IMAGE WORSHIP
There is a great deal of controversy in both Catholic and Protestant circles about the word "worship." The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) on page 670 has a paragraph headed, "The Principles of Image-Worship," openly uses the word "worship" to characterize a Roman Catholic's veneration to images, but adds, "We need not hesitate to speak of our worship of images, though no doubt we shall often be called upon to explain the term."
But "explaining the term" is not what it is all about. You can call the devotion to saints veneration, dulia, hyperdulia, protodulia, relative latria (a term used by Thomas Aquinas), latria or worship. No one can know what is going on in the mind of a Catholic who is kneeling before a statue, but the very fact that the words used in many devotional prayers smack of worship, it is certainly safer to obey the second commandment and not bow down to images.
Catholics are very sensitive about this issue, and more enlightened modern Catholics like to hide behind the use of the term veneration or the theological distinctions between latria and the lesser devotions of dulia and hyperdulia. The fact remains that the Ten Commandments have been tampered with.
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