The Council of Trent declared that, ‘the saints, who reign together with Christ, offer up their own prayers to God for men.  It is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them,^[1] and to have recourse to their prayers’.^[2]  But there is no early evidence to support such a doctrine.  The Invocation of Saints is an infringement of our Lord’s role in the relation between God and Man, and against the uniform teaching of the New Testament and the early Church on His unique mediatorship and high priesthood: ‘There is one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus’.^[3]  ‘Every prayer, and supplication, and intercession, and thanksgiving,’ says Origen, ‘is to be sent up to the supreme God through the High Priest, who is above all the angels, the living Word and God’.^[4]  Neither in Scripture nor in any Christian writing of the first three centuries is there any allusion to asking departed Christians for their prayers.  ‘The first introduction of invocations to a saint into public worship is said to have been made by Peter the Fuller, the monophysite Patriarch of Constantinople (c. 480 A.D.)’.^[5]  We reject the practice of invoking the saints to pray for us, for several further reasons: (a) There is no evidence that the saints can hear our prayers.  The strongest argument that can be offered is that ‘the saints enjoy the vision of God, and as God sees all things they also see them in God as in a mirror’.  But that assumption makes God a medium  – we pray to a saint to intercede for us; God hears the prayer and tells the saint; the saint then intercedes!  In short, God acts as a medium between man and the saint; and the saint then acts as a medium between man and God!  (b) There is no evidence in Scripture or the early Fathers that any of the departed enter the full glories of heaven and the inner Presence of God until after the general resurrection ‘at the last day’.^[6]  The souls of the martyrs may be viewed as praying ‘under the altar’, but that does not mean ‘before the Throne’.  There is in fact no evidence that they are in a position to intercede for us as yet.  (c) If the saints can hear our petitions at any time, and thousands may be continually invoking them, they must share the divine attributes of omniscience and omnipresence!  But there is no evidence that they do.  We refuse to impose this  doctrine on our people by practising invocation of saints in public worship, because it has not been practised ‘everywhere, always, and by all’ (semper, ubique, ab omnibus), and therefore fails to pass that classic test by which Catholic truth is distinguished from error.

Roman apologists are at their weakest in trying to defend these accretions to the Faith; verses have been taken out of their contexts and had meanings forced upon them which no modern scholarship would support.  The Article gives the simple reason for their impossible task; these beliefs and practices illustrate the declaration in Article XIX that the Church of Rome has erred in matters of Faith, for they are ‘grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God’.