Can a Catholic own and pray before Eastern Orthodox icons?

Yes. Icons are inanimate objects and there is nothing sinful about owning one. If your conscience is genuinely troubled by having them, do not keep them. Yes, you may own them. An icon is wood and paint. It is an inanimate thing. There is nothing sinful in the object itself, and the fact that it was written in the Byzantine tradition rather than painted in the Latin one does not change that. The Eastern churches are in schism from Rome, but they are not heretics on this point. On sacred images they are on our side, and always have been. The history proves it. In 726, the emperor Leo the Isaurian issued an edict equating sacred images with idols, and the heresy called iconoclasm, from the Greek for image-breaking, tore through the Byzantine empire. The men who fought it were Easterners: Patriarch Germanus of Constantinople, and above all St. John Damascene, a monk of St. Sabas in Jerusalem, who defended the veneration of images in his apologetical treatises. Popes Gregory II and Gregory III refused communion to the iconoclast patriarch. When Constantine V tried to get 338 bishops at Hieria in 753 to condemn images, the monk St. Stephen the New answered him with the question that settles it: how can a council be called ecumenical to which the bishop of Rome did not consent? A council at the Lateran in 769 condemned iconoclasm outright. And in 787 the Second Council of Nicaea, the seventh ecumenical council, with Pope Hadrian I and Patriarch Tarasius, defined the veneration of sacred images for the whole Church. Trent did not invent this; Trent merely affirmed what had already been decided. So when you hang an icon on your wall you are standing with the seventh ecumenical council, not against it. Nor does Exodus 20 forbid it. What God condemns there is the making of images of false gods and the bowing down to them as gods. We do not worship images. That is the whole of it. The Church distinguishes latria, which is worship and belongs to God alone, from dulia, the honor given to the saints, and hyperdulia, the higher honor given to Our Lady. Those are not word games. They mark the real difference between adoring a thing and honoring the person it depicts. An icon of Christ honors Christ. The honor passes to the one represented; it does not stop at the panel. Now the caveat, and I mean it seriously. If having icons in your house disturbs your conscience, do not have them. Sacred images are a good, not an obligation. St. Paul's rule in Romans 14 applies exactly here: do not do what you cannot do in good conscience, and do not put a stumbling block in your brother's way either. A man who acts against his own conscience sins, even when the act itself is lawful. So if you find that the icon is pulling you somewhere you should not go, take it down, and do not let anyone make you feel superstitious for doing so. I will say one more thing, because I have said it before and I do not take it back. There are places in the world, and I have South America and Mexico in mind, where devotion has gone past honor into something else, where the image of Our Lady has become such a fixture in people's minds that they look to her first and to God second. Some Catholics tell me that is fine because it all goes through Mary to God in the end. I am not so sure. Mary has no power in herself unless God gives it to her. She is a glorified human being and a created being, nowhere near God. That danger tells you to know what an image is for. It does not tell you to throw the image out. Keep your icons, and keep your order of worship straight. One last practical note. If you are drawn to the icons because you are drawn to Orthodoxy itself, that is a different question, and a bigger one. Loving the Eastern liturgical patrimony is not the same as accepting that Constantinople was right in 1054. You can have the icons and stay Catholic. Do both.