Our Lady of Humility Catholic Questions

"Why do Catholics pray to saints; isn't that wrong? We should only worship and pray to God".

Say that you and I are friends; if I ask you to pray for me, would you do so? You would, I hope.

The saints are men and women whose lives have been transformed by Christ and the Holy Spirit and lived their lives according to that transformation. Richard McBrien, a theologian, says so beautifully, "Saints are holy people, who have on balance, lived their lives in conformity with the gospel. The words *on balance * are crucial here, because it is not the case that saints neither committed sins nor had any personal faults and weaknesses. The saints were as human as any of us, but they somehow managed to rise above the standard of ordinary human behavior and manifest heroic virtue when it counted most.

The Church is a community, but not just any community. It is a community of those who have been transformed by Christ and the Holy Spirit. Since transformation is a process, to be completed when the Kingdom of God is fully realized at the end of history, our bond in Christ and the Spirit is not broken by death.. It is a bond of brothers and sisters in the Lord, the very Body of Christ on the way to achieving the fullness of God (Eph 3:19)".

So devotion, not worship, to the saints, is ultimately devotion to Christ. We pray to saints to ask them to intercede on our behalf and pray for us to Christ.

"Some of the Catholic Church's teachings aren't in the Bible. Why should we believe anything that's not in Scripture?"

Again the theologian, Richard McBrien, explains so well that "Scripture itself is a product of Tradition. It is not as if you first have Scripture and then you have Tradition. Tradition (upper case) comes before and during, and not just after, the writing of Sacred Scripture. In fact, careful study of the various books of the Bible, including the Gospels, themselves, discloses several layers of tradition from which the individual books have emerged and taken final form, Those traditions may be oral (preaching), liturgical (prayer formulas), narrative (recollection of important events, especially Jesus* passion), and so forth......from which the New Testament authors worked..... and needs to be differentiated from traditions (lower case), ie: obligatory priestly celibacy and other examples which include customary ways of doing or expressing matters related to faith. If a tradition cannot be rejected or lost without essential distortion of the Gospel, it is part of Tradition itself."

It's important to remember that Tradition never contradicts the Bible.

"Aren't all those statues in the Catholic Church the same as worshipping graven images?"

First, one must understand what a graven image is in the context of the Old Testament. To make a graven image is to create an image out of some medium, such as clay or wood, and worship it as a God. The statues or pictures of Mary are not worshipped as a God. If a Catholic worships a statue of Mary as a God, they are guilty of idolatry.

The Lord did not forbid the making of images. In fact, God commanded Moses to shape a brazen serpent. This serpent was able to cure the people of the serpent bite, if they looked upon it (Numbers 21:8). Later, when the people turned to idolatry of the serpent, Hezekiah had it destroyed (II Kings 18:4). Here you see the balance. Images are good, if they are helpful, but not if they encourage idolatry.

Moreover, the Lord commanded that the image of two Cherubim be constructed on the top of the Ark of the Covenant on either side of the Mercy seat. Was this the sin of idolatry? I think not.

Mary is the mother of God and the saints are the friends of God. If keeping their pictures or statues helps to inspire us to a more holy life, then it is a good thing. Don't you have pictures of your family in your home? Is this idolatry? Or when someone dies, should you destroy all images or pictures of them, lest you be guilty of worshipping them?

Did Jesus have actual brothers and sisters?

Matthew 12:47 and Matthew 13:55 make reference to brothers and sisters of Jesus, so many sects claim that the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph had offspring in the natural sense, an attack on the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This error in interpretation comes about because the reader takes the scripture out of its cultural context.

In the Hebrew and Aramaic the word for brother and kinman is the same, so James, Joseph, and Jude were kinsmen, relatives (Matthew 13:55). This is a common attitude in Mediterranean and Semitic cultures. For instance, the Apostle James is the Son of Alpheus (Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:15) and brother of the Apostle Matthew Levi (Mark 2:14) and the Apostle Jude (Luke 6:16, Acts 1:13), yet this Apostle is specifically referred to by Paul as the brother of Jesus (Galations 1:19). He can't be referring to James the Greater, because he is a son of Zebedee as well as the Apostle John. Surely the Virgin Mary did not have more than one husband!