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Remember the word Pray means implore and request to anyone not just God Webster definition. This might Help: Intercession and Invocation of the Saints: How is it Different From Magic?

Lutheran sociologist Peter Berger has stated that “Protestantism cut off the umbilical cord between heaven and earth.” How true. Of course, the issue is whether there should be such a cord in the first place. I contend that there clearly should be, and I will proceed to give biblical evidences for same (as is my wont).

A Protestant friend asked the question that always comes up in any discussion of the Catholic view on the communion of saints:

Why WOULD anyone content themselves with seeking the intercession of a manager, even at the highest level (where Mary undoubtedly is) when one can go to the CEO Himself?

One simple reason: because we are informed in the Bible that the prayers of certain people have more efficacy than those of others:

. . . The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit. (James 5:16-18; RSV)

One immediately thinks of other powerful intercessors such as Abraham and Moses. God sometimes did not destroy entire cities or peoples as a result of their pleas. Of course God cannot change and knew what He was going to do all along, but the point is that He involved His creatures in the process in a lesser, secondary fashion. They participated, just as Paul states that we “work out our own salvation” (Philippians 2:12).

The Apostle John writes: “if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have obtained the requests made of him” (1 Jn 5:14-15). Similar themes are common in Scripture. I need not document further. The principle is already established.

Following this line of thought, then, if Mary is indeed sinless (I am still within the Catholic paradigm, for the sake of argument), then it follows inexorably (right from Scripture) that her prayers would have the greatest power and efficacy, and not only because of her sinlessness but because of her status as the Theotokos and Spiritual Mother, for which God appointed her.
We pray for each other because we are to love one another, and prayer is an obvious aspect of love, for if we love someone, and know of a way that they can be aided, we pursue that avenue on their behalf. That’s what intercession is. God grants us that great privilege, and we do it because we love others and wish to show forth Christ’s love. Jesus told us to pray. That settles it.

Catholics don’t disagree with Protestants that prayer is supremely important, and is God’s will. The disagreement is over whether this applies to those who have died and gone to be with Jesus in the afterlife. Most Protestants believe that we shouldn’t ask for their intercession, usually stating that we should go right to God, but some recognize that they can’t take that principle too far, else all prayers for each other would be eliminated. So the standard Protestant position is to accept the prayers among those on earth, but not from those (saved saints) who have departed from the earth as a result of physical death.

It’s really quite simple. Either these folks are alive or they are not. Clearly, they are alive (more than we are). Jesus alludes to this fact when He speaks of “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacb,” stating that “He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Mt 22:32). Hebrews 12:1 mentions that we are surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses” — which commentators have compared to a picture of spectators in a sports arena observing. Further proof is unnecessary. All Christians who are not annihilationists or believers in “soul-sleep” (like, e.g., the 7th-Day Adventists or heretics like Jehovah;s Witnesses) believe that souls are conscious after death.

So, no doubt many Protestants would reply that “okay, they are alive, but that doesn’t prove that they can pray for us or hear our prayers.” At that point, the Catholic appeals to a combination of direct scriptural proofs and pretty solid indirect ones. I wrote in my first book, A Biblical Defense of Catholicism:

The saints are not only still alive, but much more vibrantly and intensely alive than we are, thoroughly able to influence and assist us, as the book of Revelation clearly testifies. (They are not preoccupied with sitting on clouds and strumming harps, as our culture’s ridiculous caricatures would have it! They still think, feel, will, love, and remember — all of our attributes are theirs (and many more: see Matthew 22:30, Romans 8:29-30,38-39, 1 Corinthians 13:9-12, 15:42-43, Philippians 3:20-21, 1 John 3:2). The invocation of saints entails much more than merely mental inspiration, though that aspect is included as well . .
.

Concerning the Church Fathers’ views . . . renowned Protestant church historian Philip Schaff -– no friend at all of these practices — concludes forlornly: . . .

“In the numerous memorial discourses of the fathers, the martyrs
are loaded with eulogies, addressed as present, and besought for
their protection. The universal tone of those productions is offensive
to the Protestant taste, and can hardly be reconciled with
evangelical ideas of the exclusive and all-sufficient mediation of
Christ and of justification by pure grace without the merit of works.
But . . . the best church fathers, too, never separated the merits of the saints from the merits of Christ, but considered the former as flowing out of the latter.”

(History of the Christian Church, Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 1976 [orig. 5th ed., 1889], vol. 3, chapter 7, section 84,
438; emphasis added).

The saints in heaven are clearly aware of earthly happenings. If they have such awareness, it isn’t that much of a leap to deduce that they can hear our requests for prayer. But is there any biblical evidence of that? I think there certainly is.

In Jeremiah 15:1, we read: Then the Lord said to me, “Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my heart would not turn toward this people.” Here it appears that God receives the prayers of the dead saints as a matter of course. Moses and Samuel were both known as intercessors, and Jeremiah lived centuries after both men (cf. 2 Maccabees 15:13-14, which reveals that Jeremiah was praying for the Jews after his death).

In my chapter on Purgatory in A Biblical Defense of Catholicism, I also showed how the inverse can be shown in the Bible: our prayers for the dead, rather than asking their prayers for us. Paul prayed for a dead man:

2 Timothy 1:16-18 May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me; he was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me eagerly and found me — may the Lord grant him to find mercy from the Lord on that Day — and you well know all the service he rendered at Ephesus.

My Protestant friend defined magic as “the use or invocation of spiritual powers, forces, or beings to effect changes in the material world.” I stated that this definition would also encompass prayers to God (”invocation” of a “spiritual power” to “effect changes in the material world” — healings, changes in monetary situations, material goods to be provided — food for the hungry, etc.).

King Saul and the Witch of Endor (1 Sam 28) are often brought up as an example of how not to go about relating to dead people. This is a good example, and I dealt with it in my first book. Saul’s motive was wrong, and the witchcraft and mediumship were wrong, yet many Protestant commentators (e.g., New Bible Commentary, Wycliffe Bible Commentary) believe that Samuel himself (i.e., not an impersonating or occultic spirit) actually chose to appear and rebuke Saul, thus proving once again that dead saints are involved in earthly affairs, just as in the Transfiguration, the Two Witnesses in Revelation, etc.

Asking saints in heaven or angels or the Blessed Virgin Mary to pray for us is not different in essence from asking each other (those of us on earth) to pray. Mary is a lot more righteous than we are, and more alive, and with God. Angels never did sin, so they are untainted with that stain. Therefore, we can ask them to pray for us, according to the clear dictum in James.

I don’t see that this is all that difficult to comprehend, or why it is so immediately objectionable to many non-Catholic Christians. Perhaps the confusion is the usual equation of such requests for intercession with seances and the like. That doesn’t follow. We are not relying on the power of some “medium” (many of whom are fake to begin with, as Houdini, the Amazing Randi, and others have shown), but on the power of God. The saints can see us, hear us, and pray for us, because they are with God, out of time, and accorded the remarkable abilities that those in such situations receive as a matter of course.

The invocation and intercession of the saints is an essentially different practice. Necromancy, divination and various occultic practices were strongly condemned in the Old Testament Law, yet the Jews prayed for the dead. They saw no contradiction because there was none. 2 Maccabees 12:39-45 presents prayers for the dead in most unquestionable terms. Of course, Protestants will reply that this is from the “Apocrypha,” which is another discussion, but whether it is Scripture or not (the early Church thought so), the passage still shows that this was the practice of the Jews and that they saw no conflict between that and the forbidden practices. Christianity develops Judaism. Many things in late Judaism, such as eschatology and angelology and notions of bodily resurrection, were continued and developed by the early Church. Praying for the dead was just one of many instances of that.

Prayer doesn’t interfere with the centrality of Christ at all, or else He wouldn’t have taught us to pray! So if the “prayer of a righteous man availeth much” then the Catholic goes right to Mary, since she is the most righteous human being, and is active in her love for mankind, not sitting on a cloud playing a harp.

It’s almost as if Protestantism adopts the silly cultural stereotypes of what heaven is supposedly like, as if it is the Norse Valhalla, rather than the intensely spiritual place (or state) that it is, with souls longing and burning in their desire for human beings to be saved and not damned. The saints who have died know what it is all about. They are in a place where they can devote themselves to prayer for us (because they are perfected in love), knowing full well what the stakes are. They no longer have to play all the games that we play in order to ignore the spiritual dimension and forget the world to come. And so we can and should certainly ask for their intercession: Mary most of all.

As for asking an angel to pray for us or help us, the Bible implies that men are of a higher order than angels (1 Cor 6:3, 1 Pet 1:12), at least in some sense. A guardian angel is a servant of man, not vice versa. So we need not feel that we are doing something improper in addressing them.
by Dave Armstrong- http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2004/07/intercession-and-invocation-of-saints.html