God forbid that our supplications to our Father in heaven should diminish in proportion as our prayers to the Saints increase; for, after all, we must remember that, while the Church declares it necessary for salvation to pray to God, she merely asserts that it is “good and useful to invoke the saints.”[208] To ask the prayers of the saints, far from being useless, is most profitable. By invoking their intercession, instead of one we have many praying for us. To our own tepid petitions we unite the fervent supplications of the blessed and “the Lord will hear the prayers of the just.”[209] To the petitions of us, poor pilgrims in this vale of tears, are united those of the citizens of heaven. We ask them to pray to their God and to our God, to their Father and to our Father, that we may one day share their delights in that blessed country in company with our common Redeemer, Jesus Christ, with whom to live is to reign.
Chapter XIV.
Is It Lawful To Honor The Blessed Virgin Mary As A Saint, To Invoke Her As An Intercessor, And To Imitate Her As A Model.
I. Is It Lawful To Honor Her?
The sincere adorers and lovers of our Lord Jesus Christ look with reverence on every object with which He was associated, and they conceive an affection for every person that was near and dear to Him on earth. The closer the intimacy of those persons with our Savior, the holier do they appear in our estimation, just as those planets which revolve the nearest around the sun partake most of its light and heat.
There is something hallowed to the eye of the Christian in the very soil of Judea, because it was pressed by the footprints of our Blessed Redeemer. With what reverent steps we would enter the cave of Bethlehem because there was born the Savior of the world. With what religious demeanor we would tread the streets of Nazareth when we remembered that there were spent the days of His boyhood. What profound religious awe would fill our hearts on ascending Mount Calvary, where He paid by his blood the ransom of our souls.
But if the lifeless soil claims so much reverence, [pg 164] how much more veneration would be enkindled in our hearts for the living persons who were the friends and associates of our Savior on earth! We know that He exercised a certain salutary and magnetic influence on those whom He approached. “All the multitude sought to touch Him, for virtue went out from Him and healed all,”[210] as happened to the woman who had been troubled with an issue of blood.[211]