This is one of the most concrete and serious objections raised against the invocation of the saints: a saint is a creature, not God. How could he or she hear, at the same instant, the prayers of thousands of faithful scattered across the earth, whispered in a hundred different languages? Only God is omniscient and omnipresent. Speaking to St. Joseph, St. Thérèse, or one’s patron saint—wouldn’t that, in the end, be speaking into the void?
The question posed here is not about the legitimacy of praying to the saints—whether we should pray to them, whether it is biblical, or whether it detracts from Christ belongs to another discussion, addressed in Should We Pray to the Saints?. The question is more precise and technical: by what mechanism can a glorified soul actually know what is being asked of it? The credibility of invocation hinges on this point: for if the saints cannot hear us, then praying to them is a wasted word, even if it were otherwise permitted.
The answer of Catholic tradition rests on a decisive distinction, too often overlooked: to know by oneself is not the same as to know in God. The saints do not perceive our prayers by an infinite faculty that would make them little omniscient gods—the Church has always denied this. They know them in the vision of God: seeing the Lord face to face, they know in Him, as in a perfect mirror, all that pertains to their charity as intercessors. The mechanism is therefore not a power snatched from God, but a gift received from Him at every moment.
This article first examines the precise question, then the objection in its strongest form, before developing the answer: the saints are alive in God (the first condition); they see God, and know our prayers in Him (the mechanism itself, with the difficulty noted by St. Augustine); finally, Scripture shows that heaven is attentive to earth. It draws on Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, and the Magisterium.
What is really the question?
Before answering, we must isolate what is being asked. Many objections actually mix together several distinct questions, and this mixture is the source of confusion.
Three questions not to be confused
The first question is that of legitimacy: is it permitted, biblical, and not idolatrous to address the saints? This question—with the objections of the “sole mediator”, “necromancy”, and “late invention”—is thoroughly addressed in Should we pray to the saints?. Here, we assume it has been resolved.
The second question is that of worship: to honor a saint, is that to adore him as God? The answer—no, veneration is not adoration—depends on the distinction between latria and dulia, developed in the difference between adoration and veneration and dulia, hyperdulia, and latria.
The third question—our focus—is that of the mechanism: even supposing it is legitimate and not idolatrous to invoke the saints, how can they hear us? This is the most concrete question, and it is the one modern objections most readily highlight. Everything else may be granted: if the saints do not actually know our prayers, invocation remains pointless.
Hearing by oneself, hearing in God
The answer lies in a distinction that the rest of the article will only unfold. To know by oneself presupposes a faculty of knowledge proportionate to the object: to perceive by one's own power all the prayers in the world, one would have to be omniscient and omnipresent—that is, to be God. The Church has never attributed this to any saint.
But there is another mode of knowledge: to know in God, that is, to know our prayers not by oneself, but by contemplating God, who alone knows everything. A mirror does not produce light: it receives it and faithfully reflects it. In the same way, the soul that sees God does not become omniscient; in that vision, it receives knowledge of what concerns it. The whole crux of the debate rests on this distinction: those who deny that the saints can hear us always implicitly suppose that, for this to be possible, they would have to be God.
The objection: can a finite creature hear thousands of prayers?
We must give the objection its full weight. As formulated by the theologians of the Reformation and, after them, many Evangelical Christians, it boils down to a few converging arguments.
“Only God is omniscient and omnipresent”
This is the most direct and strongest argument. To hear a prayer is to have knowledge of it; to hear all prayers addressed simultaneously, everywhere, in every language, is to possess unlimited knowledge. But omniscience and omnipresence are exclusively divine attributes. A creature, even glorified, remains finite: its intelligence cannot encompass an infinity of simultaneous acts. The conclusion of the objection: to attribute to a saint the capacity to hear the prayers of the whole world is to attribute a divine attribute to him—thus, implicitly, to deify him.
The dead know nothing of what happens here below
The objection then appeals to Scripture. Ecclesiastes states that “the dead no longer know anything” (Eccl 9:5)[1], and some draw from this the idea of a sleep of the soul: between death and resurrection, the soul would be in a state of unconsciousness, incapable of knowing or acting. If this is the case, a deceased saint could perceive nothing of our requests: invocation would be addressed to a sleeper.
“It is presumptuous: no one knows what the dead see”
A more cautious form of the objection does not absolutely deny that the saints might know our prayers, but judges it presumptuous to affirm it: since Scripture nowhere clearly explains it, to claim to describe how the blessed hear us would be to build on nothing. This objection has the merit of forcing theology to be rigorous—and it is precisely a difficulty that Saint Augustine honestly formulated, as will be seen later. The Catholic response does not claim to remove all mystery; it only shows that the thing is possible, coherent with Revelation, and taught by Tradition.
These objections are serious and deserve a reasoned response, not a shrug. The specifically moral (necromancy) and theological (sole mediator) objections mainly concern the legitimacy of invocation; they are addressed in Should we pray to the saints?. Those that touch directly on our subject—the mechanism of knowledge—are omniscience, the sleep of the soul, and presumption. These are the ones with which we must begin.
First Condition: The Saints Are Alive and Conscious
Before asking how the saints know our prayers, we must set aside the hidden presupposition behind the “soul sleep” objection: the idea that the departed are unconscious. If a saint were merely asleep, or worse, annihilated, the question of the mechanism would not even arise. Yet the faith affirms exactly the opposite.
“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living”
Christ himself settled the question, against the Sadducees who denied the survival of the soul. Quoting Exodus, he declares:
“He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live to him.” — Jesus, Gospel according to Luke 20:38[2]
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, dead for centuries, are declared alive before God. The death of the body does not abolish the person: the soul remains conscious, and even more so when admitted to the vision of God. The text from Ecclesiastes invoked by the objection does not describe the soul’s final state: it observes, from the Old Testament perspective, that the dead no longer participate in the bustle “under the sun” (Eccl 9:6), not that they are annihilated or asleep. The full light on conscious survival comes from Christ.
Death Does Not Break Communion
From this follows a truth the objection forgets: death does not break the Church. The blessed in heaven, the souls in purification, and the faithful on earth form one Body. The Catechism states this, quoting the council:
“Being indeed more closely united to Christ, those who dwell in heaven […] do not cease to intercede with the Father for us […]. Thus their fraternal concern is of great help to our weakness.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 956, quoting Lumen Gentium 49[3]
Far from cutting the blessed off from us, their entry into glory makes them closer—for they are more intimately united to Christ, and thus to his whole Body. This is what is called the communion of saints: a solidarity of charity that death does not break. The first condition for hearing—being present and conscious—is thus fully met in the saints. The remaining difficulty is this: does this conscious life suffice to make them aware of our prayers?
The Mechanism: The Saints Know Our Prayers in the Vision of God
Here lies the heart of the problem. A saint is alive, granted; but conscious life in heaven does not, by itself, grant the power to know thousands of earthly prayers. Here the specifically Catholic theological answer comes in: the blessed know our prayers in the very vision of God.
The Blessed See God Face to Face
The starting point is the beatific vision. The souls admitted to heaven see God, no longer “confusedly, as in a mirror,” but “face to face” (1 Cor 13:12)[4]. Saint Thomas Aquinas affirms this as a certainty of faith: it must be granted without reserve that the blessed see the very essence of God[5]. This vision is not the fruit of their natural powers—no creature can, by itself, see God—but of a supernatural gift, the light of glory[6].
Now God, seen in his essence, contains within himself and manifests all things[7]. To see God is thus also to see, in him, the creatures he knows and loves. Not all creatures indiscriminately—for that would make the blessed another God—but those required for the perfection of their beatitude and charity.
Knowing in the Word: The Answer of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Saint Thomas applies this principle precisely to our question, in an article entirely devoted to the subject — “Utrum sancti orationes nostras cognoscant” (“Do the saints have knowledge of the prayers we address to them?”, title translated). His answer is clear:
Paraphrase: the saints know our prayers in the Word (in verbo): since it belongs to their glory to help those in need for salvation, God manifests to them the desires, prayers, and devotions of those who have recourse to their aid. — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement (posthumous part, compiled from his Commentary on the Sentences, IV, dist. 45), q. 72, a. 1, body of the article (paraphrase, see note)[8]
The expression in the Word (in verbo) is the key to everything. The saint does not perceive our prayers by some kind of spiritual radar sweeping the earth; he sees them reflected in the vision of God, the Word in whom all things subsist. This is precisely what God, by grace, manifests to him—because it pertains to his glory to cooperate in our salvation.
By Nature, No; In God, Yes
Elsewhere, Saint Thomas had made the decisive distinction, regarding the souls of the departed in general: by their natural knowledge alone, separated souls do not know what happens on earth[9]. Left to their own powers, separated souls would indeed be incapable of perceiving our petitions—the omniscience objection would be correct. But Thomas immediately adds, following Saint Gregory the Great, whom he judges more probable:
Paraphrase: the souls of the blessed, because they see God, know what happens here below — without thereby interfering in the affairs of the living, except according to the disposition of divine justice. — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 89, a. 8, following Saint Gregory the Great (paraphrase, see note)[10]
Everything hinges on this passage from natural knowledge to the vision of God. The Protestant objection is correct on one point: a creature left to itself cannot know the prayers of the world. But it is wrong on the essential: the blessed are not left to themselves—they see God, and it is in Him that they know us.
The Difficulty of Saint Augustine, and Its Resolution
It would be dishonest to present this answer as obvious and without history. The greatest authority of Western Christianity, Saint Augustine, raised a real difficulty—and it is by taking it seriously that tradition refined its response. This is the point where the objection of “presumption” finds its best ally… and its refutation.
The dead, by themselves, do not know what the living do
Asked by Saint Paulinus of Nola about the meaning of burying the faithful near the tombs of the martyrs, Augustine wrote around 421 an entire treatise, The Care to Be Taken for the Dead (De cura pro mortuis gerenda). There he sets forth a sober and prudent thesis: the dead, by their own powers alone, do not know what is happening among the living—not even concerning their own children—at the moment it happens.
Paraphrase: if such great patriarchs did not know what was happening to the people descended from them, how should the dead involve themselves in the affairs and actions of the living, so as to know and help them? — Saint Augustine, The Care to Be Taken for the Dead, ch. XIII (paraphrase, see note)[11]
Augustine offers as proof a word from Isaiah: “Abraham does not know us and Israel does not recognize us” (Is 63:16)[12]. Here is the objection of presumption with its strongest support: the greatest of the Latin Fathers seems to say that the saints do not know us.
Three Channels: God, the Angels, the Souls Who Ascend
But Augustine does not stop there—and this is what the objection always forgets to cite. While he denies natural and immediate knowledge, he immediately affirms that the dead can learn what happens here below by other means: through the souls of the departed who join them and report what they have known or brought with them; through the angels who go back and forth between heaven and earth; and above all through God Himself, who reveals to them what He deems good[13].
Paraphrase: the dead do not know what is done here below at the moment it is done; but they can learn of it afterwards through the souls who, dying, join them, through the angels, or through a revelation of the Spirit of God. — Saint Augustine, The Care to Be Taken for the Dead, ch. XV (paraphrase, see note)[14]
Far from contradicting Catholic doctrine, Augustine lays its foundation: the knowledge that the saints have of our affairs is never a natural omniscience, but a gift received from God. What Saint Thomas would clarify eight centuries later—that the blessed know our prayers in the Word—simply identifies the principal one among Augustine’s three channels: the revelation of God, brought to perfection in the beatific vision that the martyrs and saints, for Augustine himself, already possess.
Augustine Recognizes the Active Help of the Saints
Moreover, the same Augustine who denies the dead natural knowledge of our actions acknowledges, in the same treatise, that the saints truly intervene on behalf of the living—he cites healings and help obtained through their intercession, including one granted, he says, by Saint Felix of Nola[15]. The difficulty for him, then, was never whether the saints help us—he was certain of it—but how they know our needs. And his answer, like Thomas’s, is: through God.
What Augustine’s difficulty teaches us: the Catholic position is not a naïveté that would attribute divine knowledge to the saints. It integrates the strongest objection—by themselves, the dead know nothing—and surpasses it: the saints know our prayers, not by nature, but because God shows them. To deny this possibility would be to limit the power of God, not to honor His transcendence.
How can a finite spirit know thousands of prayers at once?
There remains the quantitative objection, the most intuitive one: even admitting that God reveals our prayers to the saints, how can a finite intelligence process thousands of simultaneous requests, in all languages, without being overwhelmed? Is this not demanding of a creature a truly infinite capacity?
The mirror does not tire of reflecting
The difficulty assumes that the saint would know our prayers one by one, like an operator overwhelmed by calls. But this is not how knowledge in the Word works. The blessed does not collect prayers: he sees God, and in God, in a single gaze, what concerns him. A mirror finds no more difficulty reflecting a crowd than a single face; the eye makes no extra effort to see a thousand stars rather than one. The multitude of prayers adds no fatigue to a soul that knows them all in the one light of God, and not by an accumulation of successive acts.
Finite by nature, yet with no common measure to our earthly limits
This is not to make the saint infinite. He remains a finite creature; his knowledge has a boundary—he does not know in the Word all things indiscriminately, which would make him another God. Saint Thomas is precise: the blessed see in the Word not all things indiscriminately, but what the perfection of their beatitude and charity requires—and since helping those who invoke them pertains to this charity, they know there the desires, acts of devotion, and prayers of those who seek their help[16]. In this order, the limits of our earthly calculations do not apply: in heaven, knowledge is no longer discursive, laborious, or successive as ours is. The capacity, therefore, is not an infinity snatched from God; it is the transparency of a soul wholly turned toward him.
Neither omniscient nor omnipresent—yet attentive
We then see what Catholic doctrine affirms, and what it denies. It denies that the saints are omniscient or omnipresent: these attributes belong to God alone. It affirms that the saints, seeing God, know in him the prayers addressed to them—not by an infinite power belonging to them, but by a gift God gives them.
The objection thus collapses because it poses a false dilemma: “either the saint is God and can hear, or he is a creature and cannot.” The reality is a third term: the saint is a creature, and it is precisely as a creature perfectly united to God that he knows our prayers—just as the eye does not produce light but sees everything in the light it receives.
What Scripture says: heaven knows and communicates
The theology of Thomas and Augustine merely explains a truth already present in Scripture: heaven is not ignorant of earth; its inhabitants know and communicate with it.
At the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah converse with Jesus
The most striking sign is the Transfiguration. On the mountain, Moses and Elijah—dead for centuries—appear alive, conscious, and converse with Christ about a specific event, still to come, in his earthly life:
“Behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” — Gospel according to Luke 9:30–31[17]
Two righteous men of the Old Testament thus know, from beyond, the redemptive plan unfolding on earth, and they converse about it with Jesus. Heaven is not cut off from the history of salvation: it follows its course and participates in it. What Moses and Elijah do here manifestly, the saints do invisibly when they know, in God, our prayers.
The rich man and Lazarus: the consciousness of the departed
The parable of the rich man and Lazarus confirms that, immediately after death and even before the resurrection, the departed are fully conscious, remember the living, and care about them. Abraham converses, knows the rich man's situation, and is aware that he has “five brothers” still on earth whose fate is not yet sealed:
“My child, Abraham replied, remember: you received your good things during your life […]. — Well then, father, I beg you to send Lazarus to my father's house. For I have five brothers […].” — Jesus, Gospel according to Luke 16:25, 27–28[18]
Abraham, dead for centuries, knows the life and death of the rich man, remembers the earth, and reasons about those who remain there. The consciousness of the departed and their concern for the living are thus taught by Christ himself.
The prayers of the saints rise like incense
Revelation offers the most explicit image of this attentiveness. Before the throne of God, the twenty-four Elders—figures of the blessed—hold “golden bowls full of incense which are the prayers of the saints” (Rev 5:8)[19]. A little further on, an angel offers incense “with the prayers of all the saints,” and “through the angel's hand the smoke of the incense rose before God, with the prayers of the saints” (Rev 8:3–4)[20]. The inhabitants of heaven are not indifferent to our prayers: they bear them, presenting them to God. Now, one presents only what one knows.
The Joy of Heaven Over a Sinner Who Converts
Jesus finally reveals that heaven follows, in real time, what takes place in hearts on earth:
“So I tell you: there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” — Jesus, Gospel according to Saint Luke 15:10[21]
This joy presupposes an actual knowledge: to rejoice at the conversion of a sinner, one must know about it at the moment it happens. And the author of the Letter to the Hebrews describes the heavenly assembly as a “great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1)[22] surrounding the Christian on his journey — witnesses, that is, conscious spectators, not absent ones.
How the Church Has Formulated This Doctrine
The conviction that the saints know and bear our prayers is not an isolated speculation: it is taught by the Magisterium and lived in the liturgy from the very beginning. The historical details — catacombs, Fathers, Council of Trent — can be found in Should We Pray to the Saints?; here we retain only what pertains to the knowledge of prayers.
The Catechism: The Saints “Care For” Us
The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not merely affirm that the saints intercede; it specifies that they know and care for those who remain on earth.
“They contemplate God, they praise him, and they do not cease to care for those whom they have left on earth. [...] Their intercession is their highest service of God's plan. We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2683[23]
One cannot care for and intercede for people about whom one knows nothing. The Catechism’s wording therefore presupposes, without needing to demonstrate it, that the saints know our needs and our prayers — exactly in the sense established by Thomas and Augustine: in God. The Catechism states this elsewhere explicitly, professing that, in the communion of saints, “the merciful love of God and of his saints is always listening to our prayers”[24].
A Knowledge Always Received, Never Rivaling God
The Magisterium is careful never to present this knowledge as a power competing with divine omniscience. The saints know our prayers in the Word, that is, in Christ — never apart from him or against him. This is why the invocation of the saints in no way diminishes the unique mediation of Christ: to see our prayers in God and to bear them to Christ is not to replace him, but to do, in the fullness of charity, what every member of the Body already does when praying for another. The development of this point — the objection of the “one mediator” (1 Tim 2:5) — is given in Should We Pray to the Saints?.
The Particular Case of Mary
One objection remains, more acute, concerning the Mother of God: if knowing thousands of prayers already requires an explanation, what can be said of Mary, to whom millions of prayers rise simultaneously, in every language of the world? The mechanism remains exactly the same — knowledge in the Word — but brought to perfection in the soul most closely united to God of all creatures.
This case is the subject of a separate article, which takes up the objection in its strongest Marian form and resolves it step by step: Does Mary Hear Our Prayers?. There, the same foundational distinction is found — to hear by oneself is not to hear in God — applied to the Queen of Saints.
Key Takeaways
To the question “Can the saints hear us?”, the faith responds with precision, avoiding two symmetrical errors:
- No, the saints are not omniscient: they do not know our prayers by any infinite power of their own, nor by a natural knowledge of the dead—which Saint Augustine rightly denied. To attribute omniscience or omnipresence to them would be to divinize them, something the Church has always rejected.
- Yes, the saints truly know our prayers: they see them in the vision of God, as in a perfect mirror. Seeing God face to face, they know in him all that pertains to their charity as intercessors—including the petitions of those who turn to them.
The objection based on the finitude of creatures rests on a false dilemma: either God, or nothing. The reality is a third term—the glorified creature who, without ceasing to be finite, knows all that she must know in the Infinite whom she contemplates. The saints hear not instead of God, but in God; not against Christ, but through him. To invoke them does not draw us away from the Savior: it is to know ourselves surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses” who, seeing God, see us in him, and bear our prayers to his throne.
To Go Further
Notes and References
Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) 9:5-6 (AELF liturgical translation): “the dead know nothing anymore. [...] Their loves, their hates, their jealousies have already vanished.” Text invoked by proponents of “soul sleep”; Catholic exegesis sees here a sapiential observation about life “under the sun,” not a denial of conscious survival, which is fully revealed by Christ.
1Gospel according to Luke 20:38 (AELF liturgical translation), parallels Mt 22:32 and Mk 12:27. Christ’s answer to the Sadducees who denied the resurrection: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are “alive” to God.
2Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 956, quoting Vatican II, Lumen Gentium 49. On the intercession of the inhabitants of heaven and their “brotherly concern.”
3First Letter to the Corinthians 13:12 (AELF liturgical translation): “At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” Scriptural basis for the doctrine of the beatific vision.
4Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 12, a. 1, corp. (paraphrase, no French verbatim): it must be granted without reserve that the blessed see the very essence of God. Substance checked against the Dominican English translation (Benziger, 1920): “it must be absolutely granted that the blessed see the essence of God”. On the beatific vision.
5Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 12, a. 4 (paraphrase, no French verbatim): no created intelligence can see the divine essence by its own natural powers alone; the light of glory (lumen gloriae — the Dominican English translation, Benziger, 1920, reads: “the light of glory strengthening the intellect to see God”, with Ps 35:10) is required.
6Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 12, a. 8, ad 1um (paraphrase, no French verbatim): God, seen in his essence, contains within himself and manifests all things; the blessed know in God what concerns them. Substance checked against the Dominican English translation (Benziger, 1920): “God, who in Himself sufficiently contains and shows forth all things”.
7Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement (posthumous part, compiled from his Commentary on the Sentences, IV, dist. 45), q. 72, a. 1, corp.: “Utrum sancti cognoscant orationes nostras.” (title of the article). Paraphrase of the body of the article, no French verbatim: the source Latin, checked against the Scriptum super Sententias, bk. IV, dist. 45, q. 3, a. 1 (Corpus Thomisticum) from which the Supplement is drawn, reads “in verbo cognoscunt vota et orationes et devotiones hominum qui ad eorum auxilium confugiunt”; the Dominican English translation (Benziger, 1920) renders: “they know in the Word the vows, devotions, and prayers of those who have recourse to their assistance”.
8Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 89, a. 8, corp. (paraphrase, no French verbatim): by their natural knowledge alone, separated souls do not know what happens on earth; but the souls of the blessed who see God know what happens here below — without interfering in the affairs of the living, except according to the disposition of divine justice. Checked Gregorian reference: Saint Thomas does cite the Moralia in Job under the mention “Moral. XII” — and not the Dialogues — (Dominican English translation, Benziger, 1920: “Gregory gives the reason thus […] (Moral. xii)”). Book XII of the Moralia expounds Jb 14 (from v. 5) then Jb 15; its § 26 comments on Jb 14:21 (“Sive nobiles fuerint filii ejus, sive ignobiles, non intelligit”): “Quod tamen de animabus sanctis sentiendum non est, quia quae intus omnipotentis Dei claritatem vident nullo modo credendum est quia foris sit aliquid quod ignorent” (Latin, Migne 1847 ed.); the Dominican translation renders: “The case of the holy souls is different, for since they see the light of Almighty God, we cannot believe that external things are unknown to them.”
9 10Saint Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda (The Care to Be Taken for the Dead, c. 421), ch. XIII of the Latin text (Migne, PL 40; § 16 of the Schaff English translation reproduced by New Advent) — paraphrase, no French verbatim: the dead, even the saints, do not know by themselves what the living are doing at the moment they do it; Augustine cites Is 63:16 (AELF: « Abraham ne nous connaît pas, Israël ne nous reconnaît pas »). The Latin of the argument is attested by Saint Thomas himself, who takes it up in objection 1 of the same dossier (Suppl., q. 72, a. 1, arg. 1, checked against the Scriptum super Sententias, bk. IV, dist. 45, q. 3, a. 1, Corpus Thomisticum): “si tanti patriarchae quid erga populum ab eis procreatum ageretur ignoraverunt, quomodo mortui vivorum rebus atque actibus cognoscendis adjuvandisque miscentur ?”; the Schaff translation renders: “If so great Patriarchs were ignorant what was doing towards the People of them begotten […] how are the dead mixed up with affairs and doings of the living, either for cognizance or help ?” Treatise addressed to Saint Paulinus of Nola.
11Book of Isaiah 63:16 (AELF liturgical translation, checked on aelf.org): “Pourtant, c'est toi notre père ! Abraham ne nous connaît pas, Israël ne nous reconnaît pas. […]” Verse invoked by Saint Augustine (De cura pro mortuis gerenda, ch. XIII) to show that the dead, by themselves, do not know what happens to the living.
12Saint Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda (same treatise, ch. XV of the Latin text — Migne, PL 40 —, n. 18 of the continuous numbering of the modern critical text; § 18 of the Schaff English translation reproduced by New Advent) — paraphrase, no French verbatim: the dead can learn what happens here below from the souls who join them at death, from angels, or by a revelation of the Spirit of God. The Schaff translation renders: “the dead indeed do not know what is doing here, but while it is in doing here : afterwards, however, they hear it from those who […]” ; “were there not Angels, who could be present in places both of quick and dead […]” ; “the spirits of the dead do learn some things […] by the Spirit of God revealing them”. The saints’ knowledge of human affairs is thus a received gift, not a natural science.
13 14Saint Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda (same treatise, ch. XVI of the Latin text — Migne, PL 40 —, nn. 19-20 of the continuous numbering of the modern critical text; § 19 of the Schaff English translation reproduced by New Advent): Augustine acknowledges that the martyrs truly help the living — he cites the apparition of the confessor Saint Felix of Nola during a barbarian attack, attested not by uncertain rumors but by sure witnesses (paraphrase of Schaff’s “not by uncertain rumors, but by sure witnesses”) — and attributes it to a divine action (paraphrase of the Latin divinitus exhibentur, Schaff rendering: “such things are of God exhibited”). He does not doubt the help of the saints, but questions the mode of their knowledge.
15Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Supplement (posthumous part, see preceding note), q. 72, a. 1, corp. and ad 1um (paraphrase, no French verbatim): the blessed see in the Word not all things, but what the perfection of their beatitude requires — including the prayers of those who invoke them. The source Latin, checked (Scriptum super Sententias, bk. IV, dist. 45, q. 3, a. 1, Corpus Thomisticum), reads “quantum perfectio beatitudinis requirit” and “sancti cognitionem habeant eorum quae ad hoc requiruntur”; the Dominican English translation (Benziger, 1920) renders: “the saints are cognizant of such things as are required for this purpose”. The reply to the first objection distinguishes the natural knowledge of separated souls (of which Saint Augustine speaks, Is 63:16) and the knowledge in the Word, proper to the vision of God — “since no one had come to the vision of God before Christ's passion” (same translation).
16Gospel according to Luke 9:30-31 (AELF liturgical translation), account of the Transfiguration; parallels Mt 17:3 and Mk 9:4. Moses and Elijah, “appearing in glory,” speak with Jesus about his “departure” (exodos) in Jerusalem.
17Gospel according to Luke 16:19-31 (AELF liturgical translation), parable of the rich man and Lazarus; vv. 25 (“My child, Abraham replied, remember: you received your good things during your life...”) and 27-28 (“...I beg you to send Lazarus to my father's house. For I have five brothers...”) cited. Abraham, deceased, dialogues, remembers earth, and knows the situation of the living.
18Revelation 5:8 (AELF liturgical translation): the twenty-four Elders hold “golden bowls full of incense which are the prayers of the saints.”
19Revelation 8:3-4 (AELF liturgical translation): an angel offers incense “with the prayers of all the saints,” and “through the angel's hand the smoke of the incense rose before God, with the prayers of the saints.”
20Gospel according to Luke 15:10 (AELF liturgical translation), conclusion of the parable of the lost coin; cf. Lk 15:7 (the lost sheep).
21Letter to the Hebrews 12:1 (AELF liturgical translation): “Therefore we too, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses [...].”
22Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2683 (official vatican.va text, [...] marking the omission of a sentence): the saints “contemplate God, they praise him, and they do not cease to care for those whom they have left on earth. [...] Their intercession is their highest service of God's plan. We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world.”
23Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 962, quoting Paul VI, Credo of the People of God (Solemn Profession of Faith, June 30, 1968), § 30: “we believe in the communion […] of all the faithful of Christ, those who are pilgrims on earth, the dead who are being purified, the blessed in heaven […] and we believe that in this communion the merciful love of God and of his saints is always listening to our prayers.” On the three states of the Church, cf. CCC nos. 954-959.
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