Praying to the dead for help in our lives

Our vibrant community extends from the living to the dead

Emma Green, when at The Atlantic, wrote extensively about the way the younger generations of Western people are experimenting with new forms of religious belief. She finds plenty of evidence that young people tend to hold to a belief in the spiritual even as they reject religion. Among the forms of spirituality that find favour these days are Spiritualism, a religion in its own right, and the unstructured darker realm of necromancy, both of which involve contact with the dead.

Of course, the belief that we can influence life after death goes back to pre-Christian Judaism, whereby we ask God to forgive the sins of the newly dead; the Christian scriptures make reference to those who have gone before us to meet God face-to-face; and, supremely, there is the doctrine of all Christians becoming part of the mystical body of Christ, united in achieving the ongoing abundance of life for all.

Because of abuses within Catholic practices surrounding praying for the dead, and all the better to challenge papal authority, Luther and fellow rebels cut from their list of traditional Christian teachings to carry forward, the powerful doctrines of praying for the dead, and praying to the dead for their intercession before God for the needs of Christians still on earth. The doctrine is referred to as the "communion of saints".

This month, Pope Francis devoted his teaching time at a public audience to the doctrine. He first spoke of some of the misunderstandings surrounding the subject.

[...] our prayer and our devotion as faithful people is not based [...] on trust in a human being, or in an image or an object, even when we know that they are sacred. The prophet Jeremiah reminds us: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man, ... blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord” (17:5, 7). 

Even when we fully rely on the intercession of a saint, or even more so that of the Virgin Mary, our trust only has value in relation to Christ. [It's] as if the path toward this saint or toward Our Lady does not end there, no. It goes there, but in relationship with Christ. Christ is the bond that unites us to him and to each other, and which has a specific name: this bond that unites us all, between ourselves and us with Christ, is the “communion of saints”. 

It is not the saints who work miracles, no! “This saint is so miraculous…” No, stop there. The saints do not work miracles, but only the grace of God that acts through them. Miracles are done by God, by the grace of God acting through a holy person, a righteous person. This must be made clear. There are people who say, “I do not believe in God, but I believe in this saint”. No, this is wrong. The saint is an intercessor, one who prays for us and we pray to him, and he prays for us and the Lord gives us grace: The Lord acts through the saint.

The notion of "saint" has a double aspect. First, the early Church, including Paul, used the term to mean all those saved sinners who had surrendered their will in obedience to the loving God. These "saints" are the living, but also those who had fallen asleep in the Lord - the dead.  The second meaning refers to the dead who have been identified by the Church as clearly rewarded with eternal life in heaven, given their holy life on earth. A recent example of the second grouping of saints is St Teresa of Kolkata - Mother Teresa of Calcutta. 

The community of all Christians is profound:

By virtue of the communion of saints, of this union, every member of the Church is bound to me in a profound way. But I don’t say “to me” because I am the Pope — we are bound reciprocally and in a profound way and this bond is so strong that it cannot be broken even by death.

Indeed, the communion of saints does not concern only the brothers and sisters who are beside me  in this historical moment, but also those who have concluded their earthly pilgrimage and crossed the threshold of death. They too are in communion with us. Let us consider, dear brothers and sisters, that in Christ no one can ever truly separate us from those we love because the bond is an existential bond, a strong bond that is in our very nature; only the manner of being together with  each of them changes, but nothing and no one can break this bond. [...] The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven.

In this sense, the relationship of friendship that I can build with a brother or sister beside me, I can also establish with a brother or sister who is in heaven. The saints are friends with whom we very often establish friendly relations. What we call devotion to a saint — “I am very devoted to this or that saint” — what we call devotion is actually a way of expressing love from this very bond that unites us. Also, in everyday life one can say, “But this person has such devotion for his elderly parents”: no, it is a manner of love, an expression of love. And we all know that we can always turn to a friend, especially when we are in difficulty and need help.

And we have some friends in heaven. We all need friends; we all need meaningful relationships to help us get through life. Jesus, too, had his friends, and he turned to them at the most decisive moments of his human experience. In the history of the Church there are some constants that accompany the community of believers: first of all, the great affection and the very strong bond that the Church has always felt towards Mary, Mother of God and our Mother. But also the special honour and affection she has bestowed on Saint Joseph. After all, God entrusts to him the most precious things he has: his Son Jesus and the Virgin Mary. 

It is always thanks to the communion of saints that we feel that the men and women saints who are our patrons — because of the name we bear, for example, because of the Church to which we belong, because of the place where we live, and so on, as well as through personal devotion — are close to us. And this is the trust that must always animate us in turning to them at decisive moments in our lives. It is not some kind of magic, it is not superstition, it is devotion to the saints. It is simply talking to a brother, a sister, who is in the presence of God, who has led a righteous life, a holy life, an exemplary life, and is now in the presence of God. And I talk to this brother, to this sister, and ask for their intercession for the needs that I have. 

 As an example of the relationships that can develop within the communion of saints, Pope Francis offered a prayer to St Joseph, an old prayer he said he had recited every day for 40 years:

“Glorious Patriarch Saint Joseph, whose power makes the impossible possible, come to my aid in these times of anguish and difficulty. Take under your protection the serious and troubling situations that I commend to you, that they may have a happy outcome. My beloved father, all my trust is in you. Let it not be said that I invoked you in vain, and since you can do everything with Jesus and Mary, show me that your goodness is as great as your power”.

Just as we are taught to ask fellow Christians to pray for us in our hour of need, so we can call on our brothers and sisters in Christ who have died and are enjoying their reward, a life close to the God who loves us. The mystical body of Christ, that ever-active communion of believers, is as real for us now as it was for St Paul.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.