Brownsville, Texas, Nov 4, 2017 / 03:02 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- They call her Santa Muerte (‘Holy Death’ or ‘Saint Death’), but she’s no saint.
Literally.
The skeletal female figure has a growing devotion in Mexico, Central America, and some places in the United States, but don’t be fooled by the Mary-like veil or the holy-sounding name.
She’s not a recognized saint by the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, in 2013, a Vatican official condemned devotion to her, equating it to “the celebration of devastation and of hell.”
“It’s not every day that a folk saint is actually condemned at the highest levels of the Vatican,” Andrew Chesnut, a Santa Muerte expert who has been studying the devotion for more than eight years, told CNA.
Chesnut is the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint,” the only English academic book to date on the subject.
Despite her condemnation from on high, Santa Muerte remains increasingly popular among criminals, drug lords and those on the fringe of society, as well as cultural Catholics who maybe don’t know (or care) that she is condemned by the Church.
“She’s basically the poster girl of narco-satanic spirituality,” Chesnut said.
According to Chesnut’s estimates, Santa Muerte is the fastest growing religious movement in the Americas – and it’s all happened within the past 10-15 years.
“She was unknown to 99 percent of Mexicans before 2001, when she went public. Now I estimate there’s some 10-12 million devotees, mostly in Mexico, but also significant numbers in the United States and Central America,” he said.
The roots of Santa Muerte
Although she has recently exploded in popularity, Santa Muerte has been referenced in Mexican culture since Spanish colonial times, when Catholic colonizers, looking to evangelize the native people of Mexico, brought over female Grim Reaper figures as a representation of death, Chesnut said.
But the Mayan and Aztec cultures already had death deities, and so the female skeletal figure became adopted into the culture as a kind of hybrid death saint.
She’s also mentioned twice in the historical records of the Inquisition, when Spanish Catholic inquisitors found and destroyed a shrine to Santa Muerte in Central Mexico. After that, Santa Muerte disappeared from historical records for more than a century, only to resurface, in a relatively minor way, in the 1940s.
“From the 1940s to 1980s, researchers exclusively report Santa Muerte (being invoked) for love miracles,” Chesnut said, such as women asking the folk saint to bring back their cheating husbands.
She then faded into obscurity for a few more decades, until the drug wars brought her roaring back.
What’s the appeal of a saint of death?
Part of the attraction to Santa Muerte, as several sources familiar with the devotion explained, is that she is seen as a non-judgemental saint that can be invoked for some not-so-holy petitions.
“If somebody is going to be doing something illegal, and they want to be protected from the law enforcement, they feel awkward asking God to protect them,” explained Fr. Andres Gutierrez, the pastor of St. Helen parish in Rio Hondo, Texas.
“So they promise something to Santa Muerte in exchange for being protected from the law.”
Devotees also feel comfortable going to her for favors of vengeance – something they would never ask of God or a canonized saint, Chesnut said.
“I think this non-judgemental saint who’s going to accept me as I am is appealing,” Chesnut said, particularly to criminals or to people who don’t feel completely accepted within the Mexican Catholic or Evangelical churches.
The cultural Catholicism of Mexico and the drug wars of the past decade also made for the perfect storm for Santa Muerte to catch on, Chesnut explained. Even Mexicans who didn’t grow up going to Mass every Sunday still have a basic idea of what Catholicism entails – Mass and Saints and prayers like the rosary, all things that have been hi-jacked and adapted by the Santa Muerte movement.
“You can almost see some of it as kind of an extreme heretical form of folk Catholicism,” he said. “In fact, I can say Santa Muerte could only have arisen from a Catholic environment.”
This, coupled with the fact that Mexican Catholics are suddenly much more familiar with death, with the recent drug wars having left upwards of 60,000 – 120,000 Mexicans dead – makes a saint of death that much more intriguing.
“Paradoxically, a lot of devotees who feel like death could be just around the corner – maybe they’re narcos, maybe they work in the street, maybe they’re security guards who might be gunned down – they ask Santa Muerte for protection.”
Why she’s no saint
Her familiarity and appeal is actually part of the danger of this devotion, Fr. Gutierrez said.
“(Santa Muerte) is literally a demon with another name,” he said. “That’s what it is.”
In his own ministry, Fr. Gutierrez said he has witnessed people who “suffer greatly” following a devotion to the folk saint.
Fr. Gary Thomas, a Vatican-trained exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, told CNA that he has also prayed with people who have had demonic trouble after praying to Santa Muerte.
“I have had a number of people who have come to me as users of this practice and found themselves tied to a demon or demonic tribe,” he said.
Fr. Gutierrez noted that while Catholics who attend Mass and the sacraments on a regular basis tend to understand this about Santa Muerte, those in danger are the cultural Catholics who aren’t intentionally engaging in something harmful, but could be opening the door to spiritual harm nonetheless.
Elizabeth Beltran is the parish secretary at Cristo Rey Church, a predominantly Latino Catholic parish in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Beltran, who grew up in Mexico and whose family is still in Mexico, said she started noticing Santa Muerte about 15-20 years ago, but she hasn’t yet noticed the presence of the devotion in the United States.
Besides narcos and criminals, the folk saint also appeals to poor, cultural Mexican Catholics or those who are simply looking for something to believe in, Beltran said.
“People who don’t know their faith very well, it’s very easy to convince them” to pray to Santa Muerte, she said. It’s common practice in Mexico for people to mix superstitious practices with Catholic prayers like the Our Father or the Hail Mary, in order to gain trust in the Catholic culture.
Besides her demonic ties, she’s also a perversion of what the practice of praying to saints is all about, said Fr. Ryan Kaup, a priest with Cristo Rey parish.
“What we venerate as saints are real people who have chosen this life to follow the will of our Lord and have done great things with their lives, and now they’re in heaven forever, and so that’s why we ask for their intercession,” Fr. Kaup said.
“So taking this devotion and this practice that we have of asking for this saint’s intercession and twisting it in such a way as to invoke this glorified image of death is really a distortion of what we believe is true intercession and truly the power of the saints.”
Because of her growing popularity in the United States, Fr. Gutierrez said he is hoping that bishops and Catholic leaders in the U.S. become more aware of the danger of the Santa Muerte devotion and start condemning it publically.
“I would love to hear something on a national level, from the U.S. conference of Catholic bishops or from local bishops speaking about it publicly,” he said. “I think that would be one way to really call it to attention.”
Fr. Thomas added that honoring a saint of death is a corruption and distortion of what Christians belief about Jesus, who came to give us eternal life.
“‘Saint Death’ is an oxymoron. God is a God of the living, not the dead.”
This article was originally published on CNA Oct. 30, 2016.
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Praying for the victims and their families, that the hostages will be released unharmed, that those who are responsible for this heinous crime will be held accountable, and that there will be a lasting Peace in Nigeria.🙏
But isn’t Islam a religion of peace?
Diogenes- and the Crusades?
The Crusades were 700 years ago. Hopefully some minds have been opened in that time frame??? There is no excuse for this sort of UNPROVOKED behavior in the modern era. Let people worship as they will. But tolerance is not a quality that Islamists value. The era when Islam conquered an held a large chunk of Europe have been too soon forgotten.
Give it a rest “Br.Jaques”.
That was my first thought too, Br. Jacques. Not to mention the St. Bartholomew Day massacre, countless pogroms right into the 20th century, Northern Ireland, etc., etc.
We can look at most religions & find examples of violence committed. It’s more about the darkness in our hearts than the doctrines of our faith.
First thoughts often are not the best ones. Familiarize yourself better with the meaning of Jihad and the history of Islam. Armed belligerence against the infidels characterizes Islam from the Mohammed’s time until the present. Unlike many other religions, and specifically Christianity, Islam provides the justification for the violence that its adherents have engaged in.
My first thought wasn’t about Islam but about what all human beings share in their hearts. Christians need to be honest about their own past also.
Let’s remember that the Catholic Church has not institutionaled violence against others. It is NOT a tenet of our faith. On the other hand, fatwas ARE institutionalized in Islam. It is essential to their faith. So is jihad. No recognized mullah or imam has stood up and condemned violence. Violence is a central part of the religion of Islam.
The New Testament surely doesn’t advocate violence & neither does Christ. It’s not a tenet of our Faith. But the Church is comprised of broken human beings like you & me & Church authorities have had a hand in instances of sectarian violence in the past.
Sectarian violence is not built into the Church but it’s definitely escaped a few times.
The Crusades were a belated response to Islamic aggression against and persecution of Christians.
The Crusades were a perfectly justifiable and moral response to over 850 Muslim attacks in Western Europe. Your ignorance of history is appalling.
Several scholars have debunked the long-peddled untruth about the Crusades. See for example, this debunking by military historian R. Ibrahim in
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2015/02/12/the-truth-about-the-crusades/
And in this interview https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2024/10/04/video-the-truth-about-the-crusades/
Ibrahim observes, “The truth, of course, is very different from the Fake History being peddled by the NYT and friends. The Crusades were a militant response to more than four centuries of jihadist aggression that saw three-quarters of the Christian world swallowed up by Islam. The particular Muslim invasions (between 1071 and 1095) that occasioned the First Crusade were actually motivated by noble — indeed, altruistic — sentiments. During that period and in the decades before it, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Christians (Armenians, Greeks, Syrians, etc.) were killed or enslaved, and tens of thousands of churches were ritually desecrated, torched, and/or turned into mosques. Think what “ISIS” did to Christians and other minorities in Iraq and Syria in the 2010s, but times a hundred, and for decades.
Nor were atrocities limited to Asia Minor or its indigenous Christians: “As the Turks were ruling the lands of Syria and Palestine, they inflicted injuries on [European] Christians who went to pray in Jerusalem, beat them, pillaged them, [and] levied the poll tax [jizya],” writes Michael the Syrian, a contemporary. Moreover, “every time they saw a caravan of Christians, particularly of those from Rome and the lands of Italy, they made every effort to cause their death in diverse ways.” Such was the fate of one German pilgrimage to Jerusalem. According to one of the pilgrims:
Accompanying this journey was a noble abbess of graceful body and of a religious outlook. Setting aside the cares of the sisters committed to her and against the advice of the wise, she undertook this great and dangerous pilgrimage. The pagans captured her, and in the sight of all, these shameless men raped her until she breathed her last, to the dishonor of all Christians. Christ’s enemies performed such abuses and others like them on the Christians.”
See also this scholarly interview by CWR of a professor on the subject of Christian Slavery under Islam which covers the origins of the Crusades as the Christian Greek Roman Emperor Alexius I Comnenos called for help from the West against the Muslim attacks against the Christian Roman Empire and how Pope Urban II gave him this help by organizing the First Crusade:
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/12/16/the-forgotten-history-of-christian-slavery-under-islam/
https://www.thepostil.com/author/dario-fernandez-morera/
There was enslavement of Christians and all sorts of other people by the Berbers, Arabs, and Ottomans.
Over a million Europeans were kidnapped into slavery but many times more Africans were marched into slavery on the Trans Sahara route. Some were sold to Christians as well as to Muslims and Jews. Slavery was an equal opportunity venture.
Please continue to pray for us it is our mother land.
I prayed for Africa just this morning.
🙂
Islam is incompatible with civilized society. To expect anything else is a fool’s errand.
See this scholarly interview on Christian Slavery under Islam by Father Connolly of CWR, with a contemporary illustration of the slave market in Islamic Constantinople:
https://www.thepostil.com/christian-slavery-under-islam-a-conversation-with-dario-fernandez-morera/
and historian R. Ibrahim account of just now another atrocity vs Christians in Egypt:
https://www.raymondibrahim.com/2025/05/29/video-nightmarish-attack-on-egypts-christians-oh-world-do-you-see/?jetpack_skip_subscription_popup
Video Nightmarish Attack on Egypt Christians “Oh World—Do You See?!”
Didn’t US Congressman Scott Perry tell the world that USAID was the main sponsor of terrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Why is everyone pretending about it? What is General Langley and his men in Africom doing in the midst of the genocide going on in Nigeria and the rest of the region. You can tell that the US does not want Africa to grow. Imagine that Gen Langley lied against Ibrahim Traore( the only good news from that region) in order to find reason to invade BurkinaFaso and destroy the little good the young man has done. What a shame!
It’s hard for me to understand exactly what’s going on in Burkina Faso today but it does seem there’s more alliance with Russia & less with France. Very sad overall health & well being situation there. I wish more was being done to alleviate that.
It is absurd and a traversed reply on the martyrdom of Christians by their brothers from Ibrahim’s son Ishmael.The article under scrutiny is between the two faiths not nations. Was Scott Perry advancing a religious issue or a state’s interest? In the so-called Holy Quran, some Ayas expressly recommend the slaying of non-believers, refer to others as infidels not worthy of living,recommend the enslaving of non believers!
Islam is divided between those that engage in terrorism and those that support terrorism. To denounce terrorism in the public domain is to sign a death warrant.