We Catholics are often accused by other Christians of worshiping statues of Mary and the saints. We do not! We worship God alone – the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but we do ask Mary, the angels and the saints in Heaven to pray to God on our behalf. We might often do this in front of an image or a statue of the person as a visual aid to help us in our prayer. The non-Catholic objection to our using statues and sacred images is based on a misrepresentation of Exodus 20:4-5 in which God says: “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.”

The thing to notice here is that God is forbidding the making of an image or statue for the purpose of idolatry. Idolatry is worshipping anything other than the one true God which the Israelites were in the habit of doing. One thinks immediately of the golden calf incident (Exodus 32). But Exodus 20 is not prohibiting the making of statues or images. After all, there are many legitimate reasons for having them. Even in our own homes, we usually have pictures of our loved ones to remind us of them. Similarly in towns and cities throughout the world, you will find statues of war heroes and past Prime Ministers, such as Churchill in Parliament Square, Nelson in Trafalgar Square, and more recently, a statue of the late Queen Elizabeth II is being developed for St James’s Park. Nobody would suggest that the public worship these statues, because common sense dictates otherwise!

But then an objector might continue that God forbids it only for religious purposes. Really? There are a number of places in Scripture where God actually commands the making of religious images. In Exodus 25, God commanded the Israelites to make statues of cherubs and put them on the Ark of the Covenant. During the plague of fiery serpents, God told Moses to make a serpent of brass and put it on a pole, so that anyone who was bitten by one of the venomous snakes, when they looked upon the brass serpent would live (Numbers 21:8-9).

And what about relics? Is it legitimate to honour the bodies and relics of saints? Yes it is, and you will find it even in the Old Testament. The Jews always respected the bodies of the dead, and Moses took the bones of Joseph with him from Egypt to bury them in the Promised Land (Exodus 13:19). A dead man whose body was thrown into the grave of the prophet Elisha, when he touched Elisha’s bones, came back to life instantly (2 Kings 13:21). And in the New Testament, God worked miracles through objects used by St Paul. His handkerchiefs and aprons were taken to the sick and they were cured of their diseases, and evil spirits came out from them (Acts 19:11-12). And so today, we revere and respect the bodies of the saints.

Also, from the earliest days of the Church, Mass has been offered over the tombs of martyrs in the catacombs. This developed into the custom of placing relics of the saints within altars. It reminds us that the saints are united with Christ’s sacrifice and continue to intercede for the Church Militant here on earth. In the High Altar of St Mary’s, we have the relics of St Peter and St Paul, St Dominic Savio and St Therese of Lisieux.

We pray to Our Lady and the saints because they are already in Heaven and they can intercede with God on our behalf because of their closeness to Him. We venerate the bodies and relics of the saints because they have been members of the Body of Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit, and as such will be raised up in glory on the Last Day, and so naturally that veneration extends to objects closely connected with them. Relics are not magical, but God uses them as a means to perform miracles, because He wants to direct our attention to them, both as models and as intercessors.

Fr Paul Gillham, IC