On Idolatry

The question of whether or not veneration of religious icons is tantamount to idolatry is nothing new. It is, I'm pretty sure, one of the reasons why many protestants look down their noses as us Catholics. Here in the Philippines and in other Catholic countries our ability to worship God seems dependent on our ability to give him, his suffering as passion as well as his glorious resurrection, a face.

For my part, I don't have anything against the veneration of icons because I subscribe to the idea that they are merely tools through which we are able to better worship God.

What bothers me, however, is how the concept of using these icons as tools, as means to an end, has been perverted to the extent that some icons have become ends in themselves. In other words, when people start worshipping and placing faith in a statue and not on the God whom the statue represents, something has gone wrong in my opinion.

In the Philippines alone we have enough stories about religious icons to fill several historical volumes, stories about how this statute of the Virgin Mary helped the Spanish defeat the Dutch or how that statue of the Boy Jesus healed the sick or something like that. While I don't disbelieve these stories, I hardly consider them grounds to get down on my knees and worship a block of wood or plaster.

And yet...I know of how droves of people make pilgrimages to grottos and shrines...perfectly intelligent and discerning people, just to pray to statues.

I want to clarify that I do not think less of these people for their chosen form of worship, but I do think that many of us have lost the point of the religious icon.

I think the religious icon, particularly the statue, was originally meant as an expression of love for the faith by those responsible both for its sculpting and/or commissioning. In that, it is a profound act of faith. When people who see this statue remember the sacrifice of Jesus, or the love of the blessed mother, then the love the sculptor has expressed becomes multiplied.

When that love, however, ends with the statue, to the extent that the worshipper asks the statue for miracles or favors, then the original intention is lost. The intention was not, in my opinion, to create love for a statue but for who or what that statue represents. When I say what, I refer to actions, like the sacrifice or suffering depicted in such imagery.

I would liken it to someone who watches The Passion of the Christ over and over and ends up praying to the DVD rather than to the God whose love is supposed to be depicted therein. As patently ridiculous as this sounds, one must consider that the religious icon is meant to be a representation and nothing more. How this has been distorted to the point that people make regular pilgrimages to ask favors of a piece of plaster isn't necessarily a mystery; in an age of mass media, fast food and other forms of instantaneous gratification, it makes sense that people would much rather put all of their faith in something they can see than a person they only read about in a book or heard about from their priest.

I wonder when we will transcend it, anyway.