Latria is a Greek term used in Catholic theology to mean adoration, which is the highest form of worship or reverence and is directed only to the Holy Trinity.
Latria is sacrificial in character, and may be offered only to God. Catholics offer other degrees of reverence to the Blessed Virgin Mary and to the Saints; these non-sacrificial types of reverence are called Hyperdulia and Dulia, respectively. Hyperdulia is essentially a heightened degree of dulia provided only to the Blessed Virgin.
In Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglo Catholic theology, veneration is a type of honor distinct from the worship due to God alone. Church theologians have long adopted the terms latria for the sacrificial worship due to God alone, and dulia for the veneration given to saints and icons. Catholic theology also includes the term hyperdulia for the type of veneration specifically paid to Mary, mother of Jesus, in Catholic tradition. This distinction is spelled out in the dogmatic 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.
Veneration is a religious symbolic act giving honor to someone by honoring an image of that person, particularly applied to saints.
The Blessed Virgin, as manifesting in a sublimer manner than any other creature the goodness of God, deserves from us a higher recognition and deeper veneration than any other of the saints; and this peculiar cultus due to her because of her unique position in the Divine economy, is designated in theology hyperdulia, that is dulia in an eminent degree. It is unfortunate that neither our own language nor the Latin possesses in its terminology the precision of the Greek. The word latria is never applied in any other sense than that of the incommunicable adoration which is due to God alone. But in English the words adore and worship are still sometimes used, and in the past were commonly so used, to mean also inferior species of religious veneration and even to express admiration or affection for persons living upon the earth. So David "adored" Jonathan. In like manner Miphiboseth "fell on his face and worshipped" David (2 Samuel 9:6).
2007-09-28
08:23:01
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