CATHOLIC IMAGE WORSHIP

Many believe that the condemnations of idolatry in the Bible is simply about taking somebody other than God and his revelation, his word, as authority or as who knows best.

In that light, even if the being worshipped did exist and could hear prayers, even if the worshipper was not deliberately adoring something of wood or stone or metal, it is idolatry if it is not a God.  If Catholicism has fake saints then it definitely violates the ban on idolatry.

When you go into a Roman Catholic Church you see images of Jesus and the saints. The faithful come up and kneel before them and adoring address prayers to them as if they were the beings they represented. They light candles before them and touch them as if to absorb some of the magical power they are thought to contain. Priests bless the images to make them vehicles of divine power. This reminds one of witches putting magical power into occult tools such as magic wands and pentacles before they can be used in religious rites.

St Thomas Aquinas THE theologian of Roman Catholicism endorsed idolatry as in statue worship and it is definitely idolatry to honour the likes of him as a saint. He said that statues of Jesus can be worshipped like God:

"The honour given to an image reaches to the prototype, i.e. the exemplar. But the exemplar itself--namely, Christ--is to be adored with the adoration of latria; therefore also His image. Consequently the same reverence should be shown to Christ's image as to Christ Himself. Since, therefore, Christ is adored with the adoration of latria, it follows that His image should be adored with the adoration of latria. Whereas we give the adoration of latria to the image of Christ, Who is true God, not for the sake of the image, but for the sake of the thing whose image it is." The Church made him a saint and an idolater cannot be a saint and canonisation is supposedly infallible so this passage is the teaching of the Church and part of what makes the Church the Church.

The Catholic Church claims that its ecumenical councils are infallible when they intend to be. The infallible Council of Trent recommended idolatry in its catechism while claiming to utilize the authority of God, “It is lawful to have images in the church and to give honour and worship unto them. Images are put in churches that they may be worshipped.”
 
Session 25 decreed, "The images of Christ and of his Virgin Mother and of other saints are to be kept and retained especially in Churches. And a due honour and veneration is to be given to them. This is not that any divinity or power is believed to be in them, for which they are to be honoured, or that any prayer can be said to them, or that any trust can be placed in them as was done by the pagans in former days who put their confidence in idols but because the honour that is bestowed on them goes to the original which they picture and represent. Therefore by the images we kiss, and before which we uncover our heads or kneel, we worship Christ and we venerate his saints whose likeness they stand for" (page 235, THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS, James Cardinal Gibbons, Forty Ninth Edition, John Murphy and Co Publishers, Baltimore, London, New York, 1897 (TAN Books keep this book in print).

The Catholic Church prays to the blood of Christ. In the prayer called Anima Christi, it prays, “Blood of Christ inebriate me”. And even, “Water from the side of Christ wash me.”
 
The Catholic Church prays, “O Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in thee”.

In the Creed of Pope Pius IV, Catholics are told to say, “I most firmly assert that the images of Christ, of the Mother of God, Ever Virgin, and also of the saints may be had and retained, and that due honour and veneration are to be given them” (page 10, Why I am not a Roman Catholic).

In the Summa of St Thomas, it is written that Catholics must give an image of Jesus the same honour and worship that God gets for Jesus is God (III, 25:3,4). He said that the image should be adored with the adoration due to God. Pope Leo XIII commanded that the schools of philosophy must conform to St Thomas’ teaching.