The intervention of the saints is effected especially in their intercession with God, that is, in the special love with which, as they see us in God, they follow up our fortunes and recommend them to Him. Like Onias, the High Priest, and the Prophet Jeremias, who “as friends of the brethren on earth pray much for the people and for the holy city” (cf. 2 Macch. xv, 14), so does the great company of the saints supplicate for the struggling members of Christ on the earth. Their intercessory prayer manifests their ardent longing that the name of God should be sanctified and His will accomplished on earth as well as in Heaven. And so it is nothing but living and active love, and a true expression of their blessed life. The Church is not deaf to the pulsation of this life, and therefore continually commends herself anew to their intercession. She cannot think of her Head, without also naming His holy members. Her whole liturgy is a going “to Mount Sion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the church of the first-born, who are written in the heavens, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new testament, and to the sprinkling of blood which speaketh better than that of Abel” (Hebr. xii, 22-24). Above all she turns to Mary, in trustful prayer. The Catholic regards Mary’s intercession as all-powerful with God, and Catholic Christianity is becoming more and more clearly conscious that as mother of the Redeemer and as aware of every pulsation of her Son’s heart, Mary is the mother also of all His grace.

If Mary is the mother of all the faithful; the influence of the other saints is defined by the position which they occupy in the whole organism of the Body of Christ. This belief that angels and saints have special spheres and special tasks of love is the foundation of Catholic doctrine concerning the Guardian Angels, abundantly attested in the Scriptures (Tob. xii, 12; Zach. i, 12; Hebr. i, 14), and of Catholic faith in the special help of Patron Saints.