To worship means to ascribe worth to. Are you saying that Catholics ascribe no worth to Mary? Everything you do as regards Mary (and indeed many saints) looks like worship. It looks like worship, it feels like worship, it tastes like worship, it sounds like worship. Guess what...?
do you know what this looks like?
Yes.
When a teenager shakes herself in a frenzy at a pop concert, she is worshipping the pop artist. When you go into a church and the pulpit gets raised mechanically from the floor and the preacher comes up and the people stand on their feet, you know that the whole thing - the architecture, the customs are intended to promote acts of worship towards the preacher and the spoken sermon. Any stranger walking in for the first time will not fail to perceive this. And when a person declares 'The Bible is the 100% inerrant Word of God', he is worshipping the Bible. Let those protestants who think they are free from the so-called idolatries of Catholicism, be clear about this. For many of you, your practices amount to worship just as much. All that is different are the practices themselves. I am not singling out Catholics.
But when you kneel down in front of an icon of Mary, you
are worshipping. Either the icon or Mary herself. Your denials of the obvious, including inventing new words for it, such as 'veneration' or 'respect' show that you do not have the courage of your own convictions. It shows that you have a guilty conscience that you are unwilling to admit what it is you are actually doing.
Catholics spend a lot of time worshipping Mary, the saints, their priests, bishops and the Pope. The question is, do you worship
God? Because God is not worshipped by a genuflection or a dipping of the hand in holy water and making the sign of the cross on you. He is worshipped by obedience to his teachings and commitment to the lifestyle Jesus taught - an acceptance of Jesus as your one and only Lord. God is worshipped because of the truth he stands for. Mary, Joseph and the saints can only be worshipped ritually - because they have no message of their own, no truth of their own. You can't go out and live as Mary taught or as Joseph taught because they taught nothing. You worship many things and many people but do you worship God? Do you spend so much time worshipping other people and things that you have no time for God? Is your worship of these things a diversion to avoid having to actually worship God himself, which requires a radically different way of thinking? Is it an excuse for you: 'I perform all these acts of worship because they are my way of worshipping of God' even though you know that this is not how to worship God?