Anybody who prays to Mary prays to no one ...
That may well be your experience, but then the insight, experience and evidence of saints and mystics for two millenia suggest otherwise, so you will understand and excuse us if we go on the weight of evidence as it presents itself to us.
Not only she, but in the Tradition there is a cornucopia of evidence of the beneficial intercession and assistance of the saints, so like yourself, we tend to go by what our experience tells us.
She never claimed to do any of these things...
Precisely, and nor has the Catholic Church ever claimed such. But she did intercede for us (John 2) and as we believe in the fullness of life in the eschaton, there is no reason to suppose that she has ceased to act in the next life as she did in this.
Then there are the Marian apparitions, which would seem to add weight to that argument.
Frankly, I think she would be upset by the way she has been, for all intents and purposes, deified by the Catholic church.
Your assumption, not that of the Catholic Church. To be sure she has called us to order more than once, but never on that point.
You are of course free to accept or deny the testimony of tradition, but then the argument becomes somewhat pointless. Many believe that Jesus Christ is also nothing more than a myth or a figment ... simply I would rather someone makes an informed decision based on fact and not hearsay, presupposition or error.
I am aware of the blurring of the distinction between devotion and deification in popular piety, but then people rarely speak from the discipline of metaphysical rigour, nor are they making doctrinal statements with theological precision. If such were the rule than language would become a very dull and dry thing indeed. Every poet would be relegated to the realm of irrational nonsense, for a start.
On the other hand, when I slip into metaphysical-theological mode, I am often met with the glazed eye, the furrowed brow, the stifled yawn ...
But rest assured never in any of my studies have I ever come across the notion that Mary is such that she renders her Son ancilliary to salvation.
Thomas
