A correspondent writes:
“I always thought it was clear Catholic Church teaching that worship is reserved for God. But now I’m having the terms latria, dulia, etc., thrown in my face and being told: ‘Hah! You Catholics worship Mary and not only that, you worship saints, too, you awful, terrible people, and you are all going to hell . . . yadda, yadda, yadda.’
I found that the original Catholic Encyclopedia states that we do worship Mary and the saints and also goes on to imply that we worship icons, statues, etc.
Could you please help me and others who are in desperate need of a method to explain Church teaching about these things?”
The basic problem is that the term “worship” has changed meaning in English. Originally, the term meant the state or condition (-ship) of having worth.
Originally, that’s all it meant: worship = worth + -ship. It meant the same as the contemporary English word “worthiness” (with its verb form meaning, “to acknowledge worth”). As such, the word could be applied in all sorts of ways, some of which survive today but are very rare.
For example, have you ever noticed in the Star Wars films that Han Solo refers to Princess Leia as “Your Worship” (much to her annoyance)? He’s not paying her divine honors. He’s employing an old British usage where certain mayors and judges and other public figures were (and still are) called “Your Worship.” He is thus needling her about the fact that she is a princess—a public official, a member of the royalty.
Here in America, we’ve replaced that usage with another one—“Your Honor”—but they mean exactly the same thing.
It’s helpful to know this since it shows that, despite how we normally use it today, the term “worship” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with God or even religion.
Because of its original broad meaning in English, “worship” could be applied to the honor we show God, the honor we show the saints, the honor we show judges, the honor we show parents—all kinds of things.
But over time that changed, with the term being applied more narrowly until today it is applied only to the honor due to God, with a few archaic expressions like “Your Worship” for judges.
The original Catholic Encyclopedia, which was written a hundred years ago, reflects some of the old way of using the word. In twenty-first century America, though, using the word “worship” to refer to anything other than the honor due to God would be very confusing to a normal speaker of colloquial English.
Hence the confusion.
I thus wouldn’t get hung up about the word “worship.” What matters are the kinds of honor that are due to God, the saints, etc., which is where latria and dulia come in.
So that’s what I’ll write about next time.
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I think the problem here is that the word “worship” has come to imply a devotion to a being who is worthy of one’s total loyalty. This would be God as Christians understand Him. To “worship” a lesser being, such as a saint or Mary, would be to make a substitute for God, i.e., an idol, and to grant that lesser being the devotion that should be reserved for God. In other words, to set God aside for someone or something else. Many Protestants think Catholics do just that, esp. since our devotion to Mary or one of the saints can take on such colorful and emotional aspects. I know Catholics who don’t accord much of an interior glance at God and who think Christ is just “too male.” But they are hugely devoted to Mary in one of her manifestations or to a saint like Therese of Lisieux, finding them much more approachable, as it were. The Wedding Feast at Cana, where Jesus manifests himself in public for the first time, gives us the proper priority: Mary says to her son, “They have no wine,” then, “Do whatever he tells you.” She is sympathetic to our needs and presents them to Christ when we pray to her, then advises us to “do whatever he tells you.” The same with the saints. This is what intercession is about and what we are really doing when we pray to Mary or to our saintly friends in heaven.
Many Protestant churches have a problem with Blessed Mary and the Saints, within the Catholic Church.
There isn’t any difference between the Catholic Church honoring the Mother of God, and Saints—-AND—-the government honoring such persons as our Founding Fathers and of late, Ted Kennedy (wanting to get the health care bill passed,in honor of him), or President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. (another honor)
Remember the Commandment “Honor thy Father and Mother”—-means we honor Mary,the Mother of Jesus as well as our Earthly parents. We worship God.
It is all in a word and what it means.
In Luke, 1:42, Elizabeth “spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”
In Luke, 1:47-8, Mary replied: “for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.”
If they don’t give honors to Mary, they are calling St. Luke a liar, aren’t they.
That’s the King James version of the Bible, by the way.
“But in vain do they worship. Teaching as doctrine the precepts of man” Mark 7:7
The important thing to stress, when defending the Faith, is that we recognize the difference between Mary and God. The power, position and influence we attribute the the Blessed Mother is entirely contingent: she has no such power apart from Him. Had God not chosen her, she most likely would still have been an entirely worthy and admirable person. Yet the odds are she would have lived and died anonymously. That “all ages ... call her blessed” is because she was given the opportunity to say that all important YES to God, not because she made the opportunity for herself. We recognize this fact even if some of us get a little saccharine in our devotion to her.
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