Why Devotion to the Saints?
Catholics are known for our devotion to Mary, the Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ. We have titles for her, such as "the Blessed Virgin," "Our Lady," "Holy Queen," "Mother of God," and "Mother of the Church." We have devotions such as the May Crowning and the Rosary, along with regional and national devotions that praise and honor the Mother of the Word Incarnate. Alongside Mary, we honor saints, martyrs, confessors, other holy men and women of faith, and even the angels.
Why give all of this devotion, praise, and honor to the saints? Is it a sign of disrespect to Jesus Christ, the Son of God?
As many Catholic theologians and apologists have pointed out, an artist is not slighted when we praise her artwork. Neither is God slighted when we praise his masterpiece in Mary or in the angels and saints. Honoring the art always honors the artist, because without the artist the art would not exist. Yet time and again Catholics have to defend why we honor Mary and the saints, so let me do that briefly.
Why Humans Honor Others
Every society has people it honors, praises, and memorializes for deeds worthy of imitation, and we do not think such honor collapses into idolatry. The statue of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima is not an idol but a commemoration. No one goes to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to worship the image of Abraham Lincoln, even though he is carved larger than life and seated in a building styled like a Roman temple. The memorial commemorates how this one man, and millions of people behind him, held the Union together.
We all honor men and women, and we do so rightly, for we should "pay all of them their dues ... respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due" (Rom. 13:7). We also react with anger, and even hatred and violence, toward those who dishonor our heroes.
Societies honor what they want imitated. This is true of every human community. A community develops its own culture, virtues, and values mostly through what it deliberately chooses to praise. Its praise is a mirror that shows the culture its own values, such as military courage, artistic achievement, or religious significance. It is also an aspiration, a goalpost for the other people in that culture to strive for. Praise and blame tell a people what they are called to be by giving them real, living examples. This reality of human nature is even stronger in the Church.
"Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ," St. Paul says (1 Cor. 11:1). Paul imitates Christ in his own way. When the people close to Paul see his virtue, his love, and his sacrificial generosity, his example becomes a real and living point of access for them to understand Christ and imitate him. This is what all of the saints say with their lives. Catholics do not look to the saints as an end in themselves, because that would indeed be idolatry or hero-worship. The saints are saints at all only because of Christ, the Son of the Living God.
Catholic sainthood is the honor we give to those who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith. Their lives were conformed to Christ's, so they are living signs of how to follow the Master. This is what we call the Communion of Saints, the "great cloud of witnesses" (Heb. 12:1) that urges us to run after Christ, the leader and perfecter of our faith. The Letter to the Hebrews also urges us to imitate the saints, "so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises" (Heb. 6:12).
We also honor the saints because God in heaven honors them. In the Book of Revelation he gives them crowns and white robes (Rev. 4:4; 6:11). The twenty-four elders have thrones of their own, and they hold golden bowls of incense, "which are the prayers of the saints" (Rev. 5:8). St. Paul tells the Ephesians, "Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children" (Eph. 5:1), and he tells the Thessalonians, "And you became imitators of us and of the Lord" (1 Thess. 1:6). God loves and honors his saints, but he does not worship them, and neither do we.
I remind people who question Catholic devotion to the saints, and especially to Mary, that we ought to honor honorable people, such as public figures who accomplished something honorable through great sacrifice and heroic work. How much more ought we to honor those who did the greatest thing, which is to imitate Christ? Their lives bear witness that the Gospel is real and can be lived. They embody different aspects of what it means to follow the Master. This is why St. Paul tells the Roman Christians to "love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor" (Rom. 12:10).
But They're Dead, Right?
What about the fact that the saints are dead? Isn't speaking to them necromancy, which means conjuring the dead and communicating with them? It is not. First, in the words of Jesus, the faithful who have gone before us are properly thought of as alive, because God "is not God of the dead, but of the living" (Matt. 22:32).
Moreover, we are all joined together in Christ. In its first chapter alone, the Letter to the Ephesians glories in the tiny preposition "in" when it describes our relationship with Christ:
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (v. 3).
"Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world" (v. 4).
"To the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved" (v. 6).
"In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace" (v. 7).
"For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ" (v. 9).
"As a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (v. 10).
That is only the first ten verses. St. Paul knew that before our redemption we were all "in Adam," fallen with him into sin, death, and darkness. Now we are all "in Christ" through faith and baptism. In Romans, Paul asks, "Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?" (Rom. 6:3). Baptism is serious business. All of the "in him" and "in Christ" verses in Ephesians are accomplished through baptism. Galatians 3:27 says, "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ."
Why does this matter for the doctrine of the Communion of Saints? There are not two bodies of Christ but one. "For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body" (1 Cor. 12:13), and that body is the Church. All of the saints, whether Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free, are baptized into Christ and become one body with him and members of his Church. Here is the key point: the faithful who have died are still united with us in Christ. No one puts off Christ by dying, so there is only one Body and one Church for both the living and the faithful departed. This is why the New Testament says the faithful have "fallen asleep" rather than calling them dead, since death in the full sense belongs to those who are only "in Adam."
The Communion of Saints does not stop at the grave, because God is the God of the living. Honoring the saints who have gone before us with prayers and devotions is entirely different from necromancy through a medium or a psychic. Necromancy is not based on faith in Jesus Christ, the one mediator between God and man. My favorite image of this is the Transfiguration. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up the mountain and reveals his glory, and he also reveals two men long dead, Moses and Elijah, speaking with him about his "departure" (Luke 9:31), which is his crucifixion. What is Peter's first impulse? He wants to honor them by building them dwellings. The three apostles see and hear two men who have died and know who they are, but they do so only in and through Jesus Christ the Lord. This is the heart of Catholic veneration of the saints: in him, we are united to one another.
The saints show us Jesus in the many ways he can be followed and imitated. The saints show us that the Gospel can be lived, because they embody it in their own life stories. The saints are still united to us in Christ, because there is only one Body of Christ, and the faithful departed are in him by virtue of their baptism every bit as much as we are. So honoring them glorifies God, and glorifying God is the point of Christian prayer and life.