It is one of our greatest blessings and privileges within the Catholic Church that we can address the Blessed Saints by name and ask them to pray for us to God, with the assurance that our prayers to them do not go unanswered.  For prayer knows no limits.  It can penetrate everywhere, beyond the seeming barriers of distance and of death, to where the Blessed Saints are standing before the Throne of God.  

It is our prayers to them and their unfailing response which combine to make the Communion of Saints, in which we profess our belief in the Creed, into a living fact.  And indeed our Christian fellowship would inevitably be incomplete and defective if it excluded the glorious company of the Apostles and Martyrs and Saints of every age, and were confined merely to the Christians of our own generation and the holy souls in Purgatory.