One of the most intelligent and well-informed converts to the Catholic Church in the United States was Orestes Brownson. He was a deep student and a sincere seeker after the truth. For years he tried one religion after another without securing satisfaction. After his conversion to the Catholic Church he told how he saw the simple logic of one Catholic practice honoring the saints, praying to the saints. "Many years ago, long before I had the happiness of being received into the communion of the Catholic Church," he wrote, "I was in the habit of frequently closing my letters to my friends with the words, 'pray for me'.
"One day, writing to a very dear friend, who was not precisely a saint, I concluded unthinkingly with the words, 'pray for me'. I did so from force of habit, but I had no sooner written the words than a sudden thought struck me, and I exclaimed to myself: 'There is justification of the Catholic practice of invocation of the saints. Here I am asking a sinful mortal to pray for me. How much rather should I ask the prayers of the beatified saints in heaven'."
Brownson was a thinker, and his thinking, deep and sincere, led him to see the reasonableness of praying to the saints. Honoring the special friends of God and praying to them or through them is not forbidden by the First Commandment. In fact, Mother Church has always asked her children to honor those who have been especially pleasing to God by their lives of goodness and love.
Just what is a saint? A saint is one who died in the grace and friendship of God, and who is already in heaven. This applies particularly to a canonized saint, one whom the Church has listed among those who have led a holy life, one who has secured miracles from Almighty God, and is therefore declared to be worthy of veneration by the Church.
1. We honor the saints because they are the special friends of God. They are the heroes and heroines who have given their best in serving the Lord. We honor and respect the president of the United States, but we also honor more than the average citizen, the members of his cabinet and of Congress.
God Himself honored the saints. That is clear from the Bible and from the lives of His special friends. Hasn't God worked miracles to show His pleasure with their service?
2. We honor the saints because they obtain great graces for us from God. The special friends of the president are more likely than the average citizen to secure a favor from the head of our government.
3. There are various ways of honoring the saints - by praying to them, by celebrating their feasts, by respecting their pictures and statues, by bearing their names in a worthy way, by appealing to them in matters of importance, and by praising them in speech and song. But the best way to honor the saints is by imitating them, trying to follow in their foot-steps.
4. Remembering the saints is the best means of keeping in mind what God wants and the possibility and beauty and reward of doing what God wants.
5. The honor we give God's friends does not in any way take away from the honor due to God Himself. There are two big differences between the two:
a. We honor God for God's sake, because He is supreme, all-good, all-holy in Himself; we honor the saints as the special servants of God. A king wants his princes and noblemen honored, but not with the respect due to his majesty alone.6. Everyone of you bears the name of some saint. Know that saint; honor that saint; imitate that saint. Likewise, there is some special saint for every walk of life: St. Joseph for the working man; St. Anthony for lost things; St. Blase for sore throats, etc.
b. We honor God for the goodness which He has in Himself; we honor the saints for the goodness which they have received from God.
Always bear in mind that the saints are beneath God. God makes known our prayers to them. In the vision of God they see our spiritual and material needs and our request for help.
As Brownson discovered, if we ask sinful, weak mortals to pray for us, it is much more reasonable to ask the saintly heroes and heroines of God to pray for us.
Closely allied to veneration of the saints is the veneration of the angels, the special heavenly messengers of God. Particularly are we to honor our guardian angel, the bodiless spirit appointed to take spiritual and physical charge of us.
Read the Bible and you find its pages bright with the wings of angels. There is no question of their existence. There is no question of their power. There is no question of their interest in our welfare.
By honoring the angels and saints we are winning friends, influential and interested friends in heaven, friends who will not forget us in our time of need, friends who will come to our help in time of temptation, unfailing friends who will speak for us at the throne of the all-powerful God.
One of the saints we hear about during this season of Advent is St. John the Baptist who calla out:
"I am the voice of one crying in the desert; Make straight the way of the Lord."
That is the work of the angels and saints - to make straight the way of the Lord into our hearts, to make straight the way to the Lord in heaven. Amen.
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Adapted from Talks on the Commandments
by Fr. Arthur Tonne, OFM (© 1948)
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