A recent story (June 25, 2025) from the Catholic News Agency (CNA) illustrates the deceptive nature of Catholicism. According to the article, many believers in Spain are deeply disturbed by a few cosmetic changes made to the image of Our Lady of Hope of Macarena. Apparently, the slight changes disturbed the people’s ability to venerate the image with the same devotion they had in the past. Many claimed that the image was no longer “their Virgin.”
This 17C wooden image of the Virgin Mary is highly valued as an object of veneration and devotion by the Spanish people. The Roman Church has always denied that she encourages the worship of idols. But the various levels of veneration allowed by the Church are sophistries meant to fool the gullible.
The following three levels of “worship” are used by the Church to explain this theology. Latria is the worship or adoration of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Dulia is the veneration of the saints, and hyperdulia is veneration especially reserved for the Blessed Virgin Mary.
These careful distinctions are, practically speaking, dubious at best. The Church is claiming that a little bit of veneration is different than a lot of veneration. How can the Church control just how much veneration is given to God, saints, and the Virgin Mary?
Can a person venerate Mary a bit too much? And Jesus a bit too little? This certainly seems possible, even likely. The Roman Church, simply put, “worships” God, the saints, and Mary at various levels of intensity. Most tellingly, worshipers are taught to pray to God, the saints, and Mary. Apparently, God is unable to hear and answer all prayers. If so, the Roman God is not the true God of heaven and earth.
The ancient world into which the children of Israel were born was dominated by the worship of idols, idols of many kinds and of many materials: wood, gold, silver, etc. God was absolutely clear about His thoughts toward idolatry. Idolatry is an abomination, or an especially awful kind of sin. Ancient gods were worshiped in disgusting ways, including through prostitution and child sacrifice.
God commanded that all idols among the Israelites be completely destroyed, lest they become a snare (or subtle temptation) to the people. The true worship of God involved no images at all. Moses in the book of Deuteronomy emphasized that God was unseen. At Mount Sinai, the people heard God’s ten commandment law spoken by God Himself, but they never saw His form.
King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, was ensnared by the idols of his foreign wives. Solomon probably did not believe in these foreign gods, but instead he likely justified their worship as merely symbolic in some harmless way. In other words, he worshiped idols on a level he thought acceptable, just as Rome does today. The results of this thinking were horrific. Solomon became fundamentally pagan in his world view.
In I Cor. 10:19-20, the Apostle Paul tells his readers that they must have nothing to do with idols and that these idols have nothing to do with God, but instead are demons.
John the Revelator writes that Babylon the Great (Rome in the end time) “has become a dwelling place of demons” (Rev. 18:2). Is it any wonder that only two verses later we hear the call of heaven: “Come out of her, my people, lest you receive of her plagues” (Rev. 18:4).
No true follower of God, in any church, will go unwarned.