Poor Mojo's Newswire

Officials in Nuevo Laredo have destroyed more than 35 statues dedicated to a "Death Saint" popular with drug traffickers—prompting protests from followers of the "folk Catholic" cult, who charge religious discrimination and have demanded a meeting with President Felipe Calderon. The statues, most depicting a robed skeleton resembling the Grim Reaper, line roads and highways around the Mexican border city. More than 30 such shrines have been destroyed in the campaign launched this week by city police backed up by federal army troops.

The cult of "Santa Muerte," considered the Patron Saint of Criminals and the Dispossessed, has been gaining popularity across Mexico's northern borderlands as the narco economy in the region has exploded. Low-level traffickers, forced to risk their lives and freedom for their livelihood, look to Santa Muerte—also known as "Santa Nina Blanca," or Saint of the White Child—for succor. Popular accounts hold that Santa Muerte will answer prayers from the evil as well as the good—even for a rival's death. Many of the statues are elaborate, marble constructions—some with electric lighting, and often festooned with candles and offerings. The owner of one statue, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation from police, told Texas' El Paso Times he spent $2,000 building his shrine. The actual sacred skeleton image is kept in a small church in Nuevo Laredo's Colonia Morelos neighborhood. The saint is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church.

City authorities said the roadside shrines were built without permission on public land. But their destruction enraged Santa Muerte church leaders—including Archbishop David Romo, who in a homily last Sunday called on followers across Mexico to hold protests against the demolitions. "It was both an open act of religious intolerance and an act of arrogance," Romo said. "We are entering a stage of religious and governmental terrorism."

The Vatican has quietly rejected at least three of President Obama's candidates to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See because they support abortion, and the White House might be running out of time to find an acceptable envoy before Mr. Obama travels to Rome in July, when he hopes to meet Pope Benedict XVI.

Italian journalist Massimo Franco, who broke the story about the White House attempts to find a suitable ambassador to the Vatican, said papal advisers told Mr. Obama's aides privately that the candidates failed to meet the Vatican's most basic qualification on the abortion issue.

Some 200 mosques in Islam's holiest city, Mecca, point the wrong way for prayers, reports from Saudi Arabia say.

All mosques have a niche showing the direction of the most sacred Islamic site, the Kaaba, an ancient cube-like building in Mecca's Grand Mosque.

But people looking down from recently built high-rises in Mecca found the niches in many older mosques were not pointing directly towards the Kaaba.

Pope Benedict's repeated gaffes and the Vatican's inability to manage his message in the internet era are threatening to undermine his papacy, Vatican insiders have said. ... The Pope's remarks about condoms, and a recent furore over his lifting of the 20-year excommunication of a British bishop who has questioned the Holocaust, has left him looking isolated and out of touch, prompting calls for a radical shake-up of the way the Holy See delivers its message.... The Pope is isolated and fails to adequately consult his advisers, said a Vatican source with 20 years' knowledge of the Holy See. Another Vatican insider described Pope Benedict's four-year-old papacy as "a disaster", recalling the pontiff's previous inflammatory remarks on Islam and homosexuality.