Dear Rev. Know-It-All,

I can't understand your defense of the Catholic practice of the worship of saints.  When the Romans took over the Church a couple centuries after Christ, they just turned pagan gods into Christian saints.

Now I see there is a new saint, “Saint Death” aka "Santa Muerte."  It is clearly demonic.  It is a combination of a skull and the grim reaper.

What have you got to say about this?

Noah Count

 I would refer you to my previous articles on the Spanish Inquisition:

You can’t have it both ways.  Either it’s a free country and people can believe whatever idiocy they want, or the church gets to hold inquisitions and threaten dire consequences for stupidity.

On occasion, the church has established a feast or promoted a devotion that has paralleled a pagan practice.  This is done to keep people from falling back into pagan practices.

For example, we aren't quite sure of the exact date of Christmas.  There was a tradition that it was in the early winter, at least according to St. Clement of Alexandria who wrote around the year 200.  The church in Rome decided to celebrate the birth of the Lord on December 25, the same time the Romans were celebrating the Saturnalia, a week long festival that was a heck of a lot of pagan fun (much like Christmas in America).

The celebration of Christmas at that time was designed to give the Christians of Rome something to focus on so that they wouldn't backslide for a week of heathen carrying on.  It wasn't the baptism of a pagan feast, it was a challenge to it.

The same is true of the feast of All Saints.  It was a refutation of the Druidic feast of Halloween.

Jews have done this recently with Hanukkah.  Hanukkah wasn't much of a feast in times past.  It's not a biblical feast in the Jewish sense.  Jewish kids would pester their parents for Hanukkah bushes and Santa Claus, so the Jewish community, especially the Lubavitcher Hasidim have reemphasized the true meaning of Hanukkah.  They aren't trying to accommodate us goyim.  Quite the opposite. 

No, the communion of saints is part of the earliest Christian belief, enshrined in her most ancient creeds.  It’s not a concession to paganism.

Santa Muerte, on the other hand, is quite another thing.

Santa Muerte, or santissima muerte in Spanish, simply means a holy death, something which is to be hoped for.  However, the word santo, which in Spanish means holy, is also used as the title for a saint.  In Spanish the one word suffices for two ideas.

There is no “Saint Death” in the Catholic Communion of Saints.

Perhaps Nahuatl speaking Aztecs who loved skull decorations and liked to keep large piles of sacrificed rotting heads on display, heard the Spanish phrase “a holy death” (una santa muerte) and thought, “Great! the Spanish have a death god just like we do!”

Well, they were wrong and anyone who venerates “Saint Death” is not practicing the Catholic faith and is just a little creepy.

Halloween and Mexican calaveras (skull decorations) are meant to poke a little fun at pagan beliefs.  When you take them  seriously you've got problems.

This culture of death may be looking for a patron saint but they won’t find it in the Catholic Communion of Saints. 

You’re free to disagree with what the Catholic Church  teaches, but it’s stupid to disagree with what you think the Catholic Church teaches.

My suggestion is that you get a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and get your Catholicism from that, instead of every avant-garde clergyman or ill-informed news reporter.

Then disagree if you so choose, or at least until I can get the Inquisition up and running again.

Your Friend,

Rev. Know-It-All