Pentecostals are our brothers and sisters in faith, as they are also Christians. Their baptism, performed with water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is valid and fully recognized by the Catholic Church.
We collaborate together in works of charity and should gradually seek to draw closer on a doctrinal level, examining more deeply some issues that sometimes arise from historical and communication problems.
An important theme is that of prayer to the Virgin Mary and the Saints.
For Catholics, devotion to the Virgin Mary and the Saints constitutes a form of intercessory prayer, similar to when you ask a group of believers to lay hands on a sick person or ask a pastor to pray for a particular situation. It is not the pastor, Mary, or the Saints who perform miracles, but it is God who acts when invoked.
Certainly, there are abuses in prayer to Mary and the Saints, but these are personal sins and wrong behaviors of individuals. Similarly, people of other Christian denominations can fall into similar errors, for example, by worshipping pastors or healers.
To understand the issue of Mary, for example, it is useful to read the common declaration between Anglicans and Catholics regarding the role of Mary.
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/angl-comm-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_20050516_mary-grace-hope-christ_it.html
Regarding depictions (which, among other things, are also found among Orthodox Christians and even in some Pentecostal churches), they are absolutely not idols but only tools for prayer.
No Catholic or Orthodox Christian believes that images with sacred depictions are divine, but rather that they are tools to remember God. Just as in the Old Testament God permitted depictions of the divine (it seems to me, Moses and Solomon):
Cf Nm 21:4-9; Wis 16:5-14; Jn 3:14-15.
(84) Cf Ex 25:10-22; 1 Kgs 6:23-28; 7:23-26
Paolo Botti
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image…”
2129 The divine injunction included the prohibition of any representation of God made by human hands. Deuteronomy explains: “Since you saw no form, when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb from the fire, be very careful, therefore, of your souls, lest you corrupt yourselves and make a carved image in the form of any idol” (Dt 4:15-16). It is the absolutely transcendent God who revealed himself to Israel. “He is all things,” but, at the same time, he is “above all his works” (Sir 43:27-28). He is “the very author of beauty” (Wis 13:3).
2130 However, from Old Testament times, God ordered or permitted the making of images that symbolically led to the salvation wrought by the Incarnate Word: such as the bronze serpent,83 the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim.84
2131 Grounded in the mystery of the Incarnate Word, the Seventh Ecumenical Council, at Nicaea (in 787), justified, against the iconoclasts, the veneration of icons: those of Christ, but also those of the Mother of God, the angels, and all the saints. By becoming incarnate, the Son of God inaugurated a new “economy” of images.
2132 Christian veneration of images is not contrary to the first commandment which prohibits idols. In fact, “the honor rendered to an image belongs to the one represented in it,”85 and “whoever venerates an image, venerates the reality of the one reproduced in it.”86 The honor paid to sacred images is a “respectful veneration,” not adoration which is due to God alone:
“Religious worship is not directed to the images themselves, considered as mere things, but under their distinctive aspect as images leading us on to God incarnate. The movement toward the image does not terminate in it as image, but tends toward that whose image it is” 87
(83) Cf Nm 21:4-9; Wis 16:5-14; Jn 3:14-15.
(84) Cf Ex 25:10-22; 1 Kgs 6:23-28; 7:23-26
© Tutti i diritti riservati. Riproduzione consentita solo chiedendo permesso a info@amicidilazzaro.it
(non verrà concesso a siti con pubblicità/ads o per usi commerciali)
© All rights reserved. Reproduction allowed only with permission from info@amicidilazzaro.it
(it will not be granted to sites with advertising/ads or for commercial uses)
