Michael Walsh, who usd to be a Jesuit priest and is now Librarian of Heythrop College in London, caused a kerfuffle during the week by saying: "It’s unbelievable. They [traditional Catholics] still think they can find salvation by praying to statues."

He was shot down for his pains almost immediately afterwards, but perhaps we can take the theme up for a minute or two. Firstly the Church has never taught that we can be saved by praying to statues. In fact we can’t pray to statues at all; we can only pray to God, though this may be through mediators – the saints.

The statues, and indeed all the other artefacts, big and small, which adorn our churches are aids to devotion. If anyone chooses to pray to them, that is up to them, but they are then practising idolatry, and not Christianity.

The statues remind us that our faith is based on the Incarnation. Christ took flesh; he took ‘human stuff’. In that way he can be represented in human form – which the Father (despite various attempts to show him as a bearded old man) cannot. Likewise the saints - Our Lady and all the others - lived the Christian life in human form, though they of course are not God. Representations of them remind us that the body is a ‘Temple of the Holy Spirit’. Thus we have relics of the saints in our altars – a material link between our own worshipping communities and the communities of faith of long ago.

The Eastern Churches (here we go again!) do not have statues and look on them a trifle askance as being too ‘life-like’ and therefore liable to lead people into just the sort of muddle Michael Walsh describes. They prefer ikons which by being less ‘real’ open the door more readily, perhaps, to the mysteries of ‘The Other’. But in some cases they ascribe properties to their ikons (healing, for example) just as we ascribe properties to our shrines. The only evidence for this is the evidence of faith, for it clearly does not belong to the scientific world.