If there is one mediator, why ask saints to pray?

01Your verse first

“One mediator of God and men”

“For there is one God: and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus:”

Read fairly: Christ alone stands between God and us. Why go through anyone else, especially the dead?

Catholics agree with that verse. Look at what surrounds it.

02The Catholic reading

Praying for each other, through him

The same passage commands Christians to intercede for others.⁷ The Catechism says Christ “is the one intercessor with the Father,” and that Christian intercession participates in his.^2,9

Christ’s unique mediation “does not exclude but rather gives rise to a manifold cooperation which is but a sharing in this one source.”³

The saints in heaven intercede for us “through the one mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus.”⁴ Jesus said God is the God of the living, “for all live to him.”¹⁰

But Scripture also forbids turning to the dead. That needs a straight answer.

03Deuteronomy 18

Is this not consulting the dead?

“Neither let there be found among you any one that shall expiate his son or daughter, making them to pass through the fire: or that consulteth soothsayers, or observeth dreams and omens, neither let there be any wizard, Nor charmer, nor any one that consulteth pythonic spirits, or fortune tellers, or that seeketh the truth from the dead.”

This is a serious objection, and the text is clear. The question is what exactly it forbids.

The passage forbids seeking hidden knowledge and power: soothsayers, omens, wizards, and anyone who “seeketh the truth from the dead.”¹¹ The Catechism keeps that ban in full, rejecting all divination, including “conjuring up the dead” and recourse to mediums.⁶

It explains what is wrong with these practices: they conceal “a desire for power over time, history,” and over other people.⁶

Asking a saint to pray is different in kind. It seeks no secret knowledge and no power, and it calls no one up. It is the same request we make of a living friend.

It is made to a member of the Church who is alive in Christ, and who prays for us through Christ, never around him.^10,4

Which leaves the practical question: how could they even hear us?

04How they hear

An honest answer about how

How could someone in heaven hear millions of prayers? The honest answer is that the Church does not explain the mechanism, and we will not invent one.

What the Church does teach is that the saints, being more closely united to Christ, “do not cease to intercede with the Father for us.”⁴ They “contemplate God, praise him and constantly care for those whom they have left on earth.”¹²

“And therefore we also having so great a cloud of witnesses over our head, laying aside every weight and sin which surrounds us, let us run by patience to the fight proposed to us:”

Scripture pictures the faithful who have gone before as a “cloud of witnesses,” and shows the prayers of the saints offered before the Lamb in golden vials.^13,14

Those passages do not describe a process, and we should not make them say more than they do. They show the people of God in heaven as present to what happens on earth, and Catholics leave the how to God.

So the disagreement is not where it first looks.

05The real disagreement

Where we think it lies

Both sides ask friends to pray. The real question is whether Christians who have died are alive in Christ, aware of us, and able to pray for us, and whether it is right to ask them.

The Catechism answers: “We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world.”¹²

This is not adoration, which is due to God alone.⁵

First of all, pray for everyone. Then, one mediator. Paul saw no contradiction.