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Definition
The Church recognizes that certain devotional practices and sacramentals can be helpful to Catholics. Many of these have a Marian emphasis.
How This Teaching Exalts Christ
All devotions to Mary and the saints ultimately glorify their Creator, who made them what they are. Could we possibly praise the Mona Lisa without praising Leonardo DaVinci? That masterpiece certainly did not paint itself! Even so, Mary is God's great masterpiece, and all praise given to her is praise of Her Maker.
Biblical Basis
When Elizabeth praises Mary, saying "Blessed art thou amongst women", Mary immediately replies "My soul doth magnify the Lord..." (Luke 1:42; 46). All the devotion which we offer her redounds to God's praise and glory.
The last article presented the biblical basis for Marian devotion in general. The biblical basis for specific Marian devotions will be given in the answers below.
Early Christian Witness
As we saw in the last article, the Church has always offered her a lesser honor, fitting for a creature. The catacomb drawing is an early holy image of Mary. The Sub Tuum Praesidium is an early prayer to Mary. The Hail Mary also originated early on, since most of it comes from the Bible. This later became one of the prayers of the Rosary, along with the Our Father, Glory be and Apostle's Creed, all of Biblical or early Christian origin. So Marian devotions clearly trace back to the early Church.
Objections
As we saw in an earlier article, the Hebrew term for the queen-mother, gevirah, literally means "lady". Mary is our Gevirah in heaven, so we certainly can call her "Our Lady".
Jesus goes on to say "for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking". He is really denouncing the belief held by pagans that repetition of words has some magical power. He cannot be condemning all repetition in prayer, for He Himself repeated His prayer in Gethsemane: "He went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words" (Mt 26:44; also Mk 14:39). He also accepts the praises of the angels who "rest not day and night, saying, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come" (Rev 4:8). Evidently, not all repetitious prayer is "vain repetition".
As for the Litany, every verse of Psalm 136 ends with the phrase "For his mercy endureth forever". That Psalm is a litany! If God objects to litanies why would He have included one in the Book of Psalms? Obviously, God does not disapprove of all repetitious prayer.
The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the most important Catholic prayer, not the Rosary! And the Mass is offered to God alone.
That's your interpretation, not ours. We say so many Hail Marys in the Rosary because it is a devotion with a Marian emphasis. We also have numerous devotions which center on Jesus, such as the Way of the Cross, Enthronement of the Sacred Heart, Benediction, etc.
Have you researched this? Have you actually counted every single Catholic prayer written in every language all over the globe during the past two millenia? If not, your objection is speculative and carries not weight.
Not without true faith and confidence in God and living a Christian life. Scapulars are intended as outward signs of inner faith. All who would use them superstitiously, thinking that they are magic passports which will get them admitted into heaven no matter what they do during life, are misusing this sacramental and so are certainly not assured of salvation.
First of all, Catholics consider that injunction against idolatry part of the First Commandment, not the Second. The Ten Commandments are never numbered in the text of the Bible, so Catholics, Protestants and Jews each number them differently. Catholics consider "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" and "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image..." to be one command, while most Protestants divide them into two.
Second, the Baltimore Catechism, a Catholic religious textbook used for decades to educate Catholic children in the Faith, says, "We do not pray to the crucifix or to the images of Christ and of the saints, but to the persons of whom they remind us" (I, q. 96). This is the official teaching of the Church; we do not worship statues, we use them to remind us of our beloved family in heaven, even as you might look at a photo of a relative when he or she is far away. We are familiar with that Commandment and would never pray to a plaster statue, since the statue itself can do nothing.
God was forbidding idolatry, not the mere making of images. That's why He added the words "Thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them." He doesn't want us to make images for the purpose of idolatrous worship. This Commandment does not apply to artwork, like Michelangelo's David, or monuments like the Lincoln Memorial or the Statue of Liberty, since none of these images are intended for idolatrous worship. And since we Catholics do not worship our holy images, this commandment does not apply to Catholic practice either.
If God really intended to ban all images, then why did He later command the Israelites to make images of angels to adorn the Tabernacle? In Exodus 25:18, shortly after issuing the Commandment in question, God says "Thou shalt make also two cherubims of gold: of beaten work shalt thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat". These cherubim on the Ark were images of things "in heaven above", and so seemingly prohibited by Exodus 20:4-5! Is God contradicting Himself? No, for although they were intended for use in the Tabernacle, and thus had a religious purpose, they were not themselves objects of worship!
Again, in Numbers 21:8-9, when the Israelites were plagued by serpents, the Lord told Moses to "Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that everyone who is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live". Moses did so, and people were healed by looking at it! If God opposed all images, why would he have chosen to heal His people through one, and even made it a type of the Messiah (John 3:14-5)?
1 Kings 6:29 tells us that the walls of the Temple were covered with "carved figures of cherubims, and palm trees, and open flowers, within & without". These are likenesses of things in heaven and on earth! 1 Chronicles 28:18-19 indicates that King David made numerous gold and silver images to adorn the future temple, and that he did so according to God's command (vs. 19)! And 2 Chronicles 3:10-13 informs us that Solomon had two huge golden statues of angels constructed for the Holy of holies (in addition to the two on top of the Ark, that is!).
Nowhere does God ever object to this proliferation of images in the Temple of Jerusalem, in fact His blessing of the Temple implies divine pleasure with the whole thing (2 Chronicles 7:18). Many Catholic churches are similarly filled with holy images; indeed, the Temple of Solomon resembled a Catholic church more than a typical Protestant one!
Only because in his day of rampant idolatry some Israelites had decided to worship it. This was a clear misuse of the statue, since God never intended for it to be an object of worship (that would have violated the First Commandment!). Yet the fact that King Hezekiah had to destroy the bronze serpent does not change the fact that God had commanded its construction in the first place, used it as a vehicle of His healing power, and that Jesus said it was a type of Himself (John 3:14-15).
So are you saying that God only objects to the making and worship of carved idols, not ones of beaten metal or molded clay? Catholics believe that God objects to all idols, but our holy images are not idols because we do not worship them or attribute divinity to them.
Let's get our terminology straight; Catholics do not kneel to images, we kneel before them. "Kneel to" implies that one kneels to honor the image itself: the wood, stone, plaster or whatever. Since we are not doing that, we say that we kneel before, or in front of, the statue. The prayers offered or honors paid are to the personage represented in the image, not to the image itself.
The same thing goes for kissing an image of a saint; the kiss is not indended for the image itself, but for the person represented. If you were far away from a beloved family member, and carried a picture of him or her in your wallet, you might, from time to time, when you missed the person, look at the picture lovingly, perhaps even "talk to" or kiss it. Do you intend to talk to or kiss the photographic paper itself, or the person represented by the picture? The person, obviously! That's how we Catholics treat holy images.
A photo and a statue are just two different kinds of images; one two dimensional, the other three. But the both represent someone else! Kissing a statue is not necessarily idolatry; I've seen Protestants kiss their Bibles; are they commiting bibliolatry? I've even seen Protestants kneel before their Bibles to pray; are they worshipping the Bible? No, they are using the Bible as an aid to prayer, perhaps praying the Psalms or another Scriptural canticle. Even so, Catholics use sacred images as aids to prayer. We do not pray to the images any more than Protestants "pray to" the Bible!
Actually, pagans made a deeper association between god and idol. They often believed that the idol "embodied" the deity, and that by possessing the idol they "possessed" the deity and could manipulate him or her by magic rituals involving the idol. This is another reason why God forbade the Israelites to make an idol of Him; He did not want them to conclude that He could be "controlled".
Not if people are well-informed, as all Catholics should be. The Church has always condemned such superstitious use of sacred images. To quote the Baltimore Catechism again, "It is not allowed to pray to the crucifix or images and relics of the saints, for they have no life, nor power to help us, nor sense to hear us" (III; q. 1215).
Properly understood, yes; we are still forbidden to worship idols of false gods. Even an image of the true God should not itself receive worship; but we can use the image to remind us of God as we pray to Him, not to the image!
In Moses' day, God forbade the Hebrews to make a created image of Himself becaues He was pure Spirit (Deuteronomy 4:15-16). But a major event has taken place since then: the Incarnation! When God the Son became flesh, He effectively made an created image of Himself - His Human Body! God gave Himself a human face, through which to manifest His glory: "For God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ." (2 Corinthians 4:6).
The unseen God of the Hebrew Scriptures is now seen in Jesus: "He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father" (John 14:9). The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "By becoming incarnate, the Son of God introduced a new "economy" of images" (2131). As the Resurrection has changed the day of rest from Saturday to Sunday, thus modifying the Third Commandment, so the monumental event of the Incarnation has modified the First Commandment. God can now be depicted in sacred art, as long as the art itself still receives no worship.
That's because the Temple was a representation of heaven, and there were no men in heaven back then, only angels. The souls of the righteous were waiting in the Limbo of the Fathers (aka Abraham's bosom: Luke 16:22) for the coming of the Messiah. When Jesus rose from the dead, he brought them into the glory of the Beatific Vision in heaven (Ephesians 4:8-10). Ever since then there have been holy men and women in heaven, and Jesus Himself said they are like the angels (Matthew 22:30). So now it is permissible to adorn a New Testament Church with images of the saints, Mary being the greatest among them.
These statues also remind us of the virtues of the saints, even as a statue of George Washington in a park reminds us of his great role in the founding of our country. So iamges of saints are both memorials and aids to devotion.
The fact that God healed people through the bronze serpent is biblical proof that He can perform miracles through images if He so chooses. So "weeping" statues and such are certainly possible. But every claim of such phenomena must be carefully investigated, since unscrupulous people can and have faked such things in the past.
We're not "trying to justify" anything; we are showing you that Catholic practices are rooted in Scripture. Your objection is based on your subjective feelings and past experiences of Christianity, which are irrelevant. If there is biblical and historical Christian precident for Catholic Marian devotions, then they certainly are Christian, not "pagan". If you have not experienced this aspect of Christianity before, then your understanding of your faith is incomplete.
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