Why It Is Good To Use and Venerate Icons

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That was absolutely beautiful. Thank you. (Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
In the image and the likeness. The Catholic church needs to restore religious art to its proper place in the church.
 
😱😱😱

Nooooo!

Icons are NOT religious art!

They are prayers in and of themselves, and we seek to join those prayers. The reverence we show them would be grossly inappropriate for religious art.

Actual likenesses of persons are not even permitted icons.

I am not knocking religious art; it is a good thing. But icons are something different.
 
Justin_Mary said:
I’d like to know more about this.
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I’ve almost exhausted my own knowledge here, but there’s a subform on byzcath.org for it.

Each image, each direction something or someone faces, and so forth has meaning.

Icons were used buy the early church for instruction at a time of general illiteracy.

When writing (not painting) an icon, specific prayers are repeated.

There’s a lot of good stuff on the byzcath forum .
ontheway1 said:
Is this cause for iconoclasm?
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No, that was more the usual ignorance of differences between different parts of the church 😡🤯:cry:

It was actually a pope that saved the Church from the iconoclasts, even though they are primarily an eastern thing.

hawk
 
Was it the pope who approved the decision of the Seventh Ecumenical Council Which infallibly defined the proper veneration of icons?
 
AFAIK, each of the Seven were approved and ratified by a pope (although there was a ratification that kind of shifted and moved :roll_eyes:).

Papal defense of icons definitely led to the pro-icon decrees at Nicea . . .
 
Do you remember which pope it was? My poor brain is almost running on empty today…
 
I have a dear friend who goes on a five-day retreat every year to “write” an icon.
She gave a talk about them and brought several of the icons with her.

It was fascinating!
She is Catholic and has been doing this for many years. (Latin-rite like me.)
 
“grossly inappropriate”

Yet interestingly in the Latin tradition we do show that same level of reverence to life like statues. Perhaps less so in North America… but think of Latin America or the Philippines… bowing before them, kissing them, processing them through the streets, laying flowers before them, crowning them…

I think the Eastern Church has a specific theology around icons themselves. For the Latin Church, icons, statues, and other images all fall under the broader theology of sacramentals more or less.
 
Does she go to the one in Fox Chase, PA with the Sisters of St. Basil the Great? I’ve always wanted to go to that one…
 
No, it is at a Monastery not far from where she lives that gives silent retreats.

An Orthodox priest would come once a year to give the retreat there.
 
They are, at least in the east, but not. with. the primacy. of form they once held (a literate membership made the other forms practical . . .)
 
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