For example, in this article from www.catholic.com, the author admits that Catholics regularly bow to statues; he just tries to separate the bowing from worship:
Sometimes anti-Catholics cite Deuteronomy 5:9, where God said concerning idols, "You shall not bow down to them." Since many Catholics sometimes bow or kneel in front of statues of Jesus and the saints, anti-Catholics confuse the legitimate veneration of a sacred image with the sin of idolatry.Of course, the author misses the point: God does not specifically forbid bowing down to a living person, like a king, in respect--but He does forbid doing so to an inanimate object, and calls it idolatry. All the justifications in the world (and we've seen a lot of them on this thread) don't change that fact.Though bowing can be used as a posture in worship, not all bowing is worship. In Japan, people show respect by bowing in greeting (the equivalent of the Western handshake). Similarly, a person can kneel before a king without worshipping him as a god. In the same way, a Catholic who may kneel in front of a statue while praying isn’t worshipping the statue or even praying to it, any more than the Protestant who kneels with a Bible in his hands when praying is worshipping the Bible or praying to it.
Give me a break! This is the best you can do? I've been pretty impressed with your posts to this point.
Have you ever been separated from a loved one? Did you have a picture? Catholics who pray at the feet of statues are not (unless they are completely ignorant) praying to the statue as an object of worship but using the statue (or picture or other...) to focus our attention on the object of our prayer.
Yes, we pray in the name of Mary and the saints. But we pray for them to hear our plea and join our prayer, just as we ask the faithful in our visible flock.
This is silly. If you spend more time on the Internet than worshipping God, does it mean you love the Internet more than you love God (smacks of idol worship to me...)