This news item caught my eye recently, partly because the vandalism happened in a nearby city I have ties to. Someone broke into a Catholic church, played with the fire extinguisher and trashed the place, destroying numerous objects there. As far as I can tell, no one has been arrested yet.
What interests me is this comment by the parish priest:
"If you think about a statue that's been in a church for well over 100 years, the amount of devotion, the affection, the prayers that have gone up to heaven through the intercession of St. Joseph, it really is a loss for the community," said Father David Kime.
I'm not in favor of iconoclasm, whether sectarian or freelance, but this seems strange to me. Will the "devotion, the affection, the prayers" disappear, or be invalidated, because the images they used were destroyed? That question should be directed to the vandal too, though I doubt they hoped to achieve that; I speculate that they were unleashing some of the "wild male energy" I used to hear so much about.
Catholics have often been accused of idolatry for their use of images, though the difference between them and even the most iconoclastic Protestants is a matter of degree, not of kind. It's proper to deplore the malicious destruction of property, whether it belongs to a church or not; but I don't understand tying the non-material devotion etc. to the material objects. Can't St. Joseph intercede for Catholics if his physical image isn't present, or has been destroyed? I've asked similar questions before, with regard to Native American religion.
This doesn't mean that I don't sympathize with lay believers who find it hard to distinguish spiritual practice from the material objects they associate with it. But admitting its importance seems to me to confirm my atheistic insistence that religion is a human invention and construction. Apologists will, I think, counter that because of human weakness, many or most people need to refer to embodied symbols and concrete images. If only Christians were as understanding of the principle as applied to the "pagan" use of images! I understand both groups, but I think understanding and sympathy can co-exist with rejection.
A Zen story comes to mind: an outsider observes a Zen master bowing to an image of the Buddha. "Why are you doing that?" the outsider protests. "It's just an image, an illusion, not reality. I can spit on these statues." "Okay," replies the master: "You spit; I bow." I do neither, but I think that spitting on a religious image, no less than smashing it, indicates how much power that it still has over the vandal. Of course images have power, because human beings assign them power. I doubt we can ever escape that, but we can be aware of what we're doing.
