Who should you ask to pray for you?

Do Catholics worship saints?

No. Worship belongs to God alone, and giving it to anything else is idolatry, which the Church names as such. Asking a saint to intercede is asking them to pray for you, in exactly the sense you would ask a friend to pray for you. The difference is not the kind of request. It is that this friend is already with God.

The Catechism puts the distinction plainly at paragraph 2132: the honour shown to a saint or an image passes to the person it represents, and is not the adoration owed to God. If you have ever asked someone to keep you in their prayers, you have already done the thing Catholics do with the saints. Nobody thought you were worshipping them.

Why the saints at all

Because Christians have never thought death ends membership of the Church. The people who have gone ahead are held to be alive in God and still concerned with the people they left, which is what the phrase the communion of saints means (Catechism 956 and 957). Asking for their prayers follows from that, and the practice is very old: the walls of the Roman catacombs carry requests to the dead to pray for the living.

They are witnesses rather than idols. The point of a saint is not that they were remarkable but that they were ordinary people the same thing happened to, and every page here tries to show that rather than assert it.

How a saint ends up patron of something

Almost always through their life. St. Peregrine is invoked by cancer patients because he had a cancer of the leg, expected to lose it, and did not. St. Monica is asked for by parents of children who have left the faith because she prayed seventeen years for one of them. St. Anthony is invoked for lost things because of a stolen book that came back.

A patronage is an association the Church or long tradition has recognised. It is not a mechanism and not a transaction. No saint is a specialist you file a request with, and nothing here promises an outcome. Where a patronage rests on legend rather than history, as with St. Christopher, the page says so.

How to ask a saint to pray for you

1. Say who you are asking. Out loud or silently, by name.
2. Say what is actually going on, in your own words. No formula is required.
3. Ask them to pray for you about it, which is the whole request.
4. Pray something alongside it if you want to. A decade of the rosary is the common choice and takes about four minutes.
5. Keep asking. Most of the stories on this site are long ones, and a single request is not a transaction that either clears or fails.