Veneration of Saints
Although direct prayer to the saints is a practice that was continued in the first Litany in English, it was not particularly encouraged after the English Reformation, it is an important part of Anglo-Catholics' public and private spiritual practices. In Anglo-Catholic theology, veneration is a type of honour distinct from the worship due to God alone. High church theologians have long used the terms latria for the sacrificial worship due to God alone, and dulia for the veneration given to saints and icons. They base this distinction on the conclusions of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787), which also decreed that iconoclasm (forbidding icons and their veneration) is a heresy that amounts to a denial of the incarnation of Jesus.
Article XXII of the Thirty-nine Articles states the "Romish doctrine" of the invocation of saints in the 16th century was not grounded in Scripture, hence many low-church or broad-church Anglicans consider prayer to the saints to be unnecessary. One example of Anglo-Catholic veneration is the annual procession in honour of Our Lady of Walsingham (see picture). It was suspended in 1538 and revived in 1922 by some clergy and lay members of the Church of England.
Read more about this topic: Anglican Devotions
Famous quotes containing the words veneration and/or saints:
“It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.”
—John le Carré (b. 1931)