Word of the Week

Dedication of Lateran Basilica

Idolatry: eidololatria (Gk.): means "worship of idols," or “service rendered to images.”
Idolatry is the worship or divinizing of something or someone in place of God which ultimate destroys communion with the Trinitarian life. These idols can come in many forms: prestige, power, pleasure, media, etc…It is only God that is living and can intervene in history on behalf of men (CCC 2112-2113). An idolateris someone who “rejects the Lordship of God…and idolatry is a perversion of man’s innate religious sense” (CCC 2113-2114).

Idolatry is found explicitly four times in the Old Testament and 3 times in the New Testament (although seen over 170 times throughout Sacred Scripture as idol). Collectively in the OT, idolatrywas equal to rebellion and a turning away from God. This idolatry would lead to a divinization of images and stubbornness towards covenant life with God (Ex.32: 1 Sam.15:23). Paul and Peter continue the golden thread of exhortation towards abstaining from licentiousness in the NT by commanding all Christian faithful to avoid all forms of idolatry: sorcery, passions, covetousness, impurity, and drunkenness (Gal.5:20; Col.3:5; 1 Pet.4:3). The great apostles set these commands forth so that we might live as new creations in Christ. Paul was adamant in his call to put to death the ways of the world and put on the new cloth of Christ (Eph.4:24). Furthermore, Christ’s expulsion of the sheep, oxen, pigeons, and money-changers in the temple (Jn.2:14-22), is an allegory of Christ expelling the senseless earthly attachments in the sanctuary of our souls to make worship possible (Hahn and Minch, 21).

The life of an idolateris one who is intimate with the ways of modern moral relativism, which is the taking of objective moral truth, such as freedom and conscience, into irrational subjective categories. This modernism ultimately pervades the heart and leads the person to lead a life of sin and covetousness. In essence, idolatry cultivates disobedience and dishonors the reverence owed to God alone. Idolatryhas become the way of the culture of death, worshipping anything and everything before God--this is the gravest of moral sin! This false sense of existence creates the great paradox that is Christianity—from the folly of material ways awakens the heart for the immaterial ways…That vista of the supernatural life!

"The cause of idolatry is twofold: dispositive on the part of man; consummative on the part of demons.”

-St. Thomas Aquinas

Primary Texts Consulted

•  Catholic Bible. Suggested trans. Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.
•  Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition, 1997.
• Hahn, Scott and Minch , Curtis. Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: The Gospel of John, RSV, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003.

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