Since her explosion into the public eye in 2001, La Santa Muerte devotion has been controversial, associated with drug cartels and condemned by the Catholic Church. (Kingsbury & Chestnut 2020, 30-33) Despite this condemnation, most devotees identify as practising Catholics. (Calvo-Quiros 2022, 224) They believe La Santa Muerte is an intermediary who only performs miracles according to God’s will, much like an angel. (Calvo-Quiros 2022, 242)
Hearing about these practices can scare or offend the unfamiliar. However, if we pause our knee-jerk reaction, we can explore an important question: why did this belief develop and what does it say about the Catholic Church?
What is La Santa Muerte Worship?
La Santa Muerte is a Mexican folk saint who is depicted as a skeleton dressed as a nun, bride, queen, or even the Virgin Mary. (Chestnut 2011, 8) Coverage of this growing spiritual movement is dictated more by what is of interest to external audiences than what is important to her followers, so it is difficult to accurately characterize the forms of worship beliefs belonging to this non-centralized group. (Graziano 2006 257, Kristensen 2015, 549) However, the primary forms of ritual involvement are characterized as collective rosary events, lighting votive candles, and leaving offerings at public and private altars. Offerings might include money, tobacco, flowers, and tequila. Collective rosaries might begin with an offering of song. The host asks God for permission to invoke La Santa Muerte’s name, then the gathered crowd collectively recites a rosary which has been altered to feature La Santa Muerte instead of Mary. Some communities host masses, sacraments or charismatic events. (Chestnut 2011, 56-89)
Characteristic Damage
I will examine the development of La Santa Muerte devotion through the lens of characteristic damage, which captures the idea that sin produces damage in our world, not only to us but all things around us. (Winner 2018, 2) Creation has been corrupted by the Fall. Because humans have agency, we not only experience this damage in ourselves and the world around us, but perpetuate that damage through our own actions. We have the freedom to choose to do what is good or what is sinful and, in our choices to sin, we damage ourselves and the world around us. (Griffiths 2009, 38, 45) We intensify the sin into which we are born. Often, what kind of damage occurs is not arbitrary but a very specific expression of the thing which is being damaged – it is characteristic. (Winner 2018, 1-3)
An uncomfortable truth to face is that nothing is undamaged post-Fall and so that must include holy things. (Winner 2018, 3) Even liturgy is celebrated by sinners in a post-Fall world, and therefore is necessarily “damaged and imperfect”. (Griffiths 2014, 101) Because of this, what we view as holy might be leading us to grow in Christ and yet drawing us away from holiness at the same time. (Winner 2018, 3-4)
Here’s an example: Petitionary prayer is characterized by making requests. While prayer is holy, it is also damaged because our desires have been damaged. We ask for what we should not want. Petitionary prayer is damaged through the petitions themselves. (Winner 2018, 61-91) Lauren Winner highlights a compelling example using the prayers of slave owners in the Antebellum south: “Since religious people always pray about whatever they are concerned about, slave owners will pray about their slaves…In a slave society, prayer will be laced with slavery.” (Winner 2018, 77) This does not make petitionary prayer inherently sinful. It is still a sacred act but one that has been damaged through what it is.
Origins of La Santa Muerte
Devotion to La Santa Muerte arose in the context of high inequality, economic instability, and state and cartel violence. Mexico experienced swinging economic outcomes from the 1990s to 2000s, facing multiple periods of recession and recovery, in part due to global economic events, market forces and state action. In 2008, over half the population could not meet their basic needs. (Iniguez-Montiel 2014, 315-317) This is not simply an impoverished economy, but an unpredictable and unstable one. As inequality rose, cartel activity grew. (Enamorado et al. 2016, 137) Cartel activity, in turn, made the economy more unstable. (López Garcia 2020, 628)
During this era, cartels were also both a cause and effect of growing mistrust in the state. Government reforms meant to change the public’s perception of state corruption resulted in a crackdown on activities like street vending in low income neighbourhoods. There was a dramatic increase in incarcerations and people sat in jail for months awaiting trial. (Kristensen 2015, 551-555)
The government also set a military mandate to target cartel leaders. (López Garcia 2020, 627) Without leaders, cartels splintered. This led to turf wars, the escalation of public violence, and the expansion of criminal activities into kidnapping and human trafficking. (Michaelsen & Salardi 2020, 3) In short, as the government waged a war against cartels, civilians became increasingly exposed to violence. (Manian 2021, 3) In multiple ways, lower income communities felt the pressure of economic and political uncertainty.
Folk Saints
La Santa Muerte is an example of a folk saint. These are unofficial saints who gain recognition for miracles among a local community. (Kingsbury & Chestnut 2020, 28) This was actually how canonization happened for the first several hundred years of church history. (Woodward 1996, 17-18) Many “official” saints were established by popular assent in their era and have not been through a formal canonization process. (Calvo-Quiros 2022, 25)
Devotion to folk saints continues to be common throughout Latin America. (Calvo-Quiros 2022, 26) They are preferred to canonized saints because they are intimately tied to the specific lived experiences of devotees. Official saints may feel distant or uninvolved in people’s lives, but folk saints “lived out their lives on Latin American soil,” sharing culture and experiences of suffering with their devotees. (Kingsbury & Chestnut 2020, 28)
When socio-cultural systems are disrupted, vulnerable people use rituals to navigate these crises by expressing and discharging emotions, creating community identity, creating or reiterating ethical obligations, protecting or healing from evil, and offering re-creation. (Hoondert et al. 2021, 5, 8) Political despair is an essential component of folk saint devotions throughout Latin America, which function as a source of justice in the face of corruption and political and economic marginalization. People are seeking divine justice in the face of worldly injustice. (Graziano 2006, 267-269) When people light green candles, the colour for justice intercessions, they are reiterating a communal sense of ethics and protection from worldly injustice which they have no other means by which to access. (Chesnut 2012, 178, 199)
Accordingly, La Santa Muerte first gained widespread devotion amongst people surviving the prison system in the 1990s. By 2008, it had grown to include three hundred street altars in Mexico City, concentrated in the lower-middle class neighbourhoods most impacted by the fluctuating economy. (Kristensen 2015, 548-551) The majority of devotees are people for whom death, violence and political and economic uncertainty are ever-present. People pray for a “good death,” which is believed to be essential for passing purgatory into heaven. When one suffers a brutal death, families may spend many nights in prayer and ritual for the repose of their soul. (Kingsbury & Chestnut 2020, 29-41) Although violences and injustices disproportionately affect marginalized communities, wealth disparity ends at death. Everyone is equal before La Santa Muerte because they cannot take their wealth with them. (Chesnut 2012, 177-8)
What makes the damage of La Santa Muerte characteristic of folk saints is that it reflects the damage of the local community that venerates her. Because folk saints are entwined so intimately with the identities of those who venerate them, veneration will involve the myriad of their daily experiences. People involved in narco-trafficking do not venerate La Santa Muerte because she is the saint of cartels. Rather, narco-trafficking is part of their daily life and thus will be something they pray for, particularly in intercessions to a saint who understands their lived experiences. (Machado 2020, 69)
La Santa Muerte captures, in part, Mexico’s cultural and religious syncretism related to death. Death has been interwoven with Christian practice throughout history, including the grim reaper which developed in Europe during the Black Plague. This image was brought by Spanish priests to the Americas where indigenous people tied it to their own traditions of sacred ancestral bones. (Chesnut 2012, 29) Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations and La Calavera Catrina show the joyful, cultural tie that Mexicans have with death. (Kristensen 2016, 411-12; Chesnut 2012, 64) These symbols and practices intertwine the pre-Hispanic, colonial and post-colonial–a mosaic of pieces that produced the complex culture and religion of modern Mexico. (Kristensen 2016, 409; Saulsbury 2008, vi) La Santa Muerte captures some of this cultural and religious syncretism related to death. Within the cultural context of Mexico, and Catholicism’s broader history of venerating and displaying relics, perhaps our discomfort with the image of La Santa Muerte is overblown. For communities facing an ever-present reality of death, violence and precarity, it is no surprise that a miracle worker who embodies cultural values related to death has become the figure people venerate to defy or navigate death, violence and crime.
Canonization
Why do people find folk saints, and particularly a damaged one like La Santa Muerte, more accessible than canonized ones? Damaged folk saints are a signpost pointing to damage in the canonization process. The institutions of our church are “open to the structures of the world and not alien to them.” (Alonso 2023, 12) In other words, we bring our worldliness into the Church. For those at the margins of institutions of power, the very idea of holiness may feel inaccessible because of who we choose to canonize. Here are three examples of how La Santa Muerte enables people to regain power in the face of marginalization:
- Wealth & Power
Pursuing canonization requires significant wealth and bureaucratic capacity, making political power an inherent dynamic in the process. (Woodward 1996, 17, 35) One estimate from 1990 shows beatification alone costing $333,250USD ($830,000USD today). (Woodward 1996, 114) Wealthier dioceses are able to be more influential in pursuing canonization–a notable challenge for Mexican dioceses facing a context of economic instability and high poverty rates. (Coppale & Champion 2024)
Another aspect of power is clerical status. In the first thousand years of papal canonizations, fewer than 20% of saints were lay persons. (Woodward 1996, 118) Until the modern era, most lay people who were canonized mirrored monastic versions of holiness such as rejecting marriage and removing oneself from the world. (Woodward 1996, 72) Uneducated, working class, married lay persons have difficulty seeing themselves in the canon of saints. La Santa Muerte, a bride reflecting this community’s lived experiences, offers a vision of holiness that is possible to reach. (Calvo-Quiros 2022, 25) She does not judge but assists them to navigate lives outside of what others might consider acceptable, which makes people feel safe to turn to her to pray for success even in illegal business activities. (Machado 2020, 69) When La Santa Muerte answers prayers for money, devotees leave coins and bills on her altar as offerings of thanks. (Chesnut 2012, 67)
- Ethnicity and Colonization
The Catholic Church and the canonization process reflect the world’s ethnic and colonial power structures. As a result, Latin Americans are woefully under-represented in the canon of saints. Central America, for example, did not have a single canonized saint until 2002. (Barro & McCleary 2016, 385, 391) La Santa Muerte flips this power dynamic by making a Mexican woman the highest figure in the celestial hierarchy. (Chesnut 2012, 60) She does not have wine at her altar but tequila. (Chesnut 2012, 73) For those who bear tattooed icons of La Santa Muerte, the mestizo body becomes quite literally the altar of veneration. (Kingsbury & Chestnut 2020, 34)
- Gender
Until the end of the 17th century, women represented fewer than 25% of canonizations per century, and often far less. (Yarrow 2018, 74) In Latin America, Marian depictions are used to enforce uneven expectations on women of asexuality, self-sacrifice, silent suffering, passivity and caretaking. (Rangel Campon 1100-1) These norms impede Latina women’s autonomy, mobility and happiness. (Morgan Consoli & Unzueta 2049) In stark contrast to this, La Santa Muerte is known for her “capricious temper and taste for expensive food, clothes and mariachi music”. (Kristensen 2015, 558) In the precarious contexts described above where women are defined by their ability to quietly endure, La Santa Muerte offers an alternate image of womanhood that is freed from patriarchal gender roles and accesses the power of divine justice.
Conclusion
Conversations surrounding La Santa Muerte are often focused on shock and disapproval. While I am not seeking to affirm La Santa Muerte devotions as correct, I am identifying that all Christian practices are damaged and used to perpetuate damage. La Santa Muerte is part of this larger phenomenon. Structural sins like poverty, racism, and injustice undermine the moral life by limiting people’s agency to choose what is morally good. (Jackson-Meyer 2022, 47-8, 122) When people feel unable to access moral goods, and do not see themselves reflected in the institutional church, it makes the holiness of canonized saints seem inaccessible. When we perceive La Santa Muerte devotees as people operating outside of the rules instead of people seeking God in the messiness of a broken world, we miss the fundamentally holy desires that operate alongside the damaged ones in these practices. People who have been damaged through socio-economic oppression, political instability, and ostracization from the Church, venerate this folk saint because they are seeking that which is holy – to have their needs met, to be loved in the fullness of who they are, and to cling to eschatological hope in a world where the promises of God have not yet been fulfilled.
