In this engaging clip, Cy Kellett and Catholic apologist Trent Horn tackle a common misconception about praying to Mary. Responding to a question from a Southern Baptist listener, Trent clarifies that Catholics do not idolize Mary but seek her intercession much like asking a friend for prayer.
Transcript:
Caller: The theology around Mary in the Catholic Church, where in the scriptures, like, she’s the mother of the church and we can pray to her. It’s illogical.
Trent: Okay, so to answer your question, yes, Mary and I think a lot of this, David, what happens is that you have these misunderstandings. Like 80, 90% of the time, people who are not Catholic, trying to understand the Catholic Church, they hear and they see Mary and they see either popular piety or misrepresentations from people who are not Catholic.
And this is how I would put that. How I, I guess I would ask it. Which of God’s creation, I guess, is a question I can ask you. Of all the things God created in the world, we have a giant universe, billions of people that were created. What is the one thing in the universe that would have the highest honor, the highest, like the part of creation that would have the biggest claim to being honored among creation?
Caller: So, among creation. That’s a very good question. And I don’t know if I can answer that off the top of my head. I, you know, everything that God created in Genesis talks about it was good. And so, you know, to have the highest honor, I mean, well, here’s how.
Trent: Here’s how I would answer right now. You’d say, obviously Christ is God become man, but here, Christ is still creator entering into creation. To me, if you think about, look, in the Old Testament, the thing that was honored the most in the Old Testament was the Ark of the Covenant, which was held as being the dwelling place of God, where the words of God written on stone tablets were placed for the Israelites during their journey in the desert.
And so, like, if you touched the Ark, as poor Uzzah discovered in Second Samuel, you would die, you would, you know, just collapse right there on the spot because it was so holy. And it contained the words of God. But the reason Catholics see Mary as just so important is because Mary didn’t just contain a stone tablet of words. She contained within her very body the eternal Word itself, that God became man through her.
And this is something I said on the show several times, but it’s just an observation that has always stuck with me that you have the Eternal Son, unchanging Second Person of the Trinity, divine Person, immutable divine nature. And yet in assuming a human nature, the eternal Second Person of the Trinity, ever since the year 2 or 3 B.C., that person now looks like a human being, looks like a particular human being.
That in assuming this human nature when we see Jesus in heaven and we see Mary, we’re going to see a familiar resemblance there. That God will resemble a human being. One of us will resemble like we’ll see a familial resemblance here. The same cheekbones, the same facial structure and hair and eyes. Maybe not exactly the same, not a clone.
But I say that because there’s a great book called *Mary for Evangelicals*. I think it’s written by Tim Perry, and he talks about how his fellow evangelicals have lost sight of the importance of Mary. And some, like Protestants, I’m not saying you do this at all, but some Protestants kind of treat Mary as like a conduit or a pipe. You know, God kind of goes through her and gets into the world and that’s all folks, but it’s just so much more than that.
So that would be one element there for a creature to justly be called the Mother of God is just so awe inspiring. And of course, what makes it awe inspiring to Mary is not that Mary in and of herself, but it’s because of her relationship to God that God, in his infinite majesty, Mary points back to Him.
An image that the Church Fathers used frequently is the sun and the moon. That the moon has a radiant glow and is beautiful only because the sun reflects off of it. The moon has no light of its own. So Mary is often compared to the moon in the early Church Fathers and other medieval patristics, things like that.
That Mary has that radiance, and her radiance and majesty is solely a reflection of Christ, of God’s. And we recognize that and rejoice in it that God chose to become man through one of us.
Second, about intercession, that if you heard someone say, well, Mary forgives our sins. Well, no, the catechism is very clear. Only God forgives sins. And the primary way he’s given us to have our sins forgiven is through the sacrament of confession and through baptism to wash away original sin.
But we can pray for one another, and we should. St. Paul talks about this in 1 Timothy 2:1-4. We should pray for all people. And part of our prayers for one another is that we should be kept safe from sin, not led into sin, to pray for one another, that we don’t stumble, that we don’t succumb to sin, to be freed from our sins, to pray and ask God for this protection for one another, because we’re all in the body of Christ and we care for one another.
Now James 5:16 says the prayers of righteous people are very powerful. I love, if you go back to the story of Job in the Old Testament, at the end of the book of Job, God comes down and tells everyone what’s what. And he tells Job. I mean, Job’s three friends have been spouting nonsense about God for like, 30 chapters. And so this makes God mad.
And he tells them, you have Job pray for you, because I will hear his prayers. And so there are prayers. This is hard. In an egalitarian society we live in, prayers have different weights to them. The holier you are, the more righteous you are. As James 5:16 says, your prayers are that much more powerful.
So if Mary is in heaven, sinless, the Mother of God, then her prayers, they got to be pretty dynamite. So when you see it all from that perspective, I think Mary starts to come more and more into focus when you look at it in that way, in a communal, intercessory way of seeing the body of Christ and seeing God, how he becomes man, and how that majesty is ultimately reflected back to him.
So I gave you a lot to chew on. We’re going to be near the break here. Is that helpful?
Caller: And yeah, you just said something I think is key because you said Mary is sinless. Now, where, I don’t know in scripture where I’ve ever read that Mary did not sin, only Christ did not. He was tempted in every way, did not sin, certainly.
Trent: So, David, great can of worms, open up. One minute left. When I was saying that, I meant we do believe Mary was sinless through her whole life, but I was referring to that. If Mary and the saints are in heaven and they’re praying for us, you would agree if someone is in heaven and they’re praying for us, they are sinless because there’s no sin in heaven.
But the evidence for Mary’s sinlessness can be reflected in scripture. Luke 1:28 talks about how she’s full of grace, and it’s described in a very unique way, as if it were a title using a Greek construction referring to kind of something that’s possessed through her whole life.
Also, there’s other elements in scripture and in tradition, where the very first Christians saw her as being without blemish and without sin. I tell you what, let me get your email, and I will send you the relevant passages of my book, *The Case for Catholicism*, that deal with the sinlessness of Mary, because we couldn’t get to it on the show.
So get your email to our call screener, and I will follow up with you on a very good question. Thanks, David.
Cy: Why aren’t you Catholic? Is our topic. Trent Horn is our guest. If you are not a Catholic and would like to share with us why that is, give us a call. 888-31-87884.