Black Mass update


So the Black Mass went ahead in Oklahoma City yesterday. Apparently about 50 people took part in the ceremony inside the downtown Oklahoma Civic Center Music Hall, and those numbers were easily dwarfed by the number of Catholics who prayed, took part in services, and marched around the city center. You can see photographs of the event here.

It looks like a good time was had by all. The organizers of the Black Mass Dakhma of Angra Mainyu got a whole lot of publicity for their previously obscure group while Catholics got a lot of publicity for some of the stranger elements of their religion, like their beliefs in demon possession and exorcisms and the even weirder doctrine of transubstantiation.

Michael Ortega, a member of Holy Family, said he came to the event “because of the love and support of my church, and the love and devotion that I have for our Lord Jesus Christ.”

“The black mass is a sacrilege to what we firmly and truly believe in, that the host is actually the body of our Lord Jesus Christ incarnate. It is not a replica, it is not a symbol, it is the body of our Lord Jesus Christ.

“When they say, ‘Jesus come out, Jesus be gone,’ and when they stomp and spit on a consecrated host, once they steal one, then I believe they are actually stomping on the body of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Ortega said.

Catholics seem to be remarkably oblivious to how this belief might look to outsiders.

“When it’s all said and done, what do (they) really stand for?” [Diocese of Tulsa Bishop Edward J. Slattery] said. “They embrace evil and anger and revenge.

“What we preach is Christ, and him crucified,” he said, “God loving humanity. Forgiveness, love, mercy and peace.”

Slattery said that the Satanists themselves believe because they like to use a consecrated host in their black mass ritual.

“It’s not as though they don’t believe it. They hate it,” he said.

“We counteract hate by forgiveness, by love and by showing what is beautiful,” he said.

Catholic doctrine may be many things but beautiful it is not, seeing as how it wallows in images of a man dying a gruesome death on a cross and then telling his followers that they are actually eating his body and drinking his blood.

Comments

  1. Pierce R. Butler says

    I predict that Oklahoma will be hit smited by tornadoes this fall, and blizzards in the winter!

  2. says

    Satanism is based on Christian theology and the Christian worldview. It is nothing more than a Christian heresy.

    It might be interested to go to a place like Oklahoma City and hold a lecture series on various Christian heresies: Arianism (which holds that the Son is a lesser being than the Father), Nestorianism (which holds that the human and divine nature in Jesus are entirely separate), Psilanthropism (which holds that Jesus was merely a human prophet), Docetism (which holds that Jesus was so thoroughly divine that his physical body and suffering were illusions intended to demonstrate God’s love), Saebellianism (which holds that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are different modes of God rather than three Persons), and so on. The Arianism one would be especially fun: in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, the disputes between those holding Arian theology and those holding what would become the orthodox theology devolved, quite literally, into war in the streets, with groups of one position rampaging through neighborhoods dominated by the other position. Ending this violence and bloodshed is why Emperor Constantine summoned every bishop to Nicaea in 325, to settle once and for all the correct doctrine. I would be vastly entertained to see local Catholics screaming about how God will punish the city for teaching such doctrines.

  3. lanir says

    For what it’s worth, the transubstantiation thing seems to be one of those things that gets thrown out there as a mystery you’re supposed to believe but which most people for all practical purposes just ignore. Once you can recite the correct soundbyte on demand if it comes up you’re pretty much done with it. The church is used to the questions about cannibalism too but I forget the responses. Basically you get a pat on the head, told actual cannibalism is very, very wrong but this is different and they move on.

    Personally I find the monotheism but with three gods, I mean one god, but really three people but one… yeah that thing. It’s much more disturbing. Eating stale bread crackers and pretending you’re eating a magic sky person you like is certainly weird but so specific as to be effectively harmless. Saying “1 = 3” is math so horribly bad it can be disproven with the fingers on one hand, especially when making a big deal about how the “more than one” polytheistic people are somehow awful for unspecified reasons.

  4. moarscienceplz says

    When your holy books say Jesus cast out demons himself on multiple occasions, and even had conversations with the demons, it makes it kinda tough to back away from the exorcism thing.
    The cracker thing, I really don’t get, except that it would involve repudiating a whole lotta past Popes, so maybe that’s why they hang on to it.

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