DAY 165
CHALLENGE
“The Catholic Church hid God’s commandment against idolatry by removing it from the Ten Commandments.”
DEFENSE
The Church didn’t try to hide the commandment against idolatry. In fact, it condemns idolatry.
The Ten Commandments are in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. If you look in a Catholic Bible, the prohibition is right there: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exod. 20:4–5; Deut. 5:8–9).
The Catechism also forcefully condemns idolatry (CCC 2112–2114).
What the Church does—like every Christian community—is pro- vide short summaries of the commandments for memorization. The full text of the Ten Commandments is between 300 and 400 words long (varying by translation), so every group uses a brief, memorizable list instead.
In Catholic and Lutheran lists, the prohibition of idolatry is subsumed under the broader commandment “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3; Deut. 5:7). Some communities treat these as separate commandments, but this is a matter of choice. We are told that there are “Ten Commandments” (Exod. 34:28), but the text contains more than ten requirements and prohibitions. Interpreters must group some of them together to make the total come out to ten, but there is no single way to do this.
“The division and numbering of the Commandments have varied in the course of history. The present catechism follows the division of the Commandments established by St. Augustine, which has become traditional in the Catholic Church. It is also that of the Lutheran confessions. The Greek Fathers worked out a slightly different division, which is found in the Orthodox Churches and Reformed communities” (CCC 2066).
In the ancient world, having other gods meant worshipping idols, so it makes sense to see the prohibitions on both as bringing out different aspects of the same commandment.
The common way of numbering the Ten Commandments in Jew-ish circles agrees and groups the prohibitions on polytheism and idola- try together in a single commandment.