Praying to the Saints – What’s up with that?

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The usual explanation offered is that you ask other Christians here on earth to pray for you, so why not the saints in heaven? After all, if we are all part of the communion of saints as the creed tells us, it would seem that the saints are in some sense present to us or with us as well as standing before the Throne of God.

Here’s an article that covers the basics.

I do have a question about this, though:

Also, God answers in particular the prayers of the righteous. James declares: “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit” (Jas. 5:16–18). Yet those Christians in heaven are more righteous, since they have been made perfect to stand in God’s presence (Heb. 12:22-23), than anyone on earth, meaning their prayers would be even more efficacious.

This, I must say, raises my Protestant hackles because it seems to imply that the saints have a righteousness of their own which somehow makes their prayers more effective. By contrast, the Protestant tradition holds that we are “clothed in the righteousness of Christ;” we are always radically dependent on God’s grace. In that sense it seems strange to me to say that somehow the saints’ righteousness earns them a more direct line to God making their prayers more efficacious.

Also, are prayers asking for intercession the only kinds of prayers directed toward the saints? Does the idea that the various saints are patrons of various things – countries, certain professional groups, etc. – just mean that the people that fall under those categories should direct their requests for prayers specifically toward those saints? Or does it imply asking them to actually do something impacting the world in some way that implies some kind of supernatural intervention? I’m in near total ignorance about this aspect of things.