Why does the Catholic Church fill their churches with statues?
There is a story of a man who was driving by a Catholic Church dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. Outside the Church, there was a statue of Mary, and kneeling before this statue, another statue of St. Bernadette. The man commented as he passed by, “Catholics! Not only do they worship statues, but they have statues that worship statues!” The first commandment does state, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is the water under the earth” (Exodus 2:4). This seems like a fairly absolute command. But then, we read in Exodus 25:18, when God commands Moses to build the Ark of the Covenant, “And you shall make two cherubim of gold, of hammered work shall you make them, on the two ends of the mercy seat.” The Lord God continues to give instructions on what these gold angelic statues are to look like. It doesn’t make sense that the Lord God would absolutely forbid the making of images, only t
