Well, if you examine this picture more closely, you will find that the very center of all those rich colors, statues, and ornaments is the tabernacle, which contains the Body of Christ, His Real Presence. As he said at the Last Supper, “This is my Body.” And as he said elsewhere, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you shall not have life within you.
And, as in many biblical passages, the Lord God of Hosts, as represented by Jesus in the Tabernacle, is surrounded by depictions of angels and saints, all of whose attention is directed toward Him—not toward themselves.
And if you look closely at the concelebrating priests and the alter servers, it would certainly appear that the eyes of all of them are focused on the tabernacle on the altar, not on the surrounding statues of angels and saints who are also focused on the tabernacle.
In other words, everything is directed toward the Real Presence of Jesus in the Sacrament of the Altar.
I understand that many Protestants hate that kind of thing. In particular, they hate to see angels and saints butting in where no one but they should be proper worshippers. But there is nothing there representing the direction of worship toward anyone but God.
....”examine this picture more closely”....
What for?... All the idols and representations of them are directly opposing what God has clearly stated we should not do....
It’s like this....Christianity started growing after the Death and Resurrection of Jesus,.... Rome was getting it’s pants in a knot as they saw this new Movement a threat to Rome’s Power and cushy lifestyle they were accustomed to.....So the government of Rome ‘literally’ sought to destroy the Christian Church through mass murder... but were unsuccessful.
... The ‘Roman’ Catholic Church “was created” as a response to True Christianity....The Pagan practices ,rites and rituals of Rome ‘were mixed’ with Christianity to create a new Brand of religion (Cathlolicism).. attractive not only to Rome’s leadership, but to those who didn’t want to give up their idols and practices.....which as the New Religion joined then with Rome and it’s partnership would dominate the world (as Rome did) and undermine True Christianity.
What is known today as Cardinals and Archbishops from the Catholic Church come from the Priests and High Priests of the Ancient Cults that ‘dominated’ Ancient Rome.... The way the Archbishops and Cardinals ‘dress’ are from those Ancient Cults.
God ‘detests’ Idol Worship. It is a sin to pray to statues or to worship any graven image.
Exodus 20:3-5 Leviticus 26:1 Deuteronomy 4:15-17
“In particular, they hate to see angels and saints butting in where no one but they should be proper worshippers.”
Yet, there are no angels or saints in those pictures, simply pieces of wood, stone, and metal fashioned by human hands.
So they aren't worshipping some of the idols but all of the idols and the people are worshiping the cracker idol. That's way better./s
Cicero, don’t forget, many Protestants, especially Protestant anti-Catholics, hate beauty.
No less a Protestant authority than Ralph Adams Cram once wrote:
“From the outbreak of the Protestant revolution, the old kinship between beauty and religion was deprecated and often forgotten. Not only was there, amongst the reformers and their adherents, a definite hatred of beauty and a determination to destroy it when found; there was also a conscientious elimination of everything of the sort from the formularies, services, and structures that applied to their new religion. This unprecedented break between religion and beauty had a good deal to do with that waning interest in religion itself. Protestantism, with its derivative materialistic rationalism, divested religion of its essential elements of mystery and wonder, and worship of its equally essential elements of beauty. Under this powerful combination of destructive influences, it is not to be wondered at that, of the once faithful, many have fallen away. Man is, by instinct, not only a lover of beauty, he is also by nature a ‘ritualist,’ that is to say, he does, when left alone, desire form and ceremony, if significant. If this instinctive craving for ceremonial is denied to man in religion, where it preeminently belongs, he takes it on for himself in secular fields; elaborates ritual in secret societies, in the fashion of his dress, in the details of social custom. He also, in desperation, invents new religions and curious sects working up for them strange rituals . . . extravagant and vulgar devices that are now the sardonic delight of the ungodly. ... If once more beauty can be restored to the offices of religion, many who are now self-excommunicated from their Church will thankfully find their way back to the House they have abandoned. The whole Catholic Faith is shot through and through with this vital and essential quality of beauty. It is this beauty implicit in the Christian revelation and its operative system that was explicit in the material and visible Churches and their art. We must contend against the strongest imaginable combination of prejudices and superstitions. These are of two sorts. There is first, the heritage of ignorance and fear from the dark ages of the sixteenth century. I am speaking of non-Catholic Christianity. Ignorance of authentic history, instigated by protagonists of propaganda; fear of beauty, because all that we now have in Christian art was engendered and formulated by and through Catholicism; fear that the acceptance of beauty means that awful thing—’surrender to superstition.’ It is fear that lies at the root of the matter, as it does in so many other fields of mental activity.” (Radio Replies, vol. 2: 1052)
Sure it does.