Images entered the Church when Constantine accommodated the pagans joining it by retaining their idols under Christian names. In Eastern Orthodoxy (which only split from Catholicism [1] in A.D. 1054), icons have intrinsic power. Catholic [1] apologists insist that veneration is not of the image but of the saint it represents. Yet John Paul II, speaking at St. Peter’s Basilica, says images have power:

“A mysterious ‘presence’ of the transcendent Prototype seems as it were to be transferred to the sacred image. … The devout contemplation of such an image thus appears as a real and concrete path of purification of the soul of the believer … because the image itself … can in a certain sense, by analogy with the sacraments, actually be considered a channel of divine grace.”