Atlanta Catholics Plan Prayer and Reparation Amid Planned ‘Satanic Black Mass’

Archbishop Hartmayer reiterated that Catholics should respond to ‘this attack to our faith through prayer, penance, and prayers of reparation.’ 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...