Why Do Catholics Pray to Mary? To Ask Her Prayers, Not to Worship Her

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Catholics pray to Mary to ask for her prayers, as they would ask a friend at church to pray for them. The Church teaches that worship belongs to God alone. Mary receives a higher honor than any other saint, but honor, not adoration. Orthodox Christians share the practice; most Protestant churches reject it.

Church	Asks Mary’s prayers?	In its own words
Catholic	Yes	“We can pray with and to her” (Catechism 2679)
Eastern Orthodox	Yes	“Most holy Theotokos, save us!” (the close of most services)
Lutheran	No	“the Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints” (Augsburg Confession, 1530)
Presbyterian and Reformed	No	Worship goes “not to angels, saints, or any other creature” (Westminster Confession, 1646)

In older English, “pray” often meant simply “ask,” and people said it to one another. In Jesus’ parable of the great supper, a guest who does not want to come sends the reply “I pray thee have me excused” (Luke 14:18, King James Version). He is asking, not worshipping. Catholics use the word in that sense when they pray to Mary: they ask her to pray for them. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it in one line: “We can pray with and to her.”

The Hail Mary, the best-known prayer to her, shows how this works. This is the text the Vatican prints in the Compendium of the Catechism:

Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

The first half comes from the Gospel of Luke. The angel Gabriel greets Mary with “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:28, in the Douay-Rheims Bible, the older Catholic English translation), and Elizabeth cries out, “blessed is the fruit of thy womb” (Luke 1:42). The second half is a request, and it asks for one thing: that Mary pray. The Catechism explains the words “pray for us sinners” this way: “By asking Mary to pray for us, we acknowledge ourselves to be poor sinners” (2677).

No. Catholic teaching draws a firm line between the worship owed to God and the honor given to Mary. The Catechism says the Church’s devotion to her “differs essentially from the adoration which is given to the incarnate Word and equally to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and greatly fosters this adoration” (971). The Second Vatican Council said the same in Lumen Gentium, its 1964 constitution on the Church, and urged theologians and preachers to “abstain zealously both from all gross exaggerations as well as from petty narrow-mindedness” when they speak of her (67).

Catholic theology names the difference with terms Thomas Aquinas set out in his Summa Theologiae. Latria is the worship given to God, and Aquinas wrote that “latria is due to God alone.” Dulia is the honor given to created beings, such as the saints and angels. Mary, he explained, “is a mere rational creature,” so she receives not latria but dulia “in a higher degree than to other creatures, inasmuch as she is the Mother of God.” He called that higher honor hyperdulia.

Mary is not divine in Catholic teaching, and she too needed a Savior. In Luke’s Gospel she says so herself: “my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:47, King James Version). The Catechism teaches that she was holy from the first instant of her conception, and that this holiness “comes wholly from Christ”: she was “redeemed, in a more exalted fashion, by reason of the merits of her Son” (492).

Catholics give the same answer they would give about asking a friend to pray. The letter of James tells Christians to “pray one for another” and adds, “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16). The first letter to Timothy asks that “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men” (1 Timothy 2:1). In the Catholic view, asking for someone’s prayer does not go around God; it brings another voice to him.

Catholic teaching holds that death does not end that fellowship, which the Apostles’ Creed calls the communion of saints. Those already with God “do not cease to intercede with the Father for us,” the Catechism says (956). Catholics point to the vision in Revelation of the elders before the Lamb holding “golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints” (Revelation 5:8), and to Hebrews 12:1, where believers are “compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” The Catechism ties the turn to Mary to her motherhood: “Because she gives us Jesus, her son, Mary is Mother of God and our mother; we can entrust all our cares and petitions to her” (2677).

• Elizabeth’s greeting. Elizabeth asks, “whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43). The Catechism takes “the mother of my Lord” as the ground for calling Mary “Mother of God” (495).
• Mary’s song. “From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). The Catechism opens its section on devotion to Mary with this verse (971).
• The wedding at Cana. Mary tells Jesus, “They have no wine,” and tells the servants, “Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it” (John 2:3, 5). Catholics read her as bringing a need to her Son and sending people to him.
• The cross. Jesus says to his mother, “Woman, behold thy son!” and to the beloved disciple, “Behold thy mother!”, and “from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home” (John 19:26-27). The Catechism reads the scene as a gift to every disciple: “Like the beloved disciple we welcome Jesus’ mother into our homes” (2679).
• The upper room. After the Ascension the apostles “continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus” (Acts 1:14).

None of these passages shows a believer asking Mary for prayer after her life on earth. Catholics read them together with the communion of saints and the Church’s long practice; Protestants read the same verses and find no warrant there for calling on her.

The verse reads, “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Catholic teaching affirms it, and the Second Vatican Council quotes it at the start of its passage on Mary’s role (Lumen Gentium 60). Her role, the Catechism says, “in no way obscures or diminishes this unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows its power,” and whatever help she gives “rests on his mediation, depends entirely on it, and draws all its power from it” (970). The same chapter of 1 Timothy, three verses earlier, asks for prayers and intercessions for all people.

The Church invokes Mary under titles that include “Advocate” and “Mediatrix,” and the Council said those titles must be understood so that “it neither takes away from nor adds anything to the dignity and efficaciousness of Christ the one Mediator” (Lumen Gentium 62). In November 2025 the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, with Pope Leo XIV’s approval, went further on one title: it is “always inappropriate to use the title ‘Co-redemptrix’ to define Mary’s cooperation” because it “risks obscuring Christ’s unique salvific mediation” (Mater Populi Fidelis 22).

The Lutheran and Reformed confessions reject calling on the saints. The Augsburg Confession, presented at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, keeps the saints as examples: “the memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling.” Then it draws the line: “But the Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor.” Of Christ it adds, “He is to be prayed to, and has promised that He will hear our prayer.”

The Westminster Confession of 1646, a doctrinal standard of Presbyterian churches, says that “Religious worship is to be given to God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and to him alone; not to angels, saints, or any other creature: and, since the fall, not without a Mediator; nor in the mediation of any other but of Christ alone.” The next paragraph names prayer as “one special part of religious worship.” On that reading, a prayer addressed to Mary gives a creature part of the worship that belongs to God.

The two sides also read the same Marian titles differently. The Hail, Holy Queen calls Mary “our life, our sweetness and our hope” and asks her, as “most gracious advocate,” to turn “your eyes of mercy toward us.” Catholics read such words within the limits the Council set in Lumen Gentium 62 and 67. Westminster’s rule leaves no room for them: worship goes to God “and to him alone.”

Yes, and their practice is close to the Catholic one. They honor her as the Theotokos, the Greek title meaning “bearer of God.” The Catechism records that “the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God” (466). Writing for the Orthodox Church in America, Fr. John Breck notes that Orthodox Christians close most services with a line that “to many people, including many other Christians, sounds scandalous or blasphemous: ‘Most holy Theotokos, save us!’” A Baptist friend once asked him, “How can you people pray that?”

His answer is the Orthodox version of the Catholic one. “Mary in no way replaces her Son in the work of salvation,” he writes, and “She ‘mediates’ for us only insofar as she prays and intercedes on our behalf.” The two churches still differ on other points, which the Orthodox and Catholic comparison covers.

No date is certain. The Vatican’s Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (2001) counts the prayer known by its Latin name, Sub tuum praesidium, among “some of the earliest forms of veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” The Compendium of the Catechism gives it in English: “We fly to thy protection, O holy Mother of God. Despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers O glorious and blessed Virgin.” Older English prayer books word the opening differently.

A Greek text of the prayer survives on a scrap of papyrus in the John Rylands Library in Manchester. The University of Würzburg’s record of the papyrus lists datings from the third century to the ninth; studies from 2005 and 2019 favor the eighth or ninth, and the record itself gives 701 to 900. The same record notes that the scrap may have been used as an amulet. Lumen Gentium echoes the prayer when it says that “from earliest times the Blessed Virgin is honored under the title of Mother of God, under whose protection the faithful took refuge in all their dangers and necessities,” and adds that after the Council of Ephesus devotion to her “wonderfully increased in veneration and love, in invocation and imitation” (66).

Besides the Hail Mary, two of the most familiar are the Memorare, which begins “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession, was left unaided,” and the Hail, Holy Queen. The full texts of these and others are gathered in prayers to the Virgin Mary.

The Catechism names the Rosary among the prayers that express devotion to Mary and calls it an “epitome of the whole Gospel” (971). It also notes that “Medieval piety in the West developed the prayer of the rosary as a popular substitute for the Liturgy of the Hours” (2678). The prayers and the order of the beads are set out in how to say the Catholic Rosary.

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• Great Cloud of Witnesses (Hebrews 12:1): who they are
• Do Protestants believe in saints?
• Protestant vs Catholic: how their beliefs and worship differ
• Did Mary go to heaven?
• Mary’s symbolic meaning in the Bible
• Intercessory prayers: praying for others in need

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