I have often wondered how the great importance of images and praying to Saints came to be of such importance to the Catholic Church .
My curiosity of this question was just that , a curiosity . I never really put the time into researching it any further , until I started dating a
Catholic girl . Her and I will often get into a little discussion on religion and if such things , such as , Saints and images should hold the
importance that the Catholic church grants to them .
What I have always believed is that images are forbidden , and one should pray to God and God alone . Where as her beliefs tell her , as she
interprets them , that praying to Saints is a very important thing , as well as displaying images of Saints around the house .
Although I am by no means a Bible expert I do consider my self to have a fair knowledge of the Bible . She on the other hand has little or no
knowledge of the Bible and only knows what she has been told . Needless to say she doesn\'t know why and how this dogma came into being , but like
I she is interested to learn the answer to this question .
I did a search on Saints and found this
en.wikipedia.org... .
according to Wikipedia Saint meant Holy person , and then later was the name given to those that followed Jesus .
\"The concept originates in early Greek Christian literature with the use of the word aghios (Greek άγιος meaning “holy” or “holy one”)
and in the New Testament, where it is used to describe the followers of Jesus of Nazareth.[1] (In the Old Testament, the cognate is the Hebrew word
qodesh, קדש)\"
I then did a search asking why the Catholic church prays to Saints and found this ,
matt1618.freeyellow.com... . This site seems to
list a few chapters and versus of the Bible where Saints are mentioned but they also seem to list Chap. and ver. reasons not to do it as well . The
the later mentioned site left me feeling that they are kind of missing the point of there bases of the hole question . They didn\'t cover the word
Saint and the meaning that it has come to be , point of case , praying to the various Saints and displaying there images , from what the name may have
actually meant at the time of Jesus .
I remember hearing one theory that at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire and the dawning of the Holy Roman empire they needed some thing to
unite the people , as a way of holding things together . It was decided that the one way to do this would be to unite the people through a common
religion . So in order to make the new religion appeal to the many different pagan religion it was decided to create a Christian version of \"The
Great Goddess\" , this form being the Virgin Merry . They then decided to render it possible to pray to one of the Saints , the Saint you would pray
to would depend on what kind of prayer you might be praying , i.e.. love , protection , what have you . Very similar to what the many Pagans where
doing at the time and how they worshiped there many Gods at the time . Images where another thing very important to the many pagan religions at the
time and the theory goes onto say that it was thought that if this things could be brought together then they might be able to unite all the different
religions could be brought into Christianity .
Is there any truth to this claim ? My search then lead me to this site
www.fsmitha.com... . This site says a fair amount and if you
are interested in this topic I would suggest you take a look for your self as it would not be fair to just pick a quote and past it here . I will
point out though , the site also give yet one more example of how Christianity was tweaked to fit the pagan practice i.e the merging of holidays
such as Christmas and the day it was celebrated and the changing of the chosen day of worship from sat. to sol , the day of the sun , Sunday .
It is my hope that some of you out there might be able to add to this topic and the understanding of how these things came to be .