"Catholics use statues, paintings, and other artistic devices to recall the person or thing depicted. Just as it helps to remember one’s mother by looking at her photograph, so it helps to recall the example of the saints by looking at pictures of them. Catholics also use statues as teaching tools. In the early Church they were especially useful for the instruction of the illiterate."
I was stationed in Italy... one Christmas eve a bus-trip was planned to go up to Rome and worship at the Popes (JP II) midnight mass. A friend who was not Catholic, nor any type of Christian came along just to be able to say they had been there. I didn't know anything of this persons religeon...I never asked, and he never talked about it. To make a long story short (and believe me this is a long story...funny too IMHO)... shortly after we entered St. Peter's we went to the alcove where Michaeangelo's "Pieta" was...I looked at it for a few minutes (it's beautiful) and wandered off to look at the rest of the Basillica...I thought my friend was right behind me... I noticed we had become separated and after about 20 minutes of looking I found him still staring at the "Pieta." And to cut this even shorter... a few day's later he asked if I could introduce him to the chaplain (who was Catholic)... I never asked why he gained an interest in the Church, to this day I don't know if it was the Pieta or the Magnifcence of the Mass, the Pope himself, or even the faithful attending. I have my own thoughts...but I'm not going to ask.
(http://www.geocities.com/romcath1/genholydays.html)
....In that crib, the Church attests, was one far "greater than" Abraham, Moses, Solomon, or Jonas (Lk 11:31, 32; Jn 1:17;8:58; Phil 2:8-10;Col 2:8,9). In that lowly crib lay the very Logos of God, the Word, Who, "in the beginning", was "with" the Father and, indeed, was "one" with Him and the Holy Ghost from all eternity (Jn 1:1; 10:31; 17:24; Mt. 28:19). No longer was God so utterly other that one could not, without sin, speak His name or paint His image. Rather, the "Word was made flesh and dwelt among us", in time and space. Truly the unthinkable has occured, and God Himself, out of His own unfathomable grace and mercy, has cut His own image in time, in history, the exact "figure of His substance", saying to the Father, "a body thou hast fitted to me" (Heb 1:3; 10:5); so that the Apostle John, almost swooning in praise and adoration of this "Good News", extolled Him " [Whom] we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have touched, of the Word of Life" (1Jn 1:1).
This is why anointed artists could henceforth lawfully paint His image and speak His holy name---Jesus--- which was given to Him in obedience to the heavenly messenger by the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph. This is why the iconoclasts in every age, since that Holy Night, have been wrong, woefully blind to the reality of God’s becoming man "to save His people from their sins". For God Himself has circumscribed an image for us in Christ Jesus, Who now belongs forever not only to eternity but also, through the incarnation, to history, even in His glorified body in heaven: He is forever, as the Creed declares, true God and true man.
St. John of Damascus, writing in the eighth century against the Iconoclasts, said:
"When you contemplate God becoming man, then you may depict Him clothed in human form. When the invisible One becomes visible to to flesh you may then draw His likeness. When He Who is bodiless and without form, immeasurable in the boundlessness of His own nature, existing in the form of God, empties Himself and takes the form of a servant in substance and in stature and is found in a body of flesh then you may draw His image and show it to anyone willing to gaze upon it...his birth from a Virgin, His baptism in the Jordan, His Transfiguration on Tabor, His sufferings which freed us from passion, His death, His miracles which are signs of His divine nature...His savings cross, the resurrection, the ascension..."