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I am going to quote Our Sunday Visitors "Study Bible" note on that topic:

"Statues are an aid to veneration of the saints and a means or remembrance of the heroes of the faith. None of this is in opposition to God. St. Jerome said that "we show veneration to the servaants so that it might radiate back from them to the Lord." No Catholic who knows anything about the Catholic Faith has ever worshiped a statue of plaster (as in idolatry). Devotion to saints no more interferes with or corrupts the unique adoration due to God than does love for our friends and relatives."

In direct response to your comment about statues and pictures of Christ, they aren't worshiped, though certainly a degree of reverence is shown to them, but we don't mistake them for God. If someone is worshiping a statue of Christ as Christ, then they are mistaken and have a misformed faith. That of course is a fault of their teachers and priests and should be corrected.

In direct response to your comment about statues and pictures of Christ, they aren't worshiped, though certainly a degree of reverence is shown to them, but we don't mistake them for God. If someone is worshiping a statue of Christ as Christ, then they are mistaken and have a misformed faith. That of course is a fault of their teachers and priests and should be corrected.

The Israelites didn't mistake the Golden Calf for God either. They had planned a feast to the LORD the following day.

Exodus 32:4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

5 And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD.

Aaron and others still knew who the Lord was. Because some of the mixed multitude that accompanied them out of Egypt believed otherwise it messed it up for the entire nation.