From a Baptist pastor-friend:

I may have it wrong, but I think the Catholic theory about saints and miracles is not widely understood.

It seems to me that their theory goes like this:

* not many Christians go straight to heaven – most need a few centuries of purging

* you can pray to any dead Christian because, as baptists rightly point out, in the plain meaning of the NT they are all saints

* your prayer will get answered ONLY IF the dead person you pray to is in heaven, because the person will have access to God’s ear

* therefore, if you pray to someone and your prayer is answered, that PROVES they are in heaven already

* So their name can go on the canon of people known to have already finished their journey

* Presumably that means God didn’t think they had too much about them to clean up and purge.

Now the confusion seems to come in that people think the nominee has to have done some miracles in their earthly life, which is not at all the case; it’s quite irrelevant. The miracles only count if they come as a result of post-mortem prayers, proving the nominee is already in heaven and thus can be confidently canon-ised. (If this is not a true account of RC dogma, please correct me.)

So the theology on which we most differ is probably ‘assurance of salvation’. In evangelical theory, purging is redundant and heavenly access for the dead is readily assumed. (But neither do we pray to God via the dead – why talk to the secretary when you can talk to the boss?)

In fact, the whole Saint theory is outrageous, it seems to me, on the following grounds:

1. it has led to the absurdity of a panel of experts trying to prove that a prayer was answered. How do you prove, scientifically and/or legally that any event was caused by prayer and nothing else? That is the quagmire the theory has landed in

2. a person prays to Mary MacKillop and gets a miracle; therefore, Mary is in heaven. But what if, under their breath, they mentioned Mary Magdalene, or if they forgot to mention Aussie Mary one day and went straight to God? The ‘proof’ would need to include that no one and nothing else was prayed to!

3. If we take the NT with its terribly sparse references to the condition of the dead, the only two shoe-ins that I can recall off hand are a filthy beggar named Lazarus and a crucified robber. O, and Abraham. Perhaps those who ask dead people to pray for them should pray to more beggars and thieves. And Abraham. And you can probably think of others.

Geoff Leslie