Over at CatholicCulture, Jeff Mirus discusses Andrew Chestnut’s relatively new Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, The Skeleton Saint . Mirus’ piece is simultaneously a book review and an introduction to a steadily-growing cultic practice which is both fascinating and frightening, and is well worth a read.
As the book explains and Mirus elaborates, the cult of ‘Saint Death’ is a practice which apes the traditional Catholic devotion to a saint. Yet it comes across as fundamentally grim and death-obsessed, despite Chestnut’s effort to broaden readers’ view of it. And, like all attempts at magic (as opposed to faith in God’s grace and providence), this ‘devotion’ aims primarily at the fulfillment of an individual’s desires by constraining the idolized being and thus forcing supernatural action.
In some ways, this is just the latest incarnation of an archaic problem. Indeed, this mixture of local folkways, pagan ritual, and Catholic aesthetics can be traced back at least as far as the Reformation, when many reformers singled out the superstitious and even outright idolatrous path some Christians had taken by blurring the lines between their faith and other outside practices or ancestral tendencies. Anyone who has read the Canterbury Tales or other Medieval literature has a sense of how widespread this kind of inverted spirituality was.
While Church leaders have struggled to eradicate this tendency for a long time, it has always had a whiff of the premodern, and quite understandably has not been a cause of concern for Western Catholics in recent memory. Yet the Santa Muerte cult has made a comeback in Latin America in recent years, aided by a breakdown in governmental authority and civil society, and may now even be, according to some estimates, numerically “on par” with devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Especially with the eruption of drug-fueled violence, criminals have sought in Santa Muerte a sort of backwards sanctification of their actions and ordinary people have sought it as a source of stability and beneficence. Mirus recounts its resurgence:
Apparently, over the past ten years the cult of this skeletal image of death, all dressed in white, has become both public and widespread, though its origins date back at least to the 18th century, with links to the emphasis on memento mori (remembrance of death) which emerged during the time of the Black Death in 14th century Europe. Based on sales of cultic objects and estimates from cultic centers, Santa Muerte has some five million adherents in Mexico; in many ways, the cult is on a statistical par with Our Lady of Guadalupe and Saint Jude. With the Mexican influx into the United States, the cult has grown rapidly in America as well, especially in Los Angeles and along the U.S.-Mexican border.Fortunately, for all who are willing to pay attention, this cult—with its horrifying rosaries and even illicit “masses”—has been condemned by the Church. It has also been targeted in various ways by the Mexican government, because Santa Muerte is the patron saint of drug dealers and murderers and, indeed, of all who wish to behave criminally, prosper, and escape the law. But it seems that not many are willing to pay attention. The cult continues to grow. Unsurprisingly (considering the potential for diabolical action), Santa Muerte has a reputation for being more responsive than other more “conventional saints” from whom one might seek such help. She seems to get the job done.
Mirus’ review is commendable for the frosty reception he gives the original author’s enthusiasm for the cult, even if that enthusiasm flows from his position as an overeager sociologist and not an actual devotee of the practice. You can read his entire piece here .
