Many of the earliest icons were destroyed in a zealous campaign that saw them condemned as idolatrous vestiges of paganism. Their defenders argued in vain that it was not the image they venerated but the spiritual reality it reflected. But there was a deeper issue at stake:
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The very mystery of the Incarnation itself and whether Christ, a true man, could serve as a true image of the invisible God. The issue was finally judged in favor of icons in the 9th century. By that time not only countless icons were destroyed but the lives of their defenders.
The lads who felt they were purifying a church by seizing images of Our Lady of the Amazon and tossing them into the Tiber follow the path of other iconoclastic vandals—the Puritans who stripped churches of statues and stained glass windows; the French mobs who set out to cleanse
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Churches of superstition, church authorities who set back the evangelization of China for disdain of ancestor “worship,” skeptical church authorities who doubted the Blessed Mother would appear to Indians, slaves, peasant children, and not to them.
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Afterward the boys probably felt pretty good. They had struck a blow against “idolatry.” They filmed their deed and were lavished with praise. But in destroying an image they did not destroy what it represented. The Amazon still burns, Our Lady still lives and prays for them.
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