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Hi, Steve –
Here are a few links to where we've discussed this:
Catholic.com, which is also an excellent source of answers, has a few responses to this question:
You may want to do a search on catholic.com or our site:
for further information.
If these pages aren't available, let me summarize: The Bible doesn't say to pray only to God. It says to only worship God. We don't worship (i.e. adore) Mary. Protestants confuse prayer and worship because they don't have a concept of offering sacrifice as Catholics do as our form of worship.
For them, prayer is worship, and so they get confused when we pray to saints. But the word "pray" simply means "to ask" (in English it has acquired specific connotations that the Latin equivalent, the official language of the Roman Catholic Church, does not have; the word in Latin is the ordinary word for "ask"). When we pray to Mary, we are asking her to be our "prayer partner", just as we'd ask one of our friends on earth to pray for us.
Eric Ewanco
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