Nuggets from Occult Invasion—Prayers to the “Saints” and Their Images | thebereancall.org

Dave Hunt

Images entered the Church when Constantine accommodated the pagans joining it by retaining their idols under Christian names. In Eastern Orthodoxy (which only split from Catholicism in A.D. 1054), icons have intrinsic power. Catholic apologists insist that veneration is not of the image but of the saint it represents. Yet John Paul II, speaking at St. Peter’s Basilica, says images have power:

“A mysterious ‘presence’ of the transcendent Prototype seems as it were to be transferred to the sacred image. … The devout contemplation of such an image thus appears as a real and concrete path of purification of the soul of the believer … because the image itself … can in a certain sense, by analogy with the sacraments, actually be considered a channel of divine grace.”