Today is the festival of one of the world’s more unusual saints; San Pascualito Muerte. What is so unusual about him? He is a skeleton, or at least that is what he is usually shown as.
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Let me explain. Pascualito was a moral and pious Franciscan friar who would probably have remained unremarked except by the most ardent hagiographers and clergy if it were not for events fifty years after he had died. In 1650 man was dying of cucumatz in what is now Guatemala when a skeleton clad in glowing robes appeared before him and introduced himself as the saint. To prove it the bony visitor promised that the plague would end when the man died in nine days. The man died and so did the plague: just as the slim spectre had foretold.
The church of San Pascualito
Ever since then people have prayed to this spectacular saint by using coloured coded candles; red for love, yellow for protection, black for revenge and so on. The church of San Pascualito in Tuxtla Gutierrez has a statue of a skeleton in a wheeled cart which represents the saint. The Spanish Inquisition formally prohibited his veneration but with no effect and even today he is not approved of by the Roman Catholic Church.
