>>9695120>so you're not even going to deny that you follow such heretical practicesYes, we pray to Saints and Angels, the Church is clear about that, we don't try to hide it. Did you read the rest of my post at all? Pray literally just means ask, we ask them to ask God for things. 'Prayer' isn't even some uniform concept in the Bible like some Prots pretend it is, the original Greek NT uses different words to say 'pray.' Such as being "proseuchesthe" and "deēsis." Petition, prayer, ask, request, all these words essentially mean the same thing. It is not wrong to ask a doctor to heal you and also ask God to heal you. Similarity, it is not wrong to ask God to heal you and also ask Mary to ask God to heal you.
It's not 'tricking,' in principal there is nothing different from asking Luke or Mary or any Saint to ask God for something and asking a fellow Christian here on earth to ask God for something. The Bible explicitly tells us to pray for each other (2 Cor 1:11; Eph 1:16; Phil 1:19; 2 Tim 1:3). So what does that mean? Again, 'pray' means ask, so if you ask your brother to pray for you, you are literally praying to him to pray for you. So just as we pray for each other here on earth, we also ask those in heaven to also help us out, this is the same exact thing. The scriptures tell us explicitly that "The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working." So we, as broken men, ask those righteous men who have already reached paradise to continue to pray for us. Do you not currently pray for those who you love? If you died tomorrow and went to heaven would you just stop?
Prayer and worship are simply not the same thing, that is your problem. In modern English the terms prayer and worship have become closely entangled but, they are distinct concepts. We never worship anyone but God, as the priest says at Mass "You are indeed Holy, O Lord, the fount of all holiness." We pray for each other and we ask each other to pray for us, but, we worship only God.
