Fed up with cellphones ringing during Mass, four Catholic churches in Monterrey, Mexico, are taking extreme measures to silence them.
They are illegally jamming cellphone signals with Israeli-made transmitters, the kind used to protect embassies and presidential motorcades from bugs and bombs detonated by phone.
"These devices have solved a very big problem for us," said Gloria Cardenas Aguero, secretary at the Rosario church. "This time in church belongs to God, and you should respect it."
The scourge of untamed cellphones is especially acute in Mexico because so many churches are old, stone sanctuaries with booming acoustics. Nearly two-thirds of telephone subscribers in Mexico use cellphones, according to the International Telecommunications Union.
Jamming cellphones is illegal in Mexico, the United States and most other Western countries. But Mexico's Federal Telecommunications Commission has looked the other way as the churches confound their parishioners' Motorolas and Nokias.
The churches say the devices work only inside the buildings.
The $1,500 jammers are boxes about the size of walkie-talkies. As churchgoers walk into the sanctuary, the devices overwhelm the phones with electronic noise. Within a few minutes, the phones show "no signal." Incoming calls don't ring, and calls are bounced to the phones' voice mail.
The churches say most cellphone offenders simply forget to turn them off, so there have been no complaints from the churchgoers.
The jammers were supplied by Rodrigo de la Mora Elizondo, who has a degree in electronic engineering. "The priest at Sacred Heart is a family friend, and one day he said to me, 'You know about these things; you have to help me solve this problem,' " de la Mora said.
De la Mora contacted Netline, an Israeli company whose staff includes former electronic-warfare specialists, and imported two of the company's jammers. With one at the church entrance and another hidden near the altar, silence was restored.
That was two years ago. Word has gotten around, and now the Rosario, San Juan Bosco and Our Lady Queen of the Angels churches all have jammers.
In the United States, cellphone jammers are supposed to be used only by embassies, the military, the Secret Service and police, who use the devices to isolate hostage-takers. Mexico also uses them in prisons to block smuggled cellphones.
But manufacturers of the devices say many jammers are being sold under the table. One company, Global Gadget, even sells one disguised as a cellphone. The demand is bound to grow as long as cellphones proliferate faster than good manners, manufacturers say.
"The wireless carriers will tell you it's an etiquette problem. But when it gets to the point where people are not using etiquette, it is my belief that the proprietor of a closed space has the right to enforce the etiquette," said Dave Derosier, founder of Washington-based Cell Block Technologies.