Atlanta Catholics plan prayer and reparation amid planned ‘Satanic black mass’

CNA Staff, Oct 21, 2024 / 13:20 pm

Catholics in Atlanta plan to fervently pray and make reparation ahead of and during an upcoming “black mass,” a sacrilegious event planned for Oct. 25 by the so-called Satanic Temple. 

Archbishop Gregory Hartmayer of Atlanta in an Oct. 8 memo urged all Catholics to counter the Satanic Temple’s “attack on the faith” through prayers of reparation and penance, calling the planned Friday event “a blasphemous and obscene inversion of the Catholic Mass.”

The Satanic Temple, which, according to its website, denies the existence of God and Satan, is a political activist group known for protesting religious symbolism in public spaces and mocking Christianity by offering “unbaptism” and hosting “black masses.”

In 2014, a planned “black mass” at Harvard University sparked considerable outcry from Catholics, as did another one later that year in Oklahoma City. 

A direct mockery of the Catholic Mass, a so-called “black mass” sometimes entails the desecration of the Eucharist, stolen from a Catholic church. The Satanic Temple website briefly describes the “black mass” as “a celebration of blasphemy, which can be an expression of personal liberty and freedom.”

The Atlanta Satanic Temple is selling tickets to the “mass,” which is set to be held at a performance venue northeast of downtown.

Hartmayer reiterated that Catholics should respond to “this attack to our faith through prayer, penance, and prayers of reparation.” He said he has asked each Atlanta parish to conduct a Eucharistic Holy Hour with Benediction to honor the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, ideally on or before Friday, Oct. 25, at 9 p.m. ET.

“Using a consecrated host they claim they obtained illicitly from a Catholic church and desecrating it in the vilest ways imaginable, the practitioners offer it in sacrifice to Satan,” the archbishop said. 

“This terrible sacrilege is a deliberate attack on the Catholic Mass as well as the foundational beliefs of all Christians. It mocks Our Lord Jesus Christ, whom we Catholics believe is truly present under the form of bread and wine in the Holy Eucharist when it has been consecrated by a validly ordained priest.”

“We commend our efforts to the Lord through the loving intercession of Mary, the mother of God,” he concluded.

In recent years, the Satanic Temple has engaged in pro-abortion advocacy, losing the various lawsuits it filed against state pro-life laws in Missouri and Indiana. It also announced last year the creation of an “After School Satan Club” at a Connecticut elementary school.

Critics have long suspected that the group is a hoax or simply exists to “troll” religious people, though the group strongly denies this.