Do Statues and Images Equal Idolatry?

Patrick Madrid answers the question today in his usual humerous AND reverent manner, and I would encourage anyone, Catholic or non-Catholic who struggles with this issue to take five minutes and read it.

When I arrived one evening at a suburban Chicago parish to conduct an apologetics seminar, I noticed a life-sized statue of Our Lady of Fatima on the rectory lawn. Kneeling before that statue were three smaller statues of Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta – the children to whom Our Lady appeared. Their statues were kneeling in prayer, heads bowed before the larger statue.

Turning to my colleague in the car, I joked, “What a great religion Catholicism is! Not only can we worship statues, but our statues can worship statues.” We chuckled at the absurdity of the thought.

When I mentioned this incident during the seminar, the Catholics in the audience laughed at the notion of statues worshipping statues and the nonsense of humans worshipping statues, but some of the Protestants in attendance weren’t laughing. They looked puzzled. The reason, as I discovered during the Q&A session, was that some of them actually believed that Catholics do worship statues.