Protestants often reject praying to the saints—a practice unique to Catholic and Orthodox Christians. They insist that the dead can’t hear us. They claim that invoking saints is a form of idolatry, a carry-over from Roman paganism, or they argue that devotion to the saints distracts from a “pure” focus on Christ alone. These Christian-sounding rejections, however, have nothing to do with authentic Christianity. We see that not just theologically, but historically.
In the catacombs of Rome, early Christians inscribed prayers directly on the walls. Many were invocations of saints, like “Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.” Despite being in Rome, this was not something that new Christians who were once Roman pagans carried into the Christian faith from their pagan culture—something Protestants often allege.
We know that because similar inscriptions are found outside of Rome, in places like Antioch and Edessa in Syria, Carthage in North Africa, Ephesus and Thessalonica in Asia Minor and Greece, and Alexandria in Egypt—showing that early Christians across the Mediterranean invoked martyrs and saints long before the medieval period.
More evidence that this was a universal (“Catholic”) Christian practice is that the inscriptions aren’t only in Latin—the language of Rome. Others are written in Greek, and even Syriac. It was a practice that transcended region and culture.
Peter and Paul were not the only ones honored—martyrs like Saint Cecilia, Saint Agnes, and Saint Lawrence are commemorated as well, their names calling for intercession and protection. These inscriptions, scattered across tombs and sacred spaces, show that invoking the saints wasn’t a late-medieval invention, but a well-established practice in the earliest periods of Christian history.
Protestants usually judge Catholicism, but authentic Christianity has to start with Jesus Christ and the Apostles. We can know what is part of authentic Christianity by looking at what the early Christians practiced, because that is what they were given by the Apostles and the teaching of the Apostles handed down to their successors. Devotion to the saints is one of those practices, and apart from a theological argument, the evidence from secular history is not only clear, it's bulletproof.
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