Vatican Official Denounces Santa Muerte as 'Sinister and Infernal'
The Mexican offensive against Santa Muerte (Saint Death) launched by former president, Felipe Calderon, has now gone global. In an interview last week with a Peruvian Catholic news site (Aciprensa), the President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, condemned the cult of the skeleton saint as "sinister and infernal."
Most of the statements made by Mexican bishops imply that devotees of Santa Muerte engage in Satanism unknowingly. Church officials can point to high profile criminal cases in which Santa Muertistas have committed heinous crimes in the name of the skeletal folk saint.
Human sacrifice, narco-assassinations and other lurid crimes have been committed in Mexico and to a lesser extent here in the U.S. by a small minority of devotees who believe that Saint Death sanctions if not blesses such nefarious deeds.
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