"You kneel in front of statues, light candles to them, even kiss them. Exodus 20 says, 'You shall not make for yourself an idol.' How is that not idolatry?" Serious charge. Here's the answer.
Short answer: No. Catholics worship God alone. Statues and icons are honored as reminders of Christ and His saints, like a photo of someone you love. The same God who forbade idols commanded Moses to make two golden cherubim (Exodus 25:18) and a bronze serpent (Numbers 21:8–9). The commandment forbids idols, not all images.
Key verses on statues and images
- "You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below" (Exodus 20:4)
- "Make two cherubim of beaten gold for the two ends of the cover" (Exodus 25:18)
- "Make a seraph and mount it on a pole" (Numbers 21:8)
- "carved figures of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers." (1 Kings 6:29)
- "He is the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15)
- "And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us" (John 1:14)
Scripture quotations are from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE), © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
What Catholics Actually Teach
The Church condemns idolatry as firmly as any Protestant: "Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God" (CCC 2113).
The Catechism also admits what the first commandment originally forbade: "the prohibition of every representation of God by the hand of man" (CCC 2129). "Nevertheless, already in the Old Testament, God ordained or permitted the making of images that pointed symbolically toward salvation by the incarnate Word: so it was with the bronze serpent, the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim" (CCC 2130).
Then came the Incarnation: "By becoming incarnate, the Son of God introduced a new 'economy' of images" (CCC 2131). The honor given to images is "a 'respectful veneration,' not the adoration due to God alone" (CCC 2132).
What Catholics do not teach:
- That a statue is God, or has power of its own. It is wood, stone, or paint.
- That we pray to the statue. We pray to God, or ask the saint pictured to pray for us.
- That Catholics are immune to idolatry. It "remains a constant temptation" (CCC 2113).
It all points to Christ. Christian images exist because God made Himself visible in Jesus, who "is the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). That is why the honor never stops at wood or paint: "the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype," and "whoever venerates an image venerates the person portrayed in it" (CCC 2132). An image of Christ leads us to Christ. An image of a saint leads us to a person whose whole holiness came from Christ.
The Biblical Case
1. The commandment targets false worship
Read the whole commandment: "You shall not have other gods beside me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or serve them" (Exodus 20:3–5). The concern is "other gods," and images made to be served as gods.
At the golden calf, the people were "bowing down to it, sacrificing to it and crying out, 'These are your gods, Israel'" (Exodus 32:8). Idolatry is treating a thing as a god. Carving isn't the sin.
2. God commanded sacred images
Five chapters after the Ten Commandments, God says: "Make two cherubim of beaten gold for the two ends of the cover" of the ark (Exodus 25:18). Then: "There I will meet you and there, from above the cover, between the two cherubim on the ark of the covenant, I will tell you all that I command you" (Exodus 25:22). God chose to speak from between two carved figures. Hebrews still recalls them with reverence: "Above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the place of expiation" (Hebrews 9:5).
3. Solomon's Temple was full of carved images
"He overlaid the cherubim with gold," and "the walls of the house on all sides of both the inner and the outer rooms had carved figures of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers" (1 Kings 6:28–29). David received the plan "by the hand of the LORD" (1 Chronicles 28:19).
4. The bronze serpent: commanded, then destroyed
At God's command, Moses "made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole" (Numbers 21:8–9). Centuries later, King Hezekiah "smashed the bronze serpent Moses had made, because up to that time the Israelites were burning incense to it" (2 Kings 18:4).
The image was good. Worshiping it was evil. And Jesus used it as a picture of Himself: "just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up" (John 3:14).
5. Bowing is not always worship
Jacob greeted Esau "bowing to the ground seven times" (Genesis 33:3). Joshua and the elders "fell face down before the ark of the LORD until evening" (Joshua 7:6), an ark crowned with golden cherubim. They were honoring God, not gold. Intent decides whether a gesture is worship.
6. God made Himself visible
Why couldn't Israel picture God? "Because you saw no form at all on the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb" (Deuteronomy 4:15). But then "the Word became flesh" (John 1:14). Christ "is the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). The invisible God took a human face. Picturing it honors the Incarnation.
Objections Answered
(a) "Exodus 20:4 forbids any likeness of anything. Your statues break it."
At its strongest: The text bans "a likeness of anything." Deuteronomy spells it out: no idol "to represent any figure, whether it be the form of a man or of a woman" (Deuteronomy 4:16). Statues of saints are exactly that.
Answer: If verse 4 bans every likeness, God broke His own law five chapters later (Exodus 25:18), Solomon's Temple was sinful (1 Kings 6:29), and so is every family photo. Verse 5 finishes the sentence: "you shall not bow down before them or serve them." Deuteronomy 4:16 likewise forbids "an idol." The command forbids images made to be worshiped. The Church agrees the Old Testament ruled out picturing God, who had shown no form (CCC 2129). The Incarnation changed that (CCC 2131).
(b) "Kneeling, candles, kissing statues. That's worship, whatever you call it."
At its strongest: Actions speak louder than definitions. Exodus 20:5 forbids bowing before images. Israel burned incense to the bronze serpent (2 Kings 18:4); Catholics burn candles before statues. St. Paul warns that "we ought not to think that the divinity is like an image fashioned from gold, silver, or stone by human art and imagination" (Acts 17:29).
Answer: Catholics agree with St. Paul completely. No Catholic thinks a statue is divine. Worship means sacrifice and divine honor, and Catholics offer sacrifice to God alone. Israel's sin was treating the serpent as a god. Kneeling before a crucifix is like Joshua before the ark (Joshua 7:6): the honor passes to the person represented (CCC 2132). An individual Catholic can slide into superstition. That is a sin the Church condemns, not Catholic doctrine. And Scripture shows the remedy: Hezekiah destroyed the serpent only after it had become an idol. Abuse of a holy thing never made God's command to make it wrong.
(c) "Catholics deleted the second commandment to hide the ban on images."
At its strongest: In most Protestant lists, "You shall not make for yourself an idol" is its own commandment. Catholic catechisms list "You shall have no other gods" as the first and then skip straight to God's name. Splitting the last commandment in two keeps the count at ten. It looks like a cover-up.
Answer: Nothing is hidden. Every Catholic Bible prints the full text: "You shall not have other gods beside me. You shall not make for yourself an idol... you shall not bow down before them or serve them" (Deuteronomy 5:7–9). Scripture gives the words but never numbers them, so every tradition has to divide them. Catholics and Lutherans follow a division that goes back to St. Augustine; Jews and most Protestants use others. The Catholic Church teaches the image prohibition openly, under the first commandment, in the very paragraphs quoted above (CCC 2129–2132). A ban the Catechism explains at length is not a ban the Church is hiding.
(d) "The early Church rejected images. Even a Spanish council banned them."
At its strongest: Early in the fourth century (c. AD 300–306), the Council of Elvira in Spain decreed, in its canon 36, that there should be no pictures in church, lest what is worshiped and adored be painted on the walls. Images, the argument goes, crept in later as the Church drifted toward paganism.
Answer: Start with Scripture: the God who gave Exodus 20 commanded the cherubim in Exodus 25, and the New Testament still honors them (Hebrews 9:5). No later council can make that command idolatry. Elvira was a small regional synod, and its canon ("placuit picturas in ecclesia esse non debere ne quod colitur et adoratur in parietibus depingatur") is a discipline about painting walls, not a ruling that images are sinful. Historians cited by the Catholic Encyclopedia read it as protecting sacred scenes from pagan mockery or protecting new converts from relapse. Meanwhile, the wider Church was already using images, as the next section shows.
The Early Church Agrees
Christian images are not a medieval invention. The record reaches back to the third century.
- Tertullian (On Modesty 10, c. AD 220), writing as a Montanist critic of the Catholic Church, mocks the "Shepherd" "whom you depict upon your (sacramental) chalice." Even an opponent testifies that Catholics painted the Shepherd on the chalices used at the Holy Mass.
- Eusebius of Caesarea (Church History 7.18, c. AD 325) reports that "the likenesses of his apostles Paul and Peter, and of Christ himself, are preserved in paintings." Eusebius puts the custom down to "a habit of the Gentiles," yet he confirms that Christians had long made such images.
- The Catechism cites St. Basil the Great (fourth century): "the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype" (quoted in CCC 2132).
- St. Augustine of Hippo (Against Faustus, c. AD 400): "What is properly divine worship, which the Greeks call latria... we give only to God" (20.21).
- Pope St. Gregory the Great (c. AD 600) praised Bishop Serenus of Marseilles for forbidding people to adore images, but blamed him for smashing them: "For to adore a picture is one thing, but to learn through the story of a picture what is to be adored is another." Images teach: "For what writing presents to readers, this a picture presents to the unlearned who behold" (Letter 11.13).
- The Second Council of Nicaea (AD 787), the seventh ecumenical council, "justified against the iconoclasts the veneration of icons - of Christ, but also of the Mother of God, the angels, and all the saints" (CCC 2131).
Conclusion
The Bible doesn't condemn images. It condemns idols. The God who wrote "You shall not make for yourself an idol" also ordered golden cherubim and a bronze serpent, a picture of the Cross. Then He gave us His own image: Jesus Christ.
If you're Protestant, you probably own a nativity set, and you don't worship it. That's the Catholic principle. Read Exodus 20 and Exodus 25 side by side. God's word holds them together.
Come home. In the Catholic Church, God alone is worshiped, and the saints are honored in their images for His sake. Christ did not found many churches. He founded one, on St. Peter and the apostles (Matthew 16:18), and that Church is the Catholic Church. "It is through Christ's Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained" (CCC 816). If you are a baptized Christian, you already share "a certain, although imperfect, communion" with her (CCC 838). Every truth you already hold is a call to the rest of the way. Christ is calling you into the Catholic Church.
Your next step: Come to Mass this Sunday at your local Catholic church. You can find one near you at MassTimes.org. Everyone is welcome; if you're not yet Catholic, pray with us but don't receive Communion yet. When you're ready to become Catholic, call the parish office and ask about OCIA, the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults. They will walk you through every step. Read our guide: How Do I Become Catholic? Not ready yet? Get our free pocket guide below and keep learning.
FAQ
Why do Catholics kneel in front of statues? To pray to God, or ask a saint's prayers, with a visible reminder. The honor passes to the person represented (CCC 2132).
Isn't a crucifix a graven image? No. It pictures Christ, "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15), much as the bronze serpent prefigured Him being "lifted up" (John 3:14–15).
What's the difference between worship and veneration? Worship (latria) is the adoration and sacrifice owed to God alone. Veneration is respectful honor given to saints and their images, pointing back to God (CCC 2132).
Sources
Scripture (NABRE, bible.usccb.org): Genesis 33:3; Exodus 20:3–5; Exodus 25:18–22; Exodus 32:8; Deuteronomy 5:7–9; Numbers 21:8–9; Deuteronomy 4:15–18; Joshua 7:6; 1 Kings 6:28–29; 2 Kings 18:4; 1 Chronicles 28:19; Matthew 16:18; John 1:14; John 3:14–15; Acts 17:29; Hebrews 9:5; Colossians 1:15.
Catechism of the Catholic Church (vatican.va): 816, 838; 2113; 2129, 2130, 2131, 2132.
Church Fathers and history (newadvent.org): Tertullian, On Modesty 10 (ANF vol. 4); Eusebius, Church History 7.18 (NPNF2 vol. 1); Catholic Encyclopedia, "Council of Elvira"; Augustine, Contra Faustum (Against Faustus) 20.21 (NPNF1 vol. 4, trans. R. Stothert); Gregory the Great, Register of Letters 11.13, to Serenus (NPNF2 vol. 13). Basil and the Second Council of Nicaea are cited as quoted in CCC 2131–2132.