Overcome Your Worry About Praying to the Catholic Saints
How to grow in holiness with the help of Catholic saints even if you don’t feel worthy of the saints’ attention.
Most lay Catholics tell me that they struggle with a shallow spiritual life. Life is just too busy, too filled with work and family life and other obligations to find the time to pray, study, and deepen their faith life. That’s why From the Abbey focuses on simple, practical ways to deepen your spiritual life in the midst of your daily life. One such strategy is to partner with the saints in your spiritual life. You don’t have to struggle through it alone!
Partnering with the saints sounds like a great idea, but typically that means also dealing with the pain of worrying about one or more of these three fears:
- I am not worthy of the attention of the saints
- I don't have time to foster an intense devotion to a saint
- Devotion to the saints will keep me from intimacy with Jesus
If any of these fears about partnering with the saints have got you worried, then here's how to get past each of them fast.
WORRY #1: "I am not worthy of the attention of the saints"
This fear usually comes from the sense that the saints are innately more holy than we are. We assume that the saints never struggled with our weaknesses or our sins. They followed God perfectly their entire lives, didn’t they? Most of us hesitate to engage such models of holy perfection because . . . well . . . we’re just not that holy. It’s embarrassing to ask the saints for help because that just shed a brighter light on our own imperfections.
If this is one of your worries, the first thing you need to understand is that most of the saints were not models of perfection their entire life. Sure, there were some who lived a blessed life form their very birth. But most of the saints struggled with sin and weakness just as you and I do. Saint Augustine struggled with lust and had a live-in-lover for his entire early adulthood. Saint Francis sought fame and glory before finally submitting himself to God’s call. These “sinner to saint” stories are not the rare exception. They are actually closer to the norm. Even saints who didn’t struggle with sin sometimes struggled to follow God’s will for their lives. What makes a saint is not how innately good they are. What makes a saint is how well they cooperated with grace in order to follow God’s will for them in the midst of their daily struggles with life, sin, and weakness.
If you don’t feel worthy of the attention of the saints, get to know some of the saints who struggled as you do. Share on X
If you don’t feel worthy of the attention of the saints, get to know some of the saints who struggled as you do. I recommend a book on Catholic saints like Saints Behaving Badly, which focuses on these saints. Remember that the only way anybody becomes a saint is through grace, and grace is available to all of us. Then ask these “sinners become saints” to pray for you so that you might be open to the grace Jesus won for us on the Cross, and that you would have the courage to cooperate with that grace to deepen your spiritual life and grow in holiness.
WORRY #2: "I don't have time to foster an intense devotion"
Do you get frustrated with every Catholic teacher and leader telling you, “You need to be doing this prayer and that devotion every single day”? If you don’t, maybe you don’t listen to as many Catholic teachers and leaders as I do. It sure frustrates me! Between work and family life (I work out of the home), my days zip by really quickly. Not only do I struggle to find the right time for daily prayer, but I also struggle to have a daily schedule of any sort. In fact, “busyness” is the #1 reason that Catholic adults give me for not developing a devoted spiritual life. Even if you have a consistent prayer life, you may still feel like you can’t add yet another devotion.
What you need to realize to put this worry to rest is that devotions are tools to help us invoke the help of the saints, but they aren’t necessary. I realize that many devotions come with promises of spiritual favors, and they are wonderful prayers. But strictly speaking, a devotion isn’t necessary in order to build a relationship with a saint. If you find a saint you want to form a relationship with, and you feel too busy to add a devotion to your prayer life, try this instead. Before you engage in your current prayer routine, simply ask the saint to join you in payer. Then pray your prayers as usual and end your prayer time by asking the saint to pray for you. This is a simple way to engage the saint in your faith life without adding an extra burden to your over-burdened daily schedule.
Of course, as you begin to do this you may feel yourself drawn to learn more about your chosen saint and to take your relationship with that saint further. If it becomes important enough to you, you will eventually take the time to do that. But you don’t have to wait to have the time in order to start engaging with the saints. Just invite them into your current prayer life and let the relationship grow from there!
WORRY #3: "Devotion to the Catholic saints will keep me from intimacy with Jesus"
Veneration of the saints (i.e. respect for the holiness of the saints and imploring their prayer help) is one of the many spiritual practices that have diminished since the Second Vatican Council. One reason for this reduction in saintly devotion is criticism by non-Catholics. Why do you pray to the saints and not to Jesus? Doesn’t going to the saints keep you from having a personal relationship with Jesus? You should be praying to God alone. Jesus is the only mediator between God and man. With so many criticisms, Catholics have started to wonder if this spiritual tradition does slide toward idolatry.
If these criticisms have you worried, go back to the truth about the saints:
- The saints in Heaven, the souls in Purgatory, and the baptized on Earth are all part of the same Family of God (the Church).
- We ask other members of our family on earth to pray for us all the time - because that’s what family does for each other.
- God loves that! He wants us to support each other as we strive for holiness and Heaven.
- Because of the power of the Resurrection, the saints are also living members of God’s family. We can ask them to pray for us just like we ask other members on earth to pray for us.
- Because of their holiness and their closeness to God in Heaven, the prayers of the saints are more effective - even sometimes resulting in miracles.
- Answered prayers and miracles that happen through the intercession of saints still come only through Jesus. It is the power of Christ that answers prayers and causes miracles. Catholic saints have no power to do these things in and of themselves. So even though our language gets sloppy, we don’t actually “pray to saints.” Instead, we ask the saints to pray for us.
Our relationship with Jesus is always defined in terms of the covenantal family. Don’t believe me? Read the Bible! Family imagery is used for the Covenant in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. When Jesus prays for His disciples, He prays that we might all be one - not just with Him but with each other. Saint Paul talks about the “great could of witnesses” not just in terms of spectators, but as those who cheer us on and support us as we run the race that they have already won.
So don’t worry that partnering with a Catholic saint and growing in relationship with him or her is going to lead you further from God. In fact, because it is grace that makes a saint, deepening a relationship with a saint is sure to deepen your relationship with Jesus. Think about how having holy people in your life spurs you on to greater holiness. Having saints in our lives does the same thing. So get to know the saints! Partner with them. Form true relationships with them. They will lead you to greater holiness and greater intimacy with Jesus.