the gods were inferior to Yahweh and
were praying to Yahweh for them. Yet the
law is clear that no such gods are to be entertained.
It is silly to pray to saints
for then it would be the same thing to pray directly. God forbade silliness when he asked to be
loved with our entire mind.
If God has arbitrarily decided
that he will not answer certain prayers unless they are made to a saint then
the Bible which praises his unlimited generosity is wrong. He is just like a man who won’t let people
who wear purple into his house.
God has no right to do this
when he promised to answer all prayers maybe not in the way we expected but he will
always do what is best (Luke 11; Unanswered Prayer, page 2).
Haven’t we all prayed at least
once in our lives for us to have our lives filled with grace and temporal
blessings? When we have prayed that way
he has to answer that prayer all our lives so there is nothing that is
conditional upon the invocation of any angel or saint. It is prayer’s quality not quantity that
counts (Matthew 6:7, 8). This theory
accuses the Lord of putting arbitrary notions before human needs and of
breaking his promises.
If we want the saints to
influence God for us when we must pray only to the being whose prayers are the
most powerful.
The Bible says this is Jesus (1 John 2:1). It would be a sin to turn anyone lesser such
as Mary, who is considered to be the only non-divine being who
has the most influence with God, and even worse to pray to anybody else. Imperfection is a sin and God only tolerates
perfection (Matthew
Praying to saints is against
the Bible which speaks of a perfectly good and all-powerful God. In the Law of Moses, God ordered that anybody
who worshipped another God was to be dragged out and stoned to death. The New Testament says that those who commit
the sin of idolatry, adoring other gods, close the gate of Heaven against
themselves. If you believe that this
should not be done to Catholics or to anybody else who prays to saints then you
still have to believe that the saint-worship is one of the things that should
be detested above every other sin or evil for it strikes at the main thing,
God. It would be sinful to ignore this
sin or evil to fight others for to pass over it is to encourage it.
Irenaeus
said we do not pray to angels and since he never stated any conditions in which
saint worship was right it follows that he forbade dulia. Origen commanded
prayer to God alone. These
considerations prove that the orthodox in the early Church never prayed to
saints (page 43, Traditional Doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church Examined).
1 TIMOTHY 2:5,6
The First Epistle to Timothy tells us to pray for others for God wishes
all people to be saved and to know the truth for “there [is only] one God, and
[only] one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus, Who gave Himself
as a ransom for all”.
Protestants say that this
excludes and forbids praying to saints.
Catholics say it does not for
“the context is about people praying for one another. When intercession is allowed then the verses
cannot disprove the notion of saints doing it for us”. But the Bible advises prayer not to change
God or to ask God to make some change for it defines all prayer as a
manifestation of one law: “Thy will be
done”. Biblical prayer is for pleasing
God and nothing else not even intercession in the sense of trying to influence
God to do something for another person or in any real sense.
When one does not know Bible
teaching one can easily assume that the Catholics are talking sense and are
right.
The Bible says that when we
pray, our prayer has to be inspired by the Spirit of God to be real prayer
(Romans 8:26, 27). The Spirit of God
prays in us and the words we say are just inspired by him. God would not influence himself so since
prayer is the Spirit's work prayer is not meant to influence God but is the
person opening up to God. The Bible says
that Jesus is the only mediator of intercession. Anybody who prays without the Spirit’s
prompting is not really praying at all but just trying to insult and fool
God. So, if I pray for my flu to be
healed soon and the prayer is answered then it is not because I prayed but
because the Holy Spirit prayed for me.
My prayers just coincided with his or its but the petitions of the
Spirit brought the answer. The Bible
says we are all sinners and that for that reason our prayers are fruitless in
themselves (James 3:9-12) so we are dependent on the Holy Spirit and the
sinless Jesus to pray for us. James
The Holy Spirit is not going
to pray to the saints for us to pray to him for us so this refutes saint
worship.
So, the Timothy verses are really instructing us to pray to God but not to intercede with him. The Catholic argument is wrong. Christians do not pray to change God or to tell him what to do for he knows but to humble themselves before him. That is what it is all about. Therefore intercession is immoral. Jesus does all the interceding necessary because though the Catholic Church denies this (Question 1320, Radio Replies 3) no prayer can be answered according to the Bible unless it is made through Jesus - ie given to Jesus to give it to God for you with his own input - and God is asked to listen to Jesus praying for us (Hebrews 4:14-16).
Jesus prayed that God would look after Jesus' followers and that God's will be done. It is quality of prayer not quantity that counts. Therefore if he was as perfect as Christians say, he made intercession for all and no other intercession is necessary. Praying to the saints would be denying his perfection.
Catholics would then argue
that there are two kinds of mediation.
The mediation of redemption is Jesus suffering on the cross to make up for
our sins while the mediation of intercession is somebody praying to God to
influence him for us.
They are saying the verses do
not refute saintly intercession for they are not concerned with that kind of
mediation.
They think that the verses are
stating that there is only one mediator of redemption. Jesus redeemed us from the guilt and much of
the punishment due to sin. The saints
who take on some of the punishment for our sins are allegedly not redeemers
because it is Jesus working in them that enables them to merit blessings. But to choose infinite or X good is to do
something of infinite merit or of X value.
Yet
By the way, there are two
kinds of mediators of redemption, those who take away the sin by atoning for it
in doing good in its place and cancelling the guilt and those who did just take
on the punishment for sin.
The Bible says that Jesus
saved us from sin by enabling God to pardon us and that he saved us from divine
retribution so Jesus is the mediator of redemption both ways.
The verses present Jesus as
the sole human mediator of intercession because they are not saying he is our
mediator because he saved us by atoning for sin but because he offered himself
and the only way he could offer himself was by prayer. The words “gave himself”
are grammatically what the mediator statement is about. The prayer was what saved us and made the
death able to save. The verses ARE
saying that Jesus alone intercedes for us.
Saint-worship and dependence on anything other than Jesus and God alone
is condemned.
MAKES SAINTS WORTHLESS
Salvation from sin and death and suffering in Heaven is a gift and not a
reward according to the Bible and even the Roman Catholic Church. But you receive rewards there for the good
you have done in life.
The Roman God does not reward
good deeds done in Heaven or give all who live there the same degree of
happiness (Radio Replies, Third Volume, Pages 230, 231) for he only
rewards what has been done on earth not after (2 Corinthians 5:10). (See also the Catholic book, Handbook of
Christian Apologetics, page 275-6).
In Matthew 26, Jesus punishes the damned and rewards the just solely on
the basis of what they did when they lived on earth. The saints will not gain from helping us if
they pray for us.
It is impossible to imagine what
the rewards the saints get in Heaven could be.
Heaven is not like earth and the saints are wrapped up in God so a good
book wouldn’t impress them. And they can
metamorphose at will so they don’t need clothes. The rewards are just another lie told by the Church.
Their God is not grateful for
the kindness of the saints when he won’t reward them. His generosity is limited. They praise and adore God and deserve rewards
for that too. You cannot avoid the mean
God doctrine by saying that the saints know nothing about us and do not think
of us.
Perhaps their only reward is
pleasing God? They are mental if they
consider pleasing a miser to be a reward.
A good God would want them to take rewards just to please him. The Handbook of Christian Apologetics
says that Heaven is not a bribe to do good but is the
reward of perfected love (page 267). In
other words, the reward of love is making you love better and making you
holier. But this is not a reward for
love is sacrifice and self-forgetful in the Christian system.
By the way, the religious and
Bible doctrine that rewards are not a bribe to do good
and such bribes are wrong shows that the heart is put before your welfare. I mean it is considered okay for God to let a
kidnapper torment you for weeks and not stop him by bribing him. Is religion about making the world a nicer
place at all?
If God won’t reward the saints
then the saints are not really good for they submit to his will in all
things. If God would reward the saints
then they don’t pray for anybody if the Bible is right. This still makes both God and his saints bad news.
Purgatory would not be a place of purification but a place where purity
of virtue is destroyed in preparation for the immorality of Heaven.
It is wrong to say that God
hears the saint’s prayers for sinners for the saint’s sake. When he is mean to them can he be sincerely
concerned about being kind to them or sinners?
If he does it for the person who requested saintly intercession we have
the same problem for if he were really altruistic towards that person he would
not have decided to neglect that person until the saints started praying for
her or him.
There is absolutely no reason
why God can’t reward the good done in Heaven.
Christians say we would not do as much on earth if he did but earth life
is only a small part of our existence anyway.
It is not the main thing.
The biblical doctrine of the
miser God contradicts the Roman dogma that we may pray to the saints. A God who makes you look at
a baby that isn’t baptised as an outcast who needs to be brought into the
Church and a baby that is baptised as a brother and sister in Christ is a miser
in the extreme.
WRONG ANTI-DULIA ARGUMENTS
Be wary of bad refutations of Catholicism from the Bible.
“Elijah asked Elisha what he could do for him before he ascended into the
sky which proves that once he was in Heaven he could do no favours.” The Bible does not say that Elijah went to
the heaven of God then. If he did not
gain the power to answer prayers after he went up then this does not prove that
the saints with God are unable to hear and answer prayers. Perhaps the prophet made a mistake and merely
thought he could no longer be of service to his friend after he was taken from
him. Perhaps the prophet did not have
praying for him in mind at all for he had done it often enough before.
“Paul declared that David had served
God’s purpose in his own generation so he cannot help us with his prayers
now.” Does a Catholic saying that a
priest lived his vocation well mean that he or she believes that he cannot be
prayed to now?
In Jeremiah 15:1 God says that
even if Moses and Samuel stood before him to intercede he would not bless the
people of
If those verses that say the
dead know nothing and do not get involved in life under the sun really proved
that the dead are non-existent and that their souls did not survive (which they
do not) they still wouldn’t oppose saint-worship. The Bible says that the dead will rise but it
never says that dead will be out of existence until then. God could immediately re-create those who
have gone out of existence at death.
CONCLUSION
The Catholic practice
of praying to saints is not Christian. It
is idolatry – the sin that is most savagely condemned in the Bible. The Bible says these things are serious wrong
and God finds them very offensive. It
condemns idolatry as the worst sin. It even
ridicules those who commit it so it forbids respecting Catholic idolatry.
BOOKS CONSULTED
ALL ROADS LEAD TO
ROME, Michael de Semlyen, Dorchester House
Publications, Bucks, 1993
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS CATHOLICS ARE ASKING Tony Coffey, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 2006
BORN
FUNDAMENTALIST, BORN-AGAIN CATHOLIC, David B Currie, Ignatius Press,
COUNTERFEIT
MIRACLES Benjamin B Warfield, Banner of Truth Trust,
FROM FASTING
SAINTS TO ANOREXIC GIRLS, Walter Vandereycken and Ron
van Deth, Athlone Press,
MAKING SAINTS,
Kenneth K Woodward, Chatto & Windus,
OBJECTIONS TO
ROMAN CATHOLICISM, Ed by Michael de la Bedoyere,
Constable,
PURGATORY, Rev W
E Kenny BD, Church of Ireland Printing, Co
SERMONS OF ST
ALPHONSUS LIGUORI, Tan Books,
THE BANNER OF THE
TRUTH IN
THE GREAT MEANS
OF SALVATION AND PERFECTION, St Alphonsus De Ligouri, Redemptorist Fathers,
THE LEGENDS OF
THE SAINTS, by Hippolyde Delehaye,
Four Courts Press,
THE MISSIONARY
POSITION, Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Christopher Hitchens,
Verso,
THE PRIMITIVE
FAITH AND ROMAN CATHOLIC DEVELOPMENTS, Rev John A F Gregg, BD, APCK,
THE VIRGIN, Geoffrey Ashe, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
VICARS OF CHRIST,
Peter de Rosa, Corgi,
THE WWW
The following two
sites show just what a liar Mother Teresa was and her callous heart is laid
bare. They show the deceit of Pope John
Paul II who is eager to make a saint of her.
OPEN LETTER TO
MOTHER TERESA, Aroup Chaterjee
http://website.lineone.net/~bajuu/chatlet.htm
MOTHER TERESA THE
FINAL VERDICT Aroup Chaterjee
http://www.meteorbooks.com/index.html
This fascinating
book reveals shockers such as that the pope has beatified Archbishop Stepinac of
BIBLE VERSION
USED
The Amplified
Bible