Folk saint

(CC) Photo: Manuel Carlos Villalba
Bottles of water are offered to Difunta Correa in commemoration of her death by thirst.

A folk saint is a dead person or a "spiritually powerful" entity venerated as a saint but not canonized by any church. Like those which are officially recognized by a religious body, folk saints are deemed to act as intercessors with God, but many are also seen as acting directly in the lives of devotees.

These saints often include folk healers, sinners, indigenous spirits and folk heroes. Some are as likely to receive a request to curse an enemy or protect a drug runner as to heal a family member. Folk saints occur particularly throughout the Catholic world, and they are especially popular in Latin America, where most have small followings; a few are celebrated at the national or even international level.

Origins

Even prior to the split of Christianity from Judaism, prophets and holy people were honored with shrines. This tradition continued among the early Christians, who visited the shrines of martyrs to ask for their intercession with God. These early saints were not canonized, however. It was not until the end of the first millennium that the sanctity of martyrs and other venerated persons began to be formally recognized by the Church.

Thus, there is a precedent for the veneration of unofficial saints dating back to the earliest days of Catholicism. Folk saints gain notoriety in much the same manner as the early saints did, and indeed, in much the same way that later canonized saints have first become popular. Word of mouth spreads the news of miracles or good works performed during the person's life and "if exceptional fame is achieved, it may happen that after his death the same cycle of stories told during life will continue to be repeated." Popularity is likely to increase if new miracles continue to be reported after death. For example, Rosa de Lima, the first American saint, attracted "mass veneration beginning almost at the moment of the mystic's death" but was not canonized until half of a century later.

As the Church spread, it incorporated regions that celebrated deities and heroes that were not part of Catholic tradition. Many of those figures were incorporated into the local variety of Catholicism that resulted, meaning that the ranks of official saints came to include a number of non-Catholic or even fictional persons. An effort was made in 1969 to purge such figures from the official list of saints, though at least some probably remain. Many folk saints have their origins in this same mixing of Catholic traditions and local cultural and religious traditions. To distinguish canonized saints from folk saints, the latter are sometimes called animas or "spirits" instead of saints.

Frank Graziano explains the genesis of a folk saint on an individual level:

"...many folk devotions begin through the clouding of the distinction between praying for and praying to a recently deceased person. If several family members and friends pray at someone's tomb, perhaps lighting candles and leaving offerings, their actions arouse the curiosity of others. Some give it a try — the for and the to begin intermingling — because the frequent visits to the tomb suggest that the soul of its occupant may be miraculous. As soon as miracles are announced, often by family members and friends, newcomers arrive to send up prayers, now to the miraculous soul, with the hope of having their requests granted."

With the exception of a few whose histories seem to have been invented from whole cloth, folk saints tend to come from the same communities as their followers. In death, they continue to be active members of their communities of origin and are therefore embedded within a system of reciprocity that reaches beyond the grave. Devotees give prayers and offerings and folk saints repay the favor by performing small miracles in response to the particular needs of the community. Many folk saints inhabit marginalized communities, the needs of which are more worldly than others; they therefore frequently act in a more worldly, more pragmatic, less dogmatic fashion than their official counterparts.

Local character

As a result of the syncretic mixing of traditions, the influence of local culture, and the inclusion of folk saints as deceased members of the community, devotions to folk saints frequently take on distinctly local character. The contrast between the manner in which Latin American and European folk saints intercede in the lives of their followers provides a good illustration. In Western Europe, "the more pervasive influence of scientific medicine, the comparative stability of Western European governments and above all, the more effective presence of the institutional Church" have meant that unofficial holy people generally work within established doctrine. Latin American holy persons, on the other hand, often stray much further from official canon. Whereas European folk saints serve merely as messengers of the divine, their Latin American counterparts frequently act directly in the lives of their devotees.

During the Counter-Reformation in Europe, the Council of Trent released a decree "On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics, of Saints, and on Sacred Images," which explained that in Catholic doctrine images and relics of the saints are to be used by worshipers to help them contemplate the saints and the virtues that they represent but that those images and relics do not actually embody the saints. Folk saints are seen as intermediaries between penitents and the divine but are not considered powerful in and of themselves. A shrine may be built "that becomes the location for the fulfillment of the village's calendrical obligations and critical supplications to the shrine image — the village's divine protector," writes anthropologist and religious historian William A. Christian Jr., but "in this context the shrine image and the site of its location are of prime importance; the seer merely introduces it, and is not himself or herself the focal point of the worship."

In pre-Columbian Mesoamerican tradition, on the other hand, representation meant embodiment rather than mere resemblance, as it did in Europe. Thus, for Mesoamerican peoples images took on the characters and spirits that they represented whilst for European Catholics this was considered idolatry. Mesoamerican perspectives live on in the actions characteristic of folk saints in the region. These folk saints often act directly in the lives of their devotees, rather than serving as mere intermediaries, and are themselves venerated. Visitors frequently interact with representations of folk saints as though they were interacting with an actual person, observing the proper etiquette for speaking to a patron or a friend depending on the spirit's disposition, shaking hands, or offering it a cigarette or a drink.

Similar local variations may be observed in folk saints of any cultural region, as they may be in the local or regional preference of one official saint versus another. Such variation may be attributed to the cultural expectations of the saint's devotees.

Devotions

One might pay a visit to the shrine of a folk saint for any number of reasons, including general requests for good health and good luck, the lifting of a curse, or protection on the road, but most folk saints have specialties for which their help is particularly sought. Difunta Correa, for example, specializes in helping her followers acquire new homes and businesses. Juan Bautista Morillo helps gamblers in Venezuela and Juan Soldado watches over border crossings between Mexico and the United States. This is not so different from the canonized saints — St. Benedict, for example, is the patron saint of agricultural workers — but it would be hard to find a canonized saint to look after narcotraffickers, as does Jesus Malverde. In fact, a number of folk saints attract devotees precisely because they respond to requests that the official saints are unlikely to respond to. As James Griffith writes, "One needs ask for help where the help is likely to be effective." So long as followers come before them with faith and perform the proper devotions, some folk saints are as willing to place a curse on a person as to lift one.

An offering to a folk saint might include the same votive candles and ex-votos left at the shrines to canonized saints, but they also frequently include other items that reflect something of the spirit's former life or personality. Thus, Difunta Correa, who died of thirst, is given bottles of water; Maximón and the spirit of Pancho Villa are both offered cigarettes and alcohol; and teddy bears and toys are left at the tomb of a little boy called Carlitos in a cemetery in Hermosillo, Mexico. Likewise, prayers to folk saints are often paired with or incorporate aspects of the Rosary but (as with many canonized saints) special petitions have been composed for many of them, each prayer evoking the particular characteristics of the saint being addressed. Other local or regional idiosyncrasies also creep in. In parts of Mesoamerica, for example, copal is burned for the more syncretic spirits like Maximón, a practice that has its roots in the offerings made to indigenous deities.

As long as the spirits come through for their followers, their devotees will keep coming back. Word of mouth spreads news of cures and good fortune following petitions to a folk saint and particularly responsive spirits are likely to gain a large following. Not all remain popular, however. While official saints remain canonized regardless of their popularity, folk saints that lose their devotees through their failure to respond to petitions might fade from memory entirely.

Folk saints and the Church

In areas where the Catholic Church has greater power, it maintains more control over the devotional lives of its members. Thus, in Europe folk devotions that are encouraged by the Church are quickly institutionalized while those that are discouraged usually die out or continue only at reduced levels. For similar reasons, folk saints are most often found in marginalized communities and are rare in affluent districts. Nor are folk saints found in shrines to the canonical saints, though the reverse is often true: it is not uncommon for a folk saint's shrine to be decorated with images of other folk saints as well as members of the official Catholic pantheon. Shrines in the home, too, will frequently include official and unofficial saints together. Graziano explains: "Catholicism is not so much abandoned as expanded [by folk practitioners]; it is stretched to encompass exceptional resources. Whereas Catholicism (like scholarship) defends a distinction between canonical and noncanonical or orthodox and heterodox, folk devotion intermingles these quite naturally and without reserve."