Why ask the saints to pray for me when I can pray to God directly?

The reality is that the saints have always been interceding for the people of God, and it was never considered to be something strange or abnormal. In fact, literally in the Old Testament, it says that the prophet Moses basically ensured the salvation of all of Israel, because as God said, he would have wiped them out had it not been for the intercession of Moses. That was not a one-time event. That was setting a precedent of what we see even in the New Testament. When people could go directly to Jesus, they still went to the apostles. They went to Peter for healing. Peter's shadow healed people. His handkerchief healed people. People in the book of Acts went to the apostles to receive the Holy Spirit. So why do we go to the saints? Well, St. James tells us the prayers of the righteous availeth much. So just like we ask other people to pray for us, the norm in the New Testament was always that people asked their priests to pray for them, or their saints, or whoever locally to pray for them. That was normative. Just like if we have something major going on in our life and we ask somebody that's a friend of ours, pray for us. That's what they do.