Common Objections: Mary and the Saints

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“It is blasphemous to worship Mary. To worship anyone other than God is pure idolatry.”

  Gary Hoge

I couldn’t agree more. That’s why Catholics do not worship Mary. Period. To do so would indeed be idolatrous, and no one would be more grieved by such wickedness than Mary herself, whose role is always to point people toward her Son. 

The Catholic Church condemns the worship of anything other than God. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc.”¹ Mary is a creature, like us, and she should be honored for her great faith, but she must never be worshipped. Referring to Mary specifically, the Church says, “no creature could ever be counted along with the Incarnate Word and Redeemer.”²

I know of only one instance in the 2,000-year history of the Church where some people supposedly worshipped Mary. This allegedly happened in the fourth century, when a group of Arab converts called “Collyridians” began to offer small cakes (called “collyrides”) in sacrifice to Mary as a goddess. There’s debate about whether these people actually existed. We only know of them through the writings of St. Epiphanius, who rebuked them saying, “Let Mary be held in honor. Let the Father, Son and Holy Ghost be adored, but let no one adore Mary.” That always has been, and always will be, the Catholic attitude toward “Mary worship.” It is blasphemy, and idolatry, and it would never be tolerated.

Those who claim that Catholics do in fact worship Mary often refer to a book by St. Alphonsus Ligouri called The Glories of Mary.³ This book is a rich source of quotes that seem to confirm all of the horror stories that people have heard about the Catholic attitude toward Mary. For example, on page 130, Ligouri writes, “The Holy Church commands a worship peculiar to Mary.”

So how can modern Catholics claim that they don’t worship Mary when one of their own saints said that they do? It’s simple: In the eighteenth century, when Ligouri wrote that book, the word “worship” had a much broader meaning than it does now. In those days, the word meant “to ascribe worthiness, honor, repute, or respect,” whether such honor was given to God or to man. There’s certainly nothing wrong with ascribing worthiness, honor, repute, or respect to Mary, or to any other worthy human.

Examples of this broad usage of the word “worship” can be seen in older translations of the Bible. For example, when an angel, the captain of the host of the Lord, appeared to Joshua, we read, “And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto him, What saith my Lord unto his servant?” (Josh. 5:14, KJV). In the parable of the unmerciful servant, Jesus says, “The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.” (Matt. 18:26, KJV). Obviously, Joshua did not worship the angel in the modern sense of the word, nor did the servant in Jesus’s parable.

In recent years the word “worship” has come to refer exclusively to the adoration that is properly given to God alone, and as I mentioned above, Catholics do not give such adoration to Mary or anyone else. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the devotion given to Mary “differs essentially from the adoration which is given to the incarnate Word and equally to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and greatly fosters this adoration.”⁴

It is very easy for Protestants to misunderstand the Church’s teachings about Mary, and so Catholics are admonished by the Church that “every care should be taken to avoid any exaggeration which could mislead other Christian brethren about the true doctrine of the Catholic Church.”⁵ Perhaps one day Catholics and Protestants will again be able to stand side-by-side, and say, in the words of Martin Luther, “[Mary is the] highest woman and the noblest gem in Christianity after Christ ... She is nobility, wisdom, and holiness personified. We can never honor her enough.”⁶

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¹Catechism of the Catholic Church, (Rome: Urbi et Orbi, 1994), 2113.

²Catechism of the Catholic Church, (Rome: Urbi et Orbi, 1994), 970.

³Brooklyn: Redemptorist Fathers, 1931.

⁴Catechism of the Catholic Church, (Rome: Urbi et Orbi, 1994), 971.

⁵Pope Paul VI, Marialis Cultus, 32.

⁶Martin Luther, Sermon, Christmas, 1531.