Question on St. Anthony / Elrond confusion: can a statue of a fictional person represent a real person?

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I would assume so. It’s not the physical statue receiving the prayers or whose intercession is being invoked.
 
It’s who you think you are praying to… When I was in Europe and saw all the statues, I always wondered if they accurately represented who they said they did, or an artists interpretation…
 
Peter_J said:
CBS news called it

Brazilian woman prays to “Lord of the Rings” elf for years, mistaking it for saint

But I’d like to ask this question: Couldn’t such a statue (in this case a statue of Elrond) represent a person who really exists (like St. Anthony in this case)?

To my mind, it would seem that the statue not only *can *but already *has *represented St. Anthony, at least for her.
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Haha, that’s funny. And it perfectly demonstrates the fact that we don’t pray to statues, we pray to the people who the statues represent. The article stupidly says that she “worshipped” the statue, though, so apparently CBS missed the point.

I agree with you - there was no issue at all with the woman using Elrond’s statue as an instrument in praying to St. Anthony, since she was praying to the saint just the same, regardless of the visage of the statue she was using.
 
dshix said:
Haha, that’s funny. And it perfectly demonstrates the fact that we don’t pray to statues, we pray to the people who the statues represent. The article stupidly says that she “worshipped” the statue, though, so apparently CBS missed the point.

I agree with you - there was no issue at all with the woman using Elrond’s statue as an instrument in praying to St. Anthony, since she was praying to the saint just the same, regardless of the visage of the statue she was using.
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Agree, it’s pretty funny. (I almost put I note about that in the OP, in case readers thought I missed the humor.)

Yeah, I too noticed where the article said “worship”. :rolleyes: If it had simply said that she “prayed to Elrond” then I could have understood that – although I would still disagree with that statement (as apparently all four of us do). I believe that she prayed to the person the statue represented to her thinking, that is St. Anthony.
 
P.S. I guess a related question could be: Can we use our imagination (to a reasonable extent) when picturing or describing people in heaven?
 
Peter_J said:
P.S. I guess a related question could be: Can we use our imagination (to a reasonable extent) when picturing or describing people in heaven?
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I’m pretty sure we already do. Look at pictures of most of the apostles and you’ll see wide variations? Why? because we have zero idea what they looked like. Heck ask many people to describe God the Father and they will talk about someone with a white beard or some other image they’ve seen. And yet the Father was not incarnate and would not have whiskers, so…
 
Usige said:
I’m pretty sure we already do. Look at pictures of most of the apostles and you’ll see wide variations? Why? because we have zero idea what they looked like. Heck ask many people to describe God the Father and they will talk about someone with a white beard or some other image they’ve seen. And yet the Father was not incarnate and would not have whiskers, so…
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Good post.

Also, when I was a kid it was recommended to me to name my guardian angel. I liked the name Arthur, like King Arthur (this is before the TV show Arthur came along) and got the idea to name my guardian angel that. So it might be asked, if I prayed to my guardian angel calling him “Authur” and imagining attributes associated with King Arthur, was I actually praying to a fictional king rather than an angel?

I think the answer is clearly no.
 
Peter_J said:
Also, when I was a kid it was recommended to me to name my guardian angel.
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Oh dear. I hope whoever it was that suggested that to you learned better and never suggested such a thing again! :eek:
 
dshix said:
Oh dear. I hope whoever it was that suggested that to you learned better and never suggested such a thing again! :eek:
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I think I should clarify a little. I was talking about circa 1990, whereas the discourage ment of said practice, i.e.
  1. Popular devotion to the Holy Angels, which is legitimate and good, can, however, also give rise to possible deviations:
when, as sometimes can happen, the faithful are taken by the idea that the world is subject to demiurgical struggles, or an incessant battle between good and evil spirits, or Angels and daemons, in which man is left at the mercy of superior forces and over which he is helpless; such cosmologies bear little relation to the true Gospel vision of the struggle to overcome the Devil, which requires moral commitment, a fundamental option for the Gospel, humility and prayer;

when the daily events of life, which have nothing or little to do with our progressive maturing on the journey towards Christ are read schematically or simplistically, indeed childishly, so as to ascribe all setbacks to the Devil and all success to the Guardian Angels. The practice of assigning names to the Holy Angels should be discouraged, except in the cases of Gabriel, Raphael and Michael whose names are contained in Holy Scripture.

-Directory on popular piety and the liturgy

didn’t come until 2001. (And I’m glad it did – by the late 90s the pracitice had clearly gotten out of hand IMO. People progressed from giving their angel a name to praying for a special divine revelation to let them know their angel’s real God-given name. Some even produced formulas (don’t ask me what their basis was!) whereby if you say this prayer a certain number of times and then that prayer, etc, then the next name that came into your mind was supposedly your guardian angel’s real name. Other people would say things like, If you talk to so-and-so he/she can tell you what you guardian angel’s real name is.)
 
Indeed. One thing that struck me, reading the article, is that it probably wouldn’t have been very widely covered if it had turned out that the statue was a different saint (or perhaps just a generic statue of “a saint”). Though analysts could still debate about “who was she praying to?” in that case.
 
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