Q&A with Fr John Flader: This week – Do Catholics worship statues?
By Fr John Flader
Question: A Protestant friend has asked me some questions I find it difficult to answer. The first is why we have statues in our churches when the first commandment, so she says, forbids making them. Also, she speaks of us “worshipping” statues. I know we don’t do that, but what is the best way to answer her question?
While the usual way of reciting the first commandment – “I am the Lord your God; you shall not have strange gods before me” – makes no reference to images or statues, the longer version in the Book of Exodus does.
It reads, “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Ex 20:3-5).
We might be tempted to think that the Catholic Church is deliberately hiding part of a commandment of God, in order to justify doing something expressly forbidden, ie making graven, or carved, images.
The Church would never do that. In order to facilitate memorising the commandments, Tradition has simply given us shorter versions which are easier to remember. But then why do we have images of Jesus, Mary, saints and angels in our churches and homes, if God strictly forbade making them?
First of all, we should recall that the same God who gave Moses the Ten Commandments actually commanded him to make a number of images. These included the images of two gold cherubim, or angels, for the ark of the covenant (cf Ex 25:18-20), and the image of the bronze serpent, which would save the lives of those who looked at it after being bitten by a poisonous serpent (cf Num 21:8-9).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that these images point toward Jesus Christ: “Nevertheless, already in the Old Testament, God ordained or permitted the making of images that pointed symbolically toward salvation by the incarnate Word: so it was with the bronze serpent, the ark of the covenant and the cherubim” (CCC 2130).
From this it is clear that what God was forbidding was not so much the making of images as the worshipping of them: “you shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Ex 20:5).
We see this when the Israelites, concerned that Moses had not come down from the mountain, made a golden calf and worshipped it (cf Ex 32:1-35). God then told Moses: “Go down; for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves; … they have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshipped it and sacrificed to it” (Ex 32:7-8). This is the sin of idolatry, the worshipping of idols, which is what the first commandment expressly forbids.
Once God became man, assuming a visible body in Jesus Christ, God in a sense gave us an image of himself. Thus, St Paul writes of Jesus: “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15). With this visible entry of God into the world, the Church from the very beginning considered it lawful to make images.
When the iconoclast heresy ravaged the Church in the eighth century, denying the morality of making icons and other images, the Church responded in the Second Council of Nicaea by declaring the acceptability of icons. The Catechism explains: “Basing itself on the mystery of the incarnate Word the seventh ecumenical council at Nicaea (787) justified against the iconoclasts the veneration of icons – of Christ, but also of the Mother of God, the angels, and all the saints. By becoming incarnate, the Son of God introduced a new ‘economy’ of images” (CCC 2131).
In answer to your second question, we do not of course “worship” statues and images. We use them to remind us of the person they represent, just as families have photos of their loved ones. Quoting St Basil, the Catechism explains: “The Christian veneration of images is not contrary to the first commandment which proscribes idols. Indeed, ‘the honour rendered to an image passes to its prototype’, and ‘whoever venerates an image venerates the person portrayed in it’” (CCC 2132).
Fr Flader: director@caec.com.au