INTERCESSION. - In the theological sense it means the intervention of a creature with God to obtain from him favors on behalf of another creature. Taking place entirely on the plane of the relations between Creator and creature, intercession necessarily has as its primary object the goods that essentially concern these relations, that is, those of a spiritual order; the others, temporal goods, enter into it only subordinately to the primordial end. Only those creatures that have not yet reached the definitive, immutable state of their relations with God can be the subject of intercession; hence all and only the blessed in heaven and the damned in hell are excluded from it.
Every intercession contains a prayer (v.) of petition to God; but sometimes it rests solely on this, and is then called impetratory intercession; at other times, instead, it is accompanied also by the offering of meritorious, satisfactory works, such as voluntary mortifications, the acceptance of sufferings in a spirit of penance, the offering of one's life, alms, which Catholic dogma teaches it is possible, under certain conditions, to perform for the benefit of others (v. VICARIOUS SATISFACTION), and in this case the intercession is satisfactory and can be made only by the living on this earth and in a state of Grace. The efficacy of intercession follows the laws of the efficacy of prayer and of satisfaction.
The possibility and the actual reality of intercession in Catholic dogma most clearly reveals the communal aspect of our relations with God, whereby creatures, in these very relations, are not like atoms independent of one another, but are in solidarity with one another. This law God freely willed to observe in his intervention in the world, aiming not only to draw to himself a certain number of individuals, but to found a city, a kingdom, in which every individual is concerned with and in solidarity with the fate of the others. Thus the fate and activity of the angels, good or evil, is not a matter of indifference to any human individual, nor is the fate of any human individual a matter of indifference to the angels; thus every human individual in his fall is in some way in solidarity with Adam and with the other sinners, and even more so, in his return to God, he is in solidarity with Christ, in whose benefits, moreover, he in some way participates only dependently on his relations with that human-divine society which is the Church, whose phases of development and whose members, on earth, in purgatory, in heaven, are in communion of supernatural life with Christ and with one another (v. COMMUNION OF SAINTS). Intercession in Catholic dogma is a particular manifestation of this general law of salvation in community: among the ways of granting his benefits to creatures, God, by virtue of that law, has foreseen and willed from all eternity that of granting them through the intercession of another creature, precisely because every creature in Christ and through Christ is and feels itself united to all the others in the destinies of the kingdom. The creatures that intercede are: Christ, the angels and the saints, especially the Most Holy Mary, men on this earth, the souls in purgatory.
Christ as man, by virtue of the hypostatic union (v.) of his human nature in the person of the Word, not only has with God a power of intercession of infinite extent and efficacy, because he has merited every grace in strict justice, but is indeed in the proper sense the sole mediator between God and men and the only way that leads to the Father (I Tim. 2:5; Io. 14:6; Mt. 11:27; Rom. 5:1; 12:24; Hebr. 10:19-25; Act. 4:12), so that any other intercession with God for men, after original sin, must be understood as subordinate to and dependent on this supreme mediation of Christ, and every grace granted to them from that moment, as granted in the last instance through his merits. Hence it is that all the other intercessions, being subordinate to his supreme mediation and drawing their efficacy from it, do not derogate from it, and still less supplant it (Denz-U, 984), but are a fruit and a glorification of it. And it is for this reason that every petition that the Church addresses to God in the liturgy, even when invoking the intercession of other saints, is always made "through Jesus Christ our Lord." Christ himself, from the first instant of his incarnation, as high priest between God and men (Hebr. 4:14-15, 10), exercised during his earthly life the intercession of impetration (Lc. 22:31 ff.; 23:34; Io. 17:6-26) and of perfect satisfaction for the sins of the whole human race through the sacrifice of his blood (Hebr. 9:11-28; Rom. 3:25 ff.; Eph. 1:7), thus becoming the universal Redeemer. And in heaven he eternally continues his impetratory intercession with God for men: "always being alive, so as to be able to intercede in their favor" (Hebr. 7:24; cf. Io. 14:16; Rom. 8:34; I Io. 2:1-2).
That the angels and the saints, among whom especially the Most Holy Mary, subordinately to Christ and in union with him, exercise in heaven the impetratory intercession for men, even individual men, is a dogma of the Catholic faith proposed by the ordinary magisterium, implicit in the dogma of the lawfulness and usefulness of the worship and invocation of the angels (Denz-U, 320) and of the saints (ibid., 984 ff.), and expressly inculcated by the Council of Trent against the Protestant errors (ibid.).
Already Scripture shows explicit cases of intercession by angels (Zach. 1:12; Job 5:1; 33:23 ff.) and by saints (II Mach. 15:11-16) and shows us how they take an interest in the destinies of the Kingdom of God on earth (Apoc. passim, e.g., 6:10) and offer the prayers of men to God (Tob. 12:12; Apoc. 5:8; 8:3). The matter is then perfectly logical in the whole of the Christian Revelation, according to which the blessed know our prayers and our needs; a fact of which in the Church, apart from the way of explaining it, not even those who admit a general intermediate state of the just souls before their final and complete retribution at the Last Judgment doubt, and of which one can doubt still less once there has been definitively clarified as a doctrine of faith (Denz-U, 530, 693) the point that the angels and the blessed in heaven enjoy from now on the beatific vision, whereby they see in God everything that in some way concerns them, among which, naturally, the prayers that we address to them. Add to this the aforementioned communal law of God's intervention in the world, whereby every member of the city of God is concerned with the fate of men who have not yet definitively reached their end; and the now perfect state of the charity of the blessed, whereby one cannot understand how those very ones, who, while they lived down here and had a charity still imperfect, were nonetheless driven by it to intercede ardently for their neighbor, now that they have a perfect charity and can so much more before God, would be unconcerned with the eternal salvation of men. Thus is explained the ever greater attention that was accorded in the Church to the doctrine of the intercession of the angels and the saints and to the consequence of their invocation and worship (v.). The essential features of this doctrine are already attested before the 4th century, especially by Origen (De oratione, Cohortatio ad Martyrium) and by a good number of paintings and cemetery epigraphs, such as that of Atticus: "Attice, dormi in pace de tua incolumitate securus et pro nostris peccatis peti sollicitus" (v. G. B. De Rossi, in Bull. d'Archeologia Cristiana, 5th series [1894], p. 58); in the 4th and 5th centuries one has its full elaboration, for example, in St. Jerome, for the explicit defense that he made of it against the denials of the priest Vigilantius (v.) in his Contra Vigilantium; likewise also in St. Augustine and in a great number of liturgical, monumental, pictorial and epigraphic testimonies, among which beautiful and comprehensive is the epitaph of Gentianus: "Gentianus fidelis in pace, qui vixit annis XXI mensibus VII dies XVI; et in orationi(bu)s tuis roges pro nobis, quia scimus te in Christo" (O. Marucchi, I monumenti del Museo cristiano lateranense, Milan 1910, pl. 51, no. 15).
Patristic documents (e.g., St. Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda, 4, 6), liturgical documents (e.g., in Masses for the dead, in the funeral rites of the Ambrosian rite), and epigraphic documents attest to the belief, now common in the Church, that the blessed intercede not only for the living but also for the souls in purgatory.
The impetratory and satisfactory intercession of the living for other living persons is also a dogma of faith proposed by the ordinary magisterium and widely attested by Scripture, both of the Old Testament (e.g., Gen. 18:22-32; 20:7: Abraham intercedes for Sodom and will intercede for Abimelech; Ex. 32:11-14; Num. 14:13-20: Moses intercedes for the people; 1 Sam. 7:8 ff.; Samuel; Job 42:8: Job), and of the New (e.g., the plural form in the petitions of the Pater; Acts 7:60; 12:5; Rom. 15:30; Eph. 1:15; 6:8-20; 1 Tim. 2:1-4; Jas. 5:16-18), as well as by the documents of ecclesiastical tradition on the practice of the faithful, both private and liturgical, e.g., the admonition of the Didache, 1, 3: "Pray for your enemies and fast for those who persecute you"; the prayers and recommendations that were sought from the confessors of the faith; the prayers for the living in the Canon of the Mass, in the orations of the Mass, and in the administration of the Sacraments and sacramentals.
It is likewise a dogma of faith (Denz-U, 464, 693) that the impetratory and satisfactory intercession of the living in favor of the souls in purgatory (v.) is a reality, an intercession exercised through every kind of suffrage, especially the sacrifice of the Mass, prayers, alms, and other pious works (ibid.), as well as through indulgences (v.) which the Church, according to the common opinion of theologians (ibid., 762, 1542), by virtue of these souls' belonging to the Mystical Body of Christ and to the Communion of saints, has the power to apply to them, by way of suffrage. This intercession of the living for the dead is always accepted by God, although we do not know when he grants it and to which soul he applies it. Even sinners can in some way benefit the souls in purgatory by having Masses celebrated and having pious works performed by righteous souls, as well as by praying for them, if it pleases God out of pure mercy to grant their prayers, even though these are devoid of merit.
That the souls in purgatory can in turn exercise impetratory intercession in favor of the living, especially of their benefactors, is an opinion increasingly common among modern theologians, supported by the quite general practice of the faithful, who invoke those souls, although this is never done in the liturgy, and by the attitude of the ordinary magisterium, which seems favorable. In reality nothing prevents these souls from praying for us, since they are in a state of Grace, possess a most perfect degree of charity, and the state of punishment in which they find themselves does not seem necessarily to prevent God from making our needs known to them or from having accepted their prayer. But the ancient theologians, especially St. Thomas (Sum. Theol., 2a-2a, q. 83, a. 11, ad 3; a. 4, ad 3), were generally of the contrary opinion, and in any case the invocation of the souls in purgatory can never be equated with that of the saints, nor can they be the object of cult.