Worshipping God alone

Some people think that, because we have statues of Our Lady and of the Saints in church, it means we worship either the statues or the Saints they represent.  This is nonsense.  Worship is that supreme honour which is due to God and God alone.  None of us is so stupid and ignorant as to honour an image as if it were God himself, nor would we be so foolish and wrong as to worship Our Lady and the Saints as if they were God.

Honouring Our Lady and the Saints

What we do is to honour Our Lady as the highest of all human beings, because that is how God himself honoured her when he chose her from all other human beings to be the Mother of his Son.  We must also never forget that Jesus himself also honours her above all other people because she is his Mother.  We should, therefore, be wrong if we did not imitate him in this by doing what he does.

So, too, with the Apostles and the other Saints.  We know that God honours them because Jesus has told us so: “Whoever serves me”, he said “the Father will honour” (NRSV, John 12:26).  And no one has served him better than the Saints have.  So when we honour Our Lady and the Saints or ask them to pray for us, we do not worship them.  We merely honour them and treat them as God wishes us to treat them.

So too with statues of Our Lady and of the Saints.  We shall see this more clearly if we think first of how we treat a crucifix or other figure of Our Lord.  Although it is only made of plaster, it is something more than plaster, just as a Bible is more than paper and print.  And just as we treat a Bible with reverence because it contains the Word of God, so we treat a crucifix with reverence because it represents Jesus who died for our salvation.  Moreover, a crucifix, by showing us what Jesus has done for us, can make us love him more.