Catholicism practices idolatry

Why its a mistake to give the Catholic Church support via membership or donations

Pagan Idols of Roman Catholicism, how the saints are false gods

Idolatry is giving religious worship to any image.

Idolatry is worshiping that which does not deserve it. It does not have to be bad to fail to deserve it. It just has be nothing special.

Idolatry is worshipping that which cannot look after itself.

Idolatry is worshipping that which cannot look after you.

Idolatry is worshiping a thing and thereby having a degraded idea of the divine.

Are the saints idols? Yes in all the ways listed because if all their power comes from God then what are they being honoured for?

INTRODUCTION

The bizarre Catholic practice of honouring saints has aided that religion to have such tremendous clout over the world because it offers divine beings to its audience which they can identify with. The lack of saints to be adored in Protestantism has led to that faith not being as successful as Catholicism. Saint worship appeals to the polytheist in people. They want more than one God but don’t want to admit it.

Everything about saint-worship smacks of ignorance and superstition. Saint worship is blasphemous if you believe in God.

God is the excuse through which the Church creates the ultimate dysfunctional parent-child relationship. The relationship is between us and God. If you really believe the saints bring you to God then your relationship with them must be as distorted too.

Believers say that sin is basically idolatry and idolatry is sin. But they are idolaters themselves. They are therefore responsible for a bad influence and the sins that take place because of it.

Catholics deny that they are afraid of God and need saints to reason with him to calm him down. But they give themselves away when they look at texts such as Exodus 32:9 to 14 where Moses gets God to relent from punishing Israel and use them as examples of how powerful the intercession of the saints is. Moses was alive then but as the saints who are dead are alive in a sense that is beside the point.

Anybody who can reason with a perfect God is a bigger god themselves.

THE THREE TYPES OF WORSHIP

In Roman theology, there are three types of worship. Latria, Dulia and Hyperdulia.

The worship of latria is the worship due to God alone. It is supreme worship.

Dulia is the inferior worship given to the saints. In reality it is supposed to be God who gets all the worship for even saint worship is done for his sake. The Catholics claim that in honouring the saints they are honouring God for they are as close to him as a Siamese twin. Latria is due to God because he is infinitely good and would do infinite good for you. It is just what you owe him. The Church preaches that you owe no creature that adoration and that it is unjust to God and idolatrous to confer it on a creature. Idolatry is turning away from the supreme good which is God and thus all sin is seen as idolatry in a sense. Sin is idolatry and idolatry is sin.

The Church does not just honour the saints by praying through it but actually addresses prayers to the saints exactly in the form as used for God. For example, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I give you my heart and my soul. Jesus, Mary and Joseph assist me in my last agony. Jesus, Mary and Joseph may I breathe forth my soul in peace with you. Sweet Heart of Mary be my salvation.” This is real worship.

Hyperdulia signifies the special kind of dulia which is reserved for the Virgin Mary alone. It just means that she is singled out for most of the worship of dulia. Hyperdulia is expressed in the popular Catholic motto: “To Jesus through Mary”. Even when the Catholic prays directly to Jesus he means for Mary to get involved and to become the channel through which his words to Jesus are delivered. The result is that the Church can only allow it to look as if you were directly praying to Jesus or God but in reality that is not what is happening. Clearly, no Protestant who believes the saints cannot hear you or that God wants us to go to him directly and that it is idolatry and mistrustful of God not to can pray with a Catholic. They cannot even do the Lord’s Prayer together. The Catholic Church has Protestants praying with her during her ecumenical and charismatic services which shows great deceit on the part of the Catholic Church. The idolater who believes in God and puts barriers up between him and man is far more dangerous and crafty than the one who is openly and obviously idolatrous because his errors are harder to see through and his power to mislead people is increased. The Church and reason both agree that error that contains a large dollop of the truth is more dangerous than error that does not for it looks more reasonable.

THE IDOLS OF THE SAINTS

A saint is a person who is now morally perfect and is enjoying eternal life in Heaven with God after being nearly perfect in life. The saint would do infinite good for you just like God would. What you intend not what you do determines what you deserve so the saint deserves latria the same worship due to God. Dulia is blasphemous and unjust for they deserve more than that. If God commands dulia then he is immoral and the saints can’t be great either when they are his close friends who see dissenting from him as a sin. If you want to be devoted to saints then become a polytheist.

The Bible says Christians should pray for one another. Rome says that this means they are allowed to pray to saints or to ask saints to pray for them. Suppose you are a Christian and a Christian friend comes and kneels before you, imploring you with great devotion to pray for him. Would you allow him? How would you react if he calls you his advocate, his hope, his life and refuge just like the pope calls Mary these things when he prays the Hail Holy Queen? What if he thanks you for the many graces you conferred on him and for delivering him from hell? Suppose he tells you that he confines his salvation to your care and pleads with you to stay with him until you see him safe in heaven? Does that sound like asking a fellow believer to pray for you? Of course not! That kind of prayer and confidence is nothing less than divine worship and it should be directed only to the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet that is exactly the kind of prayer that Catholics offer to Mary and the saints.

If you call yourself Catholic then have the integrity to call yourself a polytheist. If you consider polytheism to be evil and pagan, then confess that the apparitions of Lourdes and Fatima and Medjugorje are probably counterfeits from Satan for they advocate the rosary which advocates the heretical prayer, Hail Holy Queen.

Worship and honour are really the same thing. It’s just that honouring God is referred to as worship. It’s only a word. Honouring the saint is worshipping the saint like you do God.

SAINT-WORSHIP ATTACKS DIVINE LOVE

According to Roman Catholic theology, a saint is a person who has lived an unusually holy life and who has gone straight to Heaven at his or her death. The pope decrees that a person is a saint after the Church has “thoroughly” investigated her or his life and the miracles done though her or his intercession. No one can be canonised without having done some miracles. God, it is supposed, does miracles in response to the invocation of the person’s intercession in order to show the Church that he or she is a saint.

Catholics pray to saints so that they will ask God to bless them on their behalf.

Is this practice rational? Does it fit into the doctrine that God is perfect love and infinite might like a glove or does it crush it?

Intercession means asking a being to help who is not interested in helping. It’s changing his mind.

Praying to the saints for their intercession is telling God that he is imperfect and they are better than what he is.

Does praying to the saints imply that God will not do his own will - his will is to help our wellbeing spiritual and otherwise - and needs them to persuade him to do it?

Catholics do not like the thought of a God they have to submit to so they devote themselves to the saints. They claim the saints pray for them and that means that they are really praying indirectly to God.

Catholics simply ignore this and then dish up reasons for praying to saints. But there is no point in even reading them because intercession of saints denies the goodness of God and it is as simple as that. Saints praying to God for us is incoherent and no argument can save it.

Catholics choose one or more reasons out of six to pray to saints and not one of them is sensible and fails to offer an indignity to the Almighty.

* Reason One. This seems to be the most theologically acceptable and decent reason because it looks as if praying to a saint doesn’t necessarily deny that God is all merciful and all good and all knowing and the only person you need. It holds that just as you may ask others to pray for you so you may ask the saints and angels and this is not praying to them but praying to God through them. In this theology you don’t say “Holy Mary Mother of God I pray to you” but “Holy Mary Mother of God pray for me” or “Holy Mary Mother of God I pray through you to God. That is, you take my prayer and take it to God for me.” This would be like sending Johnny a text message but you sending it to Mark so that he can do it for you so you are talking to Johnny through Mark. It doesn’t look at all sensible and implies that somehow you are afraid to approach Johnny directly. It implies you are hiding behind Mary. This insults the mercy and the all knowing nature of God.

You should ask others to pray for you not because you believe it will help you but because you believe it will help them to open themselves up to God so that they can love you better. Prayer is mainly for changing the heart. To ask a saint to pray for you is to insult the saint for the saint doesn’t need to pray for you. Also the saint just praises God and though the saint wants God to help you she or he will leave it between you and God. True reverence will require that you do not ask them to pray for you. There is no need to read on, praying to saints puts them before what is right and before God. It attempts to make idols of them. It is presumptuous to ask a saint to pray for you for how do you know they can hear you and that they can listen to billions of prayers at once? They would have to be Gods to do that. If Mary is praying for you but without knowing much about your circumstances then you should not be praying, “Holy Mary Mother of God pray for me now and at the hour of my death” but “God hear the prayers of Mary for me now and at the hour of my death.” I would remember too that if she is praying for me know it isn’t just me she is praying for. She would be praying for everybody on earth.

* Reason Two. The Lord is more likely to answer your prayer when you ask a saint to pray for you because the saint is and was holier than you and deserves God’s blessings more so he will answer the prayer for the saint’s sake. You might not get what you want but you will get as good if not better.

Radio Replies says that God loves Mary more than anybody on earth so he will be more ready to answer the prayers she makes for us when we invoke her intercession (Vol 1, Question 1410).

This and the previous theory show their errors more plainly when it is seen that all favours asked of God are ultimately spiritual ones for even gaining temporal goods will affect you spiritually. God only answers prayer if they will be of spiritual benefit to you. The theories present a God who encourages us to sin by withholding the power to resist sin by leaving us without the spiritual benefits until a saint is invoked. Instead of God they give us Satan. God is not so concerned about merit after all.

If God answers all prayers in accordance with his promise then the theory is untrue.

If God answers because a saint deserves it or asked him then this is the main reason he is doing it and not because it is the best thing to do for you and everybody. A saint’s merit does not come before what is best on earth. Is God honouring St Lucy more important than helping a sick baby at the behest of prayer?

God might only humour the saint when it is for the best but please understand it is motive that I am worried about here. God has a bad motive for doing good for he is putting the lesser motive before the better one. This makes the saint superior to God and able to persuade him to sin.

If God answers any prayer, it must be for the best. But if the saint had not asked and offered some merits it would not have been answered. So answering was not for the best after all. God answering prayer for a saint means that God can evilly do wrong. The saint is actually better than God for at least doing something for you but just as evil for adoring the monster God as a perfect being. The saint is deceitful and so is God for having frauds in Heaven.

This reason implies that you should visit allegedly holier people on earth and ask them to intercede for you. But that would be the sin of encouraging them to be self-righteous. The Bible wants humility.

* Reason Three. It is simply easier to pray to God at times through a human being than to pray straight.

Some declare that we should pray to the saints for it is easier to pray to human beings. They say our prayers will be better and therefore more powerful.

Why is it easier? Because the saints know what life is like and God doesn’t? This attitude denies the knowledge of God and that he became a man, Jesus Christ, who understands us (Hebrews 4:15, 16). Praying for that reason is hurting God. Moreover, the harder prayer is the more merit Catholics see in it for it is a bigger sacrifice. It is effort God cares about. If it is hard for you to pray, God is happier because all God wants from you is an effort to do his will. Saint-worship shouldn’t be an excuse for retreating from God. God having made you for himself would want you to come directly to him.

And if the saints do not pray for you until they are asked they are not much.

God is supposed to not care about the quality of your prayer or even how much time you spend at prayer but cares only about the sincere effort to reach him. To argue that our prayers are improved in quality by praying to the saints and because more influential for that reason is to blaspheme God for a decent God is as pleased with the prayer of an expert as he is the prayer of the sinner who makes a sincere effort.

The claim that prayer is sometimes easier if you talk to a saint or angel rather than God shows that the person is trying to fool God. It’s a case of, “God I don’t trust you or want to be close to you. I’d rather the saint would deal with you. You might be stupid enough to give me what I want though I do not trust you.”

If prayer to the saints is about reaching God then why are you asking somebody else to kick the ball into the goal for you when you can do it yourself? You don't really want the goal. So it is with God.

The Catholic doctrine that prayer is merely raising the heart and mind to God in submission to his will and pleasure suggests that praying to saints is unnecessary. It suggests that it’s a hindrance.

* Reason Four. We can ask saints to pray for us when we are too busy to do it ourselves.

That is just laziness for nobody is too busy to think about God and it is superstition to take the saints for mugs. One quick prayer is as good as many so there is no need for it. Such petitions would disgust the saints.

They will not reward them by doing what you ask. The Devil might for an evil purpose.

It is a sin to ask for help when you mean, “God, thy will be done!” It would be more rational and less selfish just to say what you mean or should mean.

Anybody that asks for help is not asking for God to do his own will but God’s. If that is all God wants to hear then this eliminates all the reasons for saint-worship. The saint is not going to petition God to assist you in passing your driving test when all the saint does is ask God to do his own will. Why pray to saints when they ask that all the time anyway?

Reason Five. To honour the saints is not to detract from the honour due to God but to double it for God is being honoured in himself and in his work in his saints. He is being honoured in his saints (page 17, The Great Means of Salvation and of Perfection). We pray to the saints to double the honour prayer offers to God. Its just another way of praying only to God. The saints have no power of their own - they pray to God to help us with his power. We are accused of dishonouring God by praying to the saints and calling for their intercession. We would dishonour Him if we consulted the saints independently of God. But we do not - we honour God by honouring them.

In honouring God you are honouring his perfect goodness which means you are necessarily and automatically honouring him in his saints. You don’t have to talk to the saints to honour this goodness or to honour it more. The silliness of this reason implies that anybody that prays straight to God is insulting him. You would need to pray to yourself to honour the goodness God does in you if there were any validity in it!

It does not follow that praying to saints is needed to double your honour for God. You should be able to honour him totally and to the hilt by praying to him alone.

Asking the saint to get you a bike is pointless. If it is not God’s will even the saint won’t get the bike for you. If your prayer for a bike is intended to honour God it follows that the saint has to check if it is God's will for you to have the bike. If it is then God has already decided you have the bike. So the saint then is left with nothing to pray for. If he prays for the bike after God has decided to give it then he is not praying but going through the motions. You can't ask for something that you know you have been given.

Perhaps the saints are going to pray to God for the people but that does not mean the saints should be prayed to or hear our prayers.

* Reason Six. God has decreed to answer some prayers only if a saint is invoked to pray them for you or with you.

This would be arbitrary of God for he is well able to do without the saint playing a part. But obviously, since God is allegedly boss he would only let the saints influence him if he wanted to be influenced. The notion of a God who knows all and who can do literally anything wanting to be influenced by creatures is totally incoherent. At most he could only pretend to be influenced. It is only imperfect beings that don’t know all that can be influenced. Influence is trying to direct their attitude and improve their knowledge and direct their thinking.

The Catholics believe the saints help them with their prayers. But it is really God who helps and not the saints. So why pray to the saints then?

Some Catholics admit that praying to saints would be blasphemy and make creatures better than the creator if he is influenced by them but not if he tells them he wants them to influence him to do things. But the absurdity in this is in saying that God can be influenced when it is not the saint that causes him to do what the saint asks but his own decision to listen to the saint which was made before he was asked. In other words, when God gives the saints the power to influence him what sense does it make to say that they truly influence him? It is like somebody saying, “I gave Joan a watch and told her to give it to me for my birthday. And she gave it to me as a gift.” It is not Joan who gives the gift but you give it to yourself through her. So the Catholics have failed to deal with the problem they admit would exist if saints could tell God what to do.

The reason denies that the saints really intercede. Intercession is a person trying to get God to do something for another but with this he has decided to
answer the prayer for an arbitrary reason and not really because he was asked for it was him that decreed the asking would prompt him to act. To put it another way, if I arbitrarily decide to give X a present if Y asks me to and I tell Y to ask me to then it was not Y but me who got me to do it. There is no intercession in that. It is crude silly play-acting. It is worse for God who knows the saint is good and will ask him.

The Church of Rome says the saints are advocates for us with God. Advocate implies pleading with a being who is reluctant to do what you want. The Bible says that Christ is advocate (1 John 1:9). Here it means that Christ paid God the price for our sins which God would not forgive without it so he was a real advocate and dealt with a being reluctant to save us unless he got paid. The saints cannot be advocates unless God does not want to hear the prayers they and we offer but reluctantly gives in.

It makes no sense for the Lord to hear some prayers and not hear others just because a saint wasn’t asked to ask him for we know that all prayers are chiefly spiritual and ask for the same thing: that the will of God may be done. God will always answer this prayer. If he is perfect then he is evil if he does not do his own will. He holds everything in existence and runs everything so he is bound to do his own will always.

If God is almighty and gives us grace then we need only ask him once in our lives to help us all our lives. One prayer suffices. Reason 1 for saint worship denies this. Therefore it calls God unreasonable and difficult.

If God helps you because the saint asked him to then he wouldn’t have bothered if the saint had not. He always does what is best for he is perfect so not helping you would be for the best. Yet this theory of saint-worship has him doing what he shouldn’t do over a saint’s request. The saint is happy with God who promises that there is no pain in Heaven so the saint won’t be offended or hurt if God refuses. God and the saint are portrayed as diabolical. The saint is stronger than God when he can get God to do what he would rather not do if he is good. The saint is the real God here. To ask the saint to sin by telling God to turn aside from perfection is insulting the saint. When the saint won’t plead with God for you unless she or he is asked it shows she or he is no saint at all but a cold monster. This God had arbitrarily made himself subject to capricious saints. A God who exposes us to the danger of falling into sin for nothing is an evil God. Praying to saints means considering God sinful.

One thing that praying to saints implies is that God is at the mercy of the saints and that they are the real gods. The almighty would not be under the creatures he has made.

Those Catholics who say they are only praying to God through the saint not to the saint and that they are not asking the saints to influence God for them are unbelievably hypocritical. Why say, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen”, when you are praying to God alone? There is no point in using this formula. It would be insulting the saint by offering deceit. You would say, “God listen to Holy Mary praying for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen”, if the adoration of God were all that mattered.

Some will contend that if we must love God only and love others just for the love of him then God might decree that we must love certain saints to get certain results. No. God loves us infinitely and totally and deserves all our love so we owe all our devotion to him and to no one else and we are to love and help others for his sake which is really just using others to love him with. When we are to love God only it is silly to pray to the saints for it would be the same thing to pray directly. Invoking saints is just using meaningless words that they aren’t interested in listening to or meant to listen to. When you say, “St Joseph, pray for us”, it is hypocrisy to be loving only God and speaking only to Joseph and especially when there is no need to address Joseph. When we are to love God alone we cannot offer any genuine worship to saints for to love them for God is not loving them but him.

Don’t buy the Catholic lie that God might choose to answer a prayer through a saint to honour a saint on earth. This lie is told in Radio Replies (Vol 1, Question 1408) which contradicts itself, which it does very often, by saying that Pope Pius XI could have been wrong to attribute his recovery from sickness to St Therese of Lisieux (Question 1329, Radio Replies 3). First of all, the level of glory in Heaven is static (Question 792, Radio Replies Volume 3) so the honour is not real for it does the saint no good. Secondly, the Church says that prayers offered through people who were not saints at all but sincerely thought to be are still efficacious. Thirdly, God might only seem to have answered the prayer. It could have been something that was going to be sent anyway whether it was requested or not. What use is God honouring a saint on earth when nobody knows if it is honour or not?

The very fact that the Bible condemns many beings as false gods who should not be prayed to though all they did was intercede with Gods who were greater than them indicates that saint-worship is bad. Though the beings were called gods they were the same as saints. Roman Catholicism is a polytheistic religion for it has many gods. Hinduism is full of demigods who are just like the Catholic saints. The pagan Gods did not necessarily know all that happened on earth. They were like men and women with magical powers. Catholic saints are more powerful than they. They are Gods and contradict the Bible rule that there is only one God and that the gods of the nations are nothing.

We have proved that prayer to saints is illogical and since Catholics know of the Christian" true God" the Christians would have to say they are worse than pagans. To honour the saints excludes invoking their intercession. It is Protestants who don’t pray to saints, not Catholics, who really respect them. The saints cannot accept such so-called worship so it must belong to demons. If such prayers are answered then the Devil must be answering them simply because God would not foster any activity that puts him down.

By now you will have read undeniable proof that saint-worship is evil and blasphemous and superstitious. Yet there are saints whose bodies allegedly have never decayed and which exude a lovely smell. There are allegedly miracle-working bones and relics of saints. There are saints who appear to the living in visions and who work many miracles. All these wonders must be hoaxes if there is a God for he would not endorse saint-worship. If there is no God then Satan could be behind them. The miracles could logically imply that Satan is God.

CONCLUSION

The Catholic practice of praying to saints is not Christian. It is idolatry – the sin that is most savagely condemned in the Bible. The Bible says these things are serious wrong and God finds them very offensive. It condemns idolatry as the worst sin. It even ridicules those who commit it so it forbids respecting Catholic idolatry. Whether those who venerate and invoke saints mean to commit idolatry or not, that is what they are doing.

BOOKS CONSULTED

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME, Michael de Semlyen, Dorchester House Publications, Bucks, 1993
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS CATHOLICS ARE ASKING Tony Coffey, Harvest House, Eugene, Oregon, 2006
BORN FUNDAMENTALIST, BORN-AGAIN CATHOLIC, David B Currie, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1996
COUNTERFEIT MIRACLES Benjamin B Warfield, Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1995
FROM FASTING SAINTS TO ANOREXIC GIRLS, Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, Athlone Press, London, 1996
MAKING SAINTS, Kenneth K Woodward, Chatto & Windus, London, 1991
OBJECTIONS TO ROMAN CATHOLICISM, Ed by Michael de la Bedoyere, Constable, London, 1964
PURGATORY, Rev W E Kenny BD, Church of Ireland Printing, Co Dublin, 1939
SERMONS OF ST ALPHONSUS LIGUORI, Tan Books, Illinois, 1982
THE BANNER OF THE TRUTH IN IRELAND, Winter 1997, Irish Church Missions, Dublin
THE GREAT MEANS OF SALVATION AND PERFECTION, St Alphonsus De Ligouri, Redemptorist Father
s, Brooklyn, 1988
THE LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS, by Hippolyde Delehaye, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 1998
THE MISSIONARY POSITION, Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Christopher Hitchens, Verso, London, 1995
THE PRIMITIVE FAITH AND ROMAN CATHOLIC DEVELOPMENTS, Rev John A F Gregg, BD, APCK, Dublin, 1928
THE VIRGIN, Geoffrey Ashe, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. London, 1976
VICARS OF CHRIST, Peter de Rosa, Corgi, London, 1995

THE WWW

The following two sites show just what a liar Mother Teresa was and her callous heart is laid bare. They show the deceit of Pope John Paul II who is eager to make a saint of her.

OPEN LETTER TO MOTHER TERESA, Aroup Chaterjee
http://website.lineone.net/~bajuu/chatlet.htm

MOTHER TERESA THE FINAL VERDICT Aroup Chaterjee
http://www.meteorbooks.com/index.html
This fascinating book reveals shockers such as that the pope has beatified Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb who stood idly by as Jews and Communists were hounded to their deaths and the notorious fascist Cardinal Schuster of Milan.

BIBLE VERSION USED
The Amplified Bible