Veneration II: Idolatry Begets Sin
A Frequently Argued Quandary
Idol worship, you will allow, is a sin. And there’s no such thing as a temperate amount of sin. Sin is cancerous, spreading its roots deeper and deeper until it chokes out the spiritual and (if given its head) even physical life of its host. If the Prophets teach us anything, it is that the most severe, dangerous form of sin is idol worship. It is the clearest possible manifestation of our tendency to take a created thing and make it our final end, our summum bonum. What is implicit and hidden in our stinginess, wrath, and vainglory is given physical incarnation when we worship stone and wood.
But suppose Protestants are right that when Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox venerate Mary and the saints, they’re actually (secretly? accidentally?) worshipping them. Even as the early Christians dogmatically proclaimed that Christ was fully God and fully man, they were filling their churches and homes with Church-sanctioned versions of the very same idols they had cast away at conversion. And this apostasy has remained hidden from the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches in the intervening centuries, so that today more people worship idols in churches than ever did in Roman temples. It has become so deeply interwoven with the lives of these so-called “Churches” that their greatest expositors of the Gospel, “Saint” (for no idolater can be called a true saint) Thomas Aquinas, “Saint” Francis of Assisi, “Saint” Anselm, “Saint” John Paul II, and countless lesser lights including the present author, failed to notice that they’d wholesale abandoned the one true God. What’s puzzling, of course, is that this obviously is not the case.
Adapting a phrase from Andy Crouch, idols begin by demanding nothing and giving you everything, but end by demanding everything and giving nothing. All is consumed, even the very pleasure we thought we had chosen over God.1 It is instructive that Judas came to find even the silver he’d traded Christ for hateful. Sin observes no appeasement treaties. It keeps on coming until it is finally victorious or totally eradicated. It follows that if the Catholic Church (and the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Oriental Orthodox Churches) has fallen into deep idolatry, it is utterly shocking that after 1500 years2 of worshipping Mary and the saints through icons, statues, songs, and festivals, you’d find a statement like this one from the late Pope Benedict XVI:
Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.
Benedict is orienting us not towards “practices,” or “works,” or even “ideas,” but a person: Jesus Christ. This is not an anomaly. If Catholics are idolaters, wouldn’t it be equally surprising to find, say, the Nicene Creed read at every Sunday Mass? Or, better still, consider this bit from the Glory to God, another prayer read at every Sunday Mass:
For You alone are the Holy One,
You alone are the Lord,
You alone are the Most High,
Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit,
in the glory of the Father.
If I were Satan, and I had a 1500-year stranglehold on the Church via ubiquitous idol worship, elimating this prayer would become my number one priority. Additionally, I would never permit any of my highly-useful images to look like this:
This image, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is almost single-handedly responsible for converting Mexico, and in time became important for all of South America. Did the Catholic Church lead millions to simply trade one idol for another? Attend to the image itself. What is Mary doing? Praying. She has her head bowed in humility, her hands folded in supplication. She is acknowledging her creaturely status and pointing us to the Creator. As in the Wedding at Cana, she brings us to Jesus and says “Do whatever He tells you.” The vague but gripping worry that Catholics treat Mary as a kind alternative god vanishes like so much vapor in sunlight when you ask what would normally be an obvious question but is studiously avoided in all anti-Marian polemics: WHY do Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox) esteem her so highly? If she were an idol, the only answer you could dependably rule out is “Because she points us to Jesus.” But in practice, when you ask even ill-formed Catholics, this is always the answer.3 Mutatis mutandi for the saints: Why do we venerate the great Christian men and women who have gone before us? So that we can learn from their example and benefit from their prayers as we seek to deepen our love and friendship with the Lord.
So here it is: either A) The Catholic Church does practice idolatry, but hamartiology (the doctrine of sin) has to be completely rewritten to account for a form of idolatry that happily coexists with almost overbearing love for the Trinity and fanatical focus on the Incarnation, or B) the Catholic Church does not practice idolatry, which implies that there really is a distinction between worship and veneration. (A) is clearly false since there can be no peace between God and sin. As Christopher Watkin puts it, “God is only angered by sin; God is always angered by sin.”4 But if (A) is false then (B) is true, and Catholics are absolved from all blanket charges of idol worship where Mary and the saints are concerned.
This conclusion is compatible with feeling discomfort at how particular devotions manifest. A later post will deal with the “But you’re literally bowing to an image!!!!!” objection. For now, it is enough to note that for this feeling of disgust to resolve into a real argument with premises and conclusions, you will inevitably have to equate veneration with idolatry, at which point you trigger the dilemma above.
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C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Ch. 9.
Accepting, for the sake of argument, that icon veneration didn’t enter Christianity until roughly 500 AD. In fact I don’t accept this claim, but I’m willing to work with it.
Though I admit an ill-formed Catholic wouldn’t be able to articulate it as cleanly as I just did. Before anyone jumps on me for that, consider how well the average Christian from any group would do explaining the Trinity.
Biblical Critical Theory, 203.