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dominosNbiscuts

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Greetings,

I’ve been having quite a time trying to understand the difference between ‘veneration’ and ‘worship’. And that despite the fact that I’ve read and reread the excellent apologetics on this web site, as well as those on www.ewtn.com

I’ve been thinking that, in as much as Catholics don’t seem to have this trouble, I’d ask for your help via a concrete example.

Let’s say that I stroll into church one afternoon - perhaps a few hours after hurricane Helga has just veered away from the harbor, leaving my modest 12 foot sailboat unharmed. Anyhow, I hit my knees (some Protestant churches have kneelers, by the way!) and begin to ‘share’ with the fellow who - during my college years - I always claimed as my ‘patron saint’ - Jack Daniels:

“Hail, bottled friend , source of all merciful numbness**…”
**

and shortly thereafter I really get into it. How do I recognize when I have reached the points that separate dulia from hyperdulia, and hyperdulia from latria, and I’m no longer ‘venerating as a friend’ or ‘venerating as The Mother of God’, but ‘worshiping as I should only worship God’?

Where exactly ARE those dividing lines between the two levels of ‘veneration’, and ‘worship’, and how does one know when they have been crossed?

Thanks for your helpful insights.

DB
 
What an interesting saint you have. (smile). To me, veneration means to honor. I would say “thank you” to the saint that went to Jesus for me. I can tell them how much I appreciate all that they experienced here on earth for their love of Our Lord but I wouldn’t go overboard on it. I have to remember that they were actual people like you and me.

When I worship God, I tell him how much I love him. How wonderful he is, how truly great and marvelous are his works. I could go as “overboard” on that as I want. To him is the power and the glory.

Since God is the one who makes good happen, then I place most of my focus on him. I just keep going on and on about how much I love him and of all his glories. To me that is worship.

When I go to Mary, I thank her for always going to Jesus for us. I can praise her like I would my mother here on earth. But I wouldn’t worship her.

Think of the saints like true friends that are hard to come by here on earth. The kind that will go to bat for you when you need a favor. You can trust them. You know that they love Our Lord as much as (but probably more than) you do. You appreciate them. You honor them but you don’t go on and on about their powers and their glories because all of their “power” is really their requests of God. Their glories are just reflections of the One on High.

Does that help? Sue
 
If you were a robot, other robots could be your friends, but only the human who made you would be your creator.

You might worship your creator, but you could only venerate your friends.
 
Simple, you have gone from good dulia to evil latria when you confuse the difference between the creator and the creation. Otherwise you are fine. One can no more insult God by praising the saints, than he can insult an artist by praising his painting. In fact, just the opposite is true in general. Most great artists shy away form and deflect personal praise. Imagine telling an artist you love him but couldn’t care less about his art. Now, that is an insult!

Scott
 
When you pray to a saint you ask them to pray to God for you. If your request was granted it was God who granted it and not the saint.
 
God is God, Mary is our mother, and the other saints are our brothers and sisters. Do you ever confuse your mother with God or your brothers and sisters with your mother? If you know how to properly honor God, your mother, and your brothers and sisters, why is it hard to understand the difference between latria, hyperdulia, and dulia?
 
I think that honoring the saints actually helps us to better worship God. The saints are in heaven, in intimate contact with God, and know better than we how to worship him.

Sometimes the worship that we actually do give to God is far less than His due. It often consists more of reverence than worship–the worship that is due only to the One who created us wholly out of nothing, and upon whom we utterly depend.

The saints can help us raise our level of worship to God. Even then, I doubt that we can begin to approach the degree of worship given to God by the Seraphim, who continually sing His praises in Heaven.
 
To modify my previous analogy, an intelligent robot might honor his friends (dulia), reverence his owner (hyperdulia), and worship his maker (latria.)

Hey, it’s only an analogy.
 
Where exactly ARE those dividing lines between the two levels of ‘veneration’, and ‘worship’, and how does one know when they have been crossed?
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Very very simple, do you know what worship is? I am sure that you do, if not you first figure that out. Then if you are worshiping you have crossed the line between veneration and worship. It will be very easy to recognize this line becuase it is more like a brick wall.
Hope that helps with the struggle that you that you seem to be having.
 
you are all forgetting that dulia, latria etc. are precise Latin words, all of which at times have been translated into the one English word “worship” which does not precisely connote any one of these terms. Guess we will just have to go back to Latin. Furthermore, “worship” in American English is not used precisely the same as the same word in “English English” where they address judges and other public officials as “your Worship” meaning about the same as “Your honor” for an American judge. A better distinction in English perhaps would be among adoration, worship, honor, veneration, esteem, respect and similar terms.

If you are engaged to be married and go to meet the guy’s family, are you going to spend the entire time talking to him, or will you converse with his parents, brothers, sisters etc as well. Would you not pay special respect to his father and mother? Laugh at dad’s jokes, praise mom’s cooking, ask her for your guys favorite foods etc. We are not in a God:me relationship alone, we are drawn into a family relationship of the Trinity, and the Church–saints in heaven, suffering souls in purgatory, and faithful on earth are all part of the family. We all address and relatet to God together–but sometimes as a good parent He spends “quality time” with one or another of us.
 
When I was a Protestant, I thought of prayer as “worship.” So, obviously, Catholics “worship” saints. But I also thought at that time that the “communion of saints” was the fellowship only of the blessed in heaven; I did not understand that the “communion of saints” embraces ALL of the Church, both in this world and in the next. Communion means communication; think of the prayers of the saints in Revelation. (lightbulb!)

Then I learned those greek words: dulia, hyperdulia, & latria, which clarified everything. When Catholics think of the word “worship” we think of the Eucharist, we think of complete submission of our heart, mind and will to the will of God. Worship, for us, is something quite beyond prayer, at least beyond petitionary prayer.

Catholics also understand that loving and venerating God’s “favorite people” – the holy ones who in a concrete way during their earthly life showed us a sliver of what God looks like when lived in the flesh – takes nothing away from God himself. Even the Blessed Virgin Mary, with all of her glorious and privileged sanctity, is still entirely human and, therefore, infinitely beneath her God, infinitely beneath her Son. All the honor accorded to her in heaven and on earth is only through God himself, to whom alone worship is due.
 
Dear DominosNBiscuts:

I was raised as a protestant, and likewise had a difficult time understanding the distinctions between dulia, hyperdulia, and latria. Even now, I’m not so sure I can make an “emotional” distinction between the three. I pour my heart and soul out equally to God as well as to the Saints; I just recognize that the Saints only have significance because of God. HOWEVER, what helped me the most in understanding Marian devotion and the communion with the saints was something that MercyGate hit one: a distinction between the act of prayer and the act of worship. I credit Kimberly Hahn for saying that the Protestant idea of worship is: singing songs, listening to a sermon, and praying. Catholics, on the other other hand identify worship as SACRIFICE, and the only Sacrifice Catholics make is that of the Eucharist to the Father. Therefore, my song singing of Mary or other saints, my listening to a sermon on Saints, and my praying to Saints in no way amounts to worship.
 
In veneration, the object of this honor is understood to be subordinate to a higher authority. Thus a saint, the object of veneration, is subordinate to God. Veneration is thus limited by its very object. In worship, the object is recognized and honored as not being subordinate to any other, but as being supreme above all else and the source of all goodness. In this case God alone qualifies for worship.

Gerry 🙂
 
**Friends,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful responses to my query: “What’s the difference between ‘veneration’ and ‘worship’?”. To say the least, differentiating between ‘veneration’ and ‘worship’ is important in light of the first commandment. It is also a conundrum to non-Catholics who, fearing that there is no difference, see Catholics as idolaters with regard to their behavior toward Mary and the saints.

The introduction of ‘dulia’, ‘hyperdulia’, and ‘latria’ does not solve the problem either. They just add three Latin terms to be somehow harmonized with 'veneration’ and ‘worship’.

Having done my homework before posing the question, I was certain that we could find common ground through your answers. Yet, when each of us had our say, I still could not see the answer.

My original focus was on understanding ‘veneration’. That yielded a plethora of results including the following:

**Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary


**venerate (verb)

1** : to regard with reverential respect or with admiring deference
2 : to honor (as an icon or a relic) with a ritual act of devotion

worship (verb)
1 : to honor or reverence as a divine being or supernatural power
2 : to regard with great or extravagant respect, honor, or devotion

**
**
Your Dictionary Online (Thesaurus)

**yourdictionary.com

venerate (verb)

To regard with great awe and devotion: adore, idolize, revere, reverence, worship.

**worship (verb)

**To regard with great awe and devotion: adore, idolize, revere, reverence, venerate.

**And this led me to the correct but non Catholic conclusion that veneration is synonymous with worship.
 
Taking a second swipe at it, I sought out THE definition of ‘worship’. And bingo, that led me to the online Catholic encyclopedia at newadvent.org. And they, in turn, harmonized all of these seemingly conflicting mysterious words as follows:

Christian Worship

newadvent.org/cathen/15710a.htm

The word worship (Saxon weorthscipe, “honour”; from worth, meaning “value”, “dignity”, “price”, and the termination, ship; Lat. cultus) in its most general sense is homage paid to a person or a thing. In this sense we may speak of hero-worship, worship of the emperor, of demons, of the angels, even of relics, and especially of the Cross. This article will deal with Christian worship according to the following definition: homage paid to God, to Jesus Christ, to His saints, to the beings or even to the objects which have a special relation to God.

There are several degrees of this worship:

if it is addressed directly to God, it is superior, absolute, supreme worship, or worship of adoration, or, according to the consecrated theological term, a worship of latria. This sovereign worship is due to God alone; addressed to a creature it would become idolatry.

When worship is addressed only indirectly to God, that is, when its object is the veneration of martyrs, of angels, or of saints, it is a subordinate worship dependent on the first, and relative, in so far as it honours the creatures of God for their peculiar relations with Him; it is designated by theologians as the worship of dulia, a term denoting servitude, and implying, when used to signify our worship of distinguished servants of God, that their service to Him is their title to our veneration (cf. Chollet, loc. cit., col. 2407, and Bouquillon, Tractatus de virtute religionis, I, Bruges, 1880, 22 sq.).

As the Blessed Virgin has a separate and absolutely supereminent rank among the saints, the worship paid to her is called hyperdulia (for the meaning and history of these terms see Suicer, Thesaurus ecclesiasticus, 1728).

As Catholics, you get reaffirmation in knowing that your interaction with Mary, the saints, and God are all different from one another. I, on the other hand, as a non-Catholic am somewhat satisfied in the notion that dulia, hyperdulia, and latria are in fact all levels of worship.

The question as to whether or not the first commandment is violated by any of these levels of worship persists.

God bless,

DB
 
That’s very good. The definitions you provided distinguish the degrees of worship by noting to whom they are addressed. Perfectly reasonable.

I venerate many of you on this board (though only a few have posted their graven images).

But none of you are saints, to whom I would give a higher degree of veneration.

None are the Mother of God, to whom I try to give the same honor that Jesus does.

And of course, none of you are God, to whom alone is owed supreme adoration. (Such as is given constantly by the angels surrounding the throne of God.)
 
We can probably think of worship as the smoke of incense that goes way up, past the saints all the way to God, and stops there. Veneration, is smoke that goes up to the saints and stops there, who in turn direct it to God.

Gerry 🙂
 
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RobedWithLight:
We can probably think of worship as the smoke of incense that goes way up, past the saints all the way to God, and stops there. Veneration, is smoke that goes up to the saints and stops there, who in turn direct it to God.

Gerry 🙂
Click to expand...
And to cap it off, I think for Catholics, the essential element that moves from veneration to latria is that of sacrifice, the most important of which is the Eucharist. There is also the sacrifice of praise: wherein the praise we offer God is a sacrifice in itself (such as our time, our voices, the praise) Essentially, I think that when we offer to God because he alone is worthy i.e. by his very being he is to be praised and adored, such that we offer sacrifice to him that is latria. The saints we venerate and honor because of their heroic virtues and obedience to God’s will. Hence we praise them as we praise our own friends, but would never offer a sacfice to them or praise them because of their own worthiness, since ultimately, all worthiness comes from God.
 
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