No, the title isn’t the worst name ever for a horror film. It is the thought that goes through my mind when I read things like Novena [a devotion] to Saint Anthony to Find a Lost Article –The Patron Saint of Lost and Found:
St. Anthony of Padua is invoked thousands (maybe millions!) of times daily to help find items that have been lost. This novena, or nine-day prayer, to find a lost article reminds us as well that the most important goods are spiritual.
NOVENA TO SAINT ANTHONY TO FIND A LOST ARTICLE
St. Anthony, perfect imitator of Jesus, who received from God the special power of restoring lost things, grant that I may find [name the item] which has been lost. At least restore to me peace and tranquility of mind, the loss of which has afflicted me even more than my material loss. To this favor, I ask another of you: that I may always remain in possession of the true good that is God. Let me rather lose all things than lose God, my supreme good. Let me never suffer the loss of my greatest treasure, eternal life with God. Amen.
I mean the title quite seriously. This Anthony fellow is dead and there is no biblical support that he can hear the prayers of billions of people simultaneously in all their languages and that he then can tell you where to find your keys (or whatever you lost).
Let me break that out for emphasis. Allegedly, he and other saints can:
- Hear from billions of people at once and know which messages are for them
- Understand all languages
- Have the power to communicate back to you in some way
So having read the Bible through quite a few times I’m pretty skeptical of those claims. Apparently people think that certain dead people can answer certain types of prayer requests. It reminds of the line in This is Spinal Tap about St. Hubbins being the patron saint of quality footwear (see the 2:03 mark here).
But guess who does know where your keys are? Satan and/or his demons. I think it is much more likely that any prayer to Anthony is being “answered” by Satan, because by praying to the dead you opened yourself up to it.
I encourage people to read the Bible and just go straight to Jesus. There is one mediator between God and man, and He is Jesus. Do not pray to Mary or any other human being, dead or alive. Just stick with any member of the Trinity, or any combination of the three.
Eternity Matters 
It’s things like this and the implementation of spiritual trinkets with ritualistic chanting or prayer which should send the red flags up. If you step back and look at it all, it looks like mass OCD. I don’t even mean that pejoratively either. I think about this every time I have to attend a Catholic mass (weddings, funerals, etc.) I try to observe what is going on but without the volume at first. All the turning, kneeling, crossing, waving over, holding up, et. al. It looks so creepy.
Then when everyone is supposed to respond in unison to some thing the priest says. Look around sometime. Many people arent even paying attention, they’re just repeating out of reflex, like an assembly line worker who can put parts on a widget without even paying attention.
There is no way this is what Jesus had in mind.
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Those Romanists pray to everyone but God!
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http://www.catholic.com/tracts/praying-to-the-saints
http://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/maryc4.htm
http://answeringprotestants.com/2013/03/07/yes-we-ask-the-saints-to-pray-for-us/
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Those links are a train wreck of bad theology. They play fast and loose with the text. They beg the question by assuming that the Catholic definition of saint is the same as the biblical definition. They assume that because prayers of the people are shared in Heaven that all dead people can hear all prayers. Look at the piece I quoted: They aren’t asking Anthony to pray to Jesus on their behalf, but to answer the prayers himself. Please read carefully:
Anthony is said to have received this special power of restoring lost things. Someone just made that up.
Anthony is allegedly able to restore peace and tranquility of mind.
Anthony is allegedly able to keep one from losing God and eternal life — as if Jesus’ promises and power weren’t good enough!
The link makes appeals to alleged numbers of believers holding that view — as if the fact that there are a lot of believers in falsehoods somehow makes them true.
That is all satanic.
Really, just pray to God. Ask other living people to pray to God. But don’t pray to the dead, and don’t exalt Mary. Just read the Bible. Try to read the NT as if you were reading it for the first time and notice how little there is about Mary.
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Does anybody realize one minor detail? All of the Catholic saints are dead! Every single one of them! It’s a job requirement.
Therefore, attempting to communicate with them FOR ANY REASON, even to act as a messenger, is forbidden by the Bible because it is speaking with the dead.
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Hey, it worked out well for King Saul! Oh, wait, never mind . . .
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I’m curious how it all works, I mean the mechanics of it. For a person to be canonized as a Saint, they must be dead. So at least for a time, aren’t they just a regular dead person? What changes about the dead person that they are now able to grant wishes and hear prayers? There had to be a change. Who authorized the change? Wouldn’t God be in charge? But it seems that the church makes this decision.
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And they don’t use “saint” as it is used in the Bible. And even if they did, your questions would apply.
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I also question the mechanics around what saint answers what prayers. What if you prayed to Mary to find your keys — would she check with Anthony for you and then answer you? Or would her answer be to just pray to Anthony? Why doesn’t she know where the keys are? We can’t say she’s too busy, right?
I realize it sounds like I’m mocking the view — and I suppose that I am, a bit — but one of the liabilities of the “praying to the ‘saints'” model is that the instant you ask the most obvious questions it tumbles like a house of cards.
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Typically, some miraculous event is credited to a specific dead guy, although I’m not sure that is absolutely required.
Just as an aside, I don’t believe all Catholics merely go through motions. I don’t see the repetitive group prayers as much different than singing hymns, which many denominations do. Also, many denominations do this thing where the preacher says a list of prayers or petitions to God or such and the congregation responds to each in the same way. The point here is that this notion of going through the motions manifests in every church to some degree.
Praying to saints is one of the reasons I am no longer a Catholic. There are many more, but they all have to do with dogma and doctrine, not Catholics. Yet, because I was raised in the faith, I can’t help but feel a desire to defend them, as they take all sorts of crap all day long for everything under the sun.
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Hey! I just found my keys!
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Catholics like to reference Revelation 5:8 to prop up the idea of praying to “saints,” but that verse doesn’t come close to proving their point. Even if those in Heaven get to hear of our prayers that doesn’t mean the prayers were made to the “saints.” The prayers were still made to God.
Praying to Mary or anyone else besides God is wrong.
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Bible reference, Isaiah 8:19-20 And when they say to you, “Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,” should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living? 20 To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.
That answers the question for me. 🙂
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I remember the time I went to a Catholic church for a baptism. My brother in law is Catholic and wanted his kids to get sprinkled with the holy water…or whatever it is they do instead of simply immersing people in regular water like it says to do in the Gospel.
Anyway, the priest started rattling off the names of a bunch of people I’d never heard of (“saints”), pausing between each one long enough to repeat “pray for us.” It was hard for me to sit still through that part…I wanted to stand up in the pews and yell out, “THEY CAN’T HEAR YOU! PRAY TO JESUS! YOU ARE CHRISTIANS, AREN’T YOU?”
Geez. I went to another one when my dad’s aunt died, and the priest finished the ceremony by swinging a pot around the casket which was giving off some kind of mist or smoke. What was the point of that one? Paul told us that to be absent from the body, is to be present with the Father. She’d already gone on to the next world (and been judged), leaving behind an empty meat shell. It was already a bit late to be reciting prayers for her soul or conducting rituals or “last rites” or whatever they call it.
“Train wreck of bad theology” indeed. I don’t mean to be insulting toward Catholics, but so much of what they do seems utterly pointless at best, and downright un-Biblical at worst. Jesus didn’t have all this elaborate pomp and circumstance! He walked from place to place teaching the Good News and performing miracles to demonstrate God’s power over death, sickness, blindness, and the full spectrum of human maladies. Likewise with the apostles and other early Christians who got started on the Great Commission after Christ had left. Whose idea was it to invent all this nonsense. and inject it into God’s simple message of love and forgiveness of sin?
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