Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and today, I wanna try to draw good out of a bad situation.

Now, if you are from Kansas or nearby, uh, and particularly if you're a Catholic, there's a good chance you know the bad situation I'm referring to.

On March 28th, which if you're watching this on the day it comes out, first of all, good on you, and second, it's tomorrow.

On March 28th, 2025, there is a planned Black Mass, uh, celebrated by a satanic group called the Satanic Grotto, intended to mock the Eucharist and to mock the Mass.

And I'm gonna explain a little more about what all of those things are about, and also, and maybe more importantly, how I think this is actually really important for us to take seriously.

Not in a way where we get alarmed or terrified by it, but in a way that we do two things.

Number one, recognize the spiritual warfare that is actually at the heart of Christianity, properly understood, and number two, recognize what this says about the Mass, and I'll just make the very short version of that argument right here.

There's a reason why the devil hates the Mass in particular, and if you are maybe someone discerning Catholicism, not sure what you should make of the Mass, that's good information for you to know, and I think that should help you to make the right decision.

So with that said, I gotta do a little bit of background, just explaining when we talk about Satanism, when we talk about the Black Masses, all that stuff, what do we mean by that?

Because we can have this idea of just, you know, kind of the cinematic version of Satanism, just this cult of people going around murdering innocent people and offering them to the devil and like that.

It's not really like that, and many so-called Satanists are actually just atheists kind of LARPing, kind of Renaissance Fair atheists, I heard someone recently describe them as, where it's just people who wanna dress up to be provocative or spooky.

Now, please understand.

Opening a door, even if you're opening it because you don't think there's anyone on the other side, can do real damage, but they aren't opening it mindful that there really is a powerful, evil entity that they might be letting in.

So, the group that i put this on, as I said, the Satanic Grotto, uh, Michael Stewart is one of the guys who leads it, and his definition of Satanism is pretty straightforward.

There are just two criteria.

We have those two basic, right?

That you're rebellious, that you venerate and identify with Satan in some way.

That's it, those two, right?

And so there's a diverse group of different organizations claiming the name of Satanist and a diverse group of organizations that seem to be Satanist even though they claim not to be.

It's complicated.

I'll explain a little more as we go.

Some of them are what are called theistic Satanists, ones who believe that the devil really does exist and they're trying to worship him.

Others are atheistic Satanists, which are usually literally atheists who don't believe in a literal devil, but use the symbol for provocative or political purposes.

So, running through kind of a very basic overview.

Uh, you have people like Anton LaVey.

He's the guy who wrote the Satanic Bible.

He's the founder of the Church of Satan.

He's probably the most famous Satanist, maybe of all time.

He has kind of an ambiguous relationship.

Publicly, he was in the atheist Satanist category.

This is all just like a symbol.

But if you read his 11 rules, number seven says that you need to acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires.

If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained.

So there are some hints, uh, that he wasn't, you know, a strict atheistic materialist who didn't believe in any kind of supernatural or spiritual forces because he seems to be a believer in magic in a more than metaphorical sense.

Additionally, there were those who were around him who said that he secretly did believe in and worship Satan.

And the most famous of them is, uh, actually a US military, uh, lieutenant colonel, Michael Aquino, which is, I'm hoping not related to the Aquino family that gave us St. Thomas Aquinas.

One does not know.

Uh, Aquino was a former, like, inner circle member of the Church of Satan that broke off because he didn't like some of the, uh, practices.

You know, people go into schisms.

And also because he was convinced that the devil had spoken to him.

Now, Aquino is one of the most explicit theistic Satanists in this sense.

He believes that there is a literal spiritual being, the Egyptian god, Set, who is known by various names, including in the Bible as Satan, and he wants to worship him.

Now, because they describe themselves as the Temple of Set rather than Satan, they will sometimes resist being called Satanists.

But because they think Set and Satan are the same person, I think it's fair to say these are literal theistic Satanists.

They are trying to worship the devil or the figure we call the devil.

And significantly, one of the members who joined that was Zeina LaVey, uh, Anton LaVey's daughter, who Anton LaVey very publicly baptized and consecrated to Satan, uh, when she was young.

And so she joined, I believe she eventually, like, split off.

It's a complicated, messy sort of situation, but she's still a Setian who still seems to be engaged in demonic spiritual practices.

So those are the kind of real deal Satanists, but they are, by basically any reckoning, a minority, uh, within the movements.

Like if you look at the number of people calling themselves Satanists, already a pretty small number, thanks be to God, most of them are just dorky atheists trying to be edgy.

And so that includes people like Douglas Mesner and Kevin Solig, who, uh, they started the Satanic Temple, so a lot of the stuff you've been seeing, particularly at Capitol buildings, is a political stunt .

being done by anti-theistic atheists.

And so, uh, if you're familiar, uh, Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jerry were their pseudonyms when they started the Satanic Temple.

You can get a sense for what they're about, uh, by listening to Douglas Mesner, aka Lucien Greaves, talk about, like, what the goal of their whole movement was.

An interview I did in Vice where the question was, Is the Satanic Temple a satanic or satirical group?

And I said, That is a common question.

I say, Why can't it be both?

And usually they use this line to show that we don't actually have any sincerity about us at all, that, um, this is all one big prank, a hoax, and that, uh, uh, the Satanism component doesn't mean anything to us at all, and I think it comforts a lot of people in this room to also think that as well.

But as a matter of fact, there's nothing disingenuous in what we're doing.

Um, the values we put forward are values we absolutely adhere to.

We're very, uh, clear at the fact that we're atheistic in that we feel that religion and supernaturalism can be separated from one another, and we feel that it only benefits us as non-believers that it is separated.

So, you'll see something going on there.

On the one hand, he's speaking at an atheist conference, this is the 2015 National Conference for American Atheists, and he's been called there, uh, in order to basically talk about how they can mess with religious people and troll them and make religious people afraid.

And if you think that's a mischaracterization, I'll, I'll give you pretty explicit evidence of that in a second.

But his response is that he knows it's gonna make these atheists uncomfortable, but that what he's trying to do in part is separate supernatural stuff from religion.

So, there does seem, again, to be some creeping in elements of occult spirituality, uh, in a genuinely demonic way, but by people who probably when pressed would say they don't believe in a literal Satan.

So, that's what you've got.

Like, if you imagine that most of the people who call themselves Satanists believe there's a literal Satan as described in the Bible, they don't.

Most of them don't.

Some do and have weird theologies about it, like the Septians, but most don't.

There are, however, some who are consciously or unconsciously toying with dark spiritual forces.

Even if they don't recognize those as genuinely satanic, they recognize there's something preternatural, or if, if you put Greaves' spin on it, supernatural about it, and they want this apart from religion.

That is genuinely alarming.

From a Christian perspective, we know what that is, and it's something to watch out for.

And so there are people who are playing around with black forces, whether they know it or not, but there are also people who are just trying to be provocative, just trying to troll, just trying to basically give a middle finger to the world around them.

So, Jamila Bey, who is, uh, the one who introduced Greaves, uh, she's written for, I think she writes for the Washington Post.

She gives a pretty good summary of what the American Atheists called them there for, and I'll let her speak to it.

We're gonna learn a lot, have a lot of fun, and please give us some ideas for how we can do the same thing and make the religious people who wanna tell us we can't be in spaces, um, run screaming the way they do when they hear your voice.

Lucien Greaves, thank you so much.

So, this is what we might call political Satanism.

It's the idea of using Satan either to kind of, uh, as a figure to express yourself or your agenda, or as a way of trying to scare your opponents or provoke them or troll them.

It's some kind of middle finger in the case of the American Atheists where it's just petulant antitheism at this point.

But in other cases, it's seizing upon Satan as a figure of positive change, as ridiculous as that might sound.

And so in that latter category, take people like Saul Alinsky.

Now, Saul Alinsky, I think it's pretty clear, was not literally a Satanist.

He did not worship Satan, didn't even pretend to worship Satan.

Nevertheless, you may have heard the allegation that he dedicates, uh, his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer.

And if you've seen the fact checks in places like Snopes, they'll say this is mostly false, and the reason they say mostly false is it's not technically a dedication page.

It's an acknowledgments page, and only, I think, an author would probably know the difference between those two.

But he has a page where he is giving three quotations, Rabbi Hillel, Thomas Paine, the atheist, and then his own quotation.

So, it's three quotations, and the one from him is that, We need to give an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical, upon whom all our legends, mythology and history – and who's to know where mythology leaves off and history begins?

Or which is which?

- the first Radical known to man, who rebelled against the Establishment, and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom.

Lucifer.

So, yeah, I mean, I would say that looks like a dedication to Lucifer.

If you wanna say it's not a dedication, it's an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement, I'm still not gonna say that's mostly false.

Nevertheless, y- you see those kind of games people play where it's Lucifer or the devil being a symbol of rebellion or just, like, you know, radical independence.

And so you'll see the devil invoked as a symbol by some elements of the Neo-Nazis, some elements of libertarians, and increasingly elements of the political left in the US, particularly the pro-choice left.

So, I think all of this actually helps to explain where this group, the Satanic Grotto, is coming from.

So, as I said, Michael Stewart is the guy who is kinda running the show for them, and he's explained that their group is diverse.

It's, he puts it, uh, in, in the terms of non-denominational, these different groups of Satanists.

He says, We have members from TST, that's the Satanic Temple, CoS, Church of Satan, and even Luciferians.

What makes you a Satanist?

What is it that defines you as a Satanist?

You know, to me, it's

To me, personally.

I'm atheistic, right?

Mm-hmm.

But it's having a rebellious attitude.

Mm-hmm.

I think that's probably one of the biggest things.

You know, you have to have that rebellious attitude that defines Satanism.

It's, it's the person and how they react to their environment-

Mm-hmm.

and the things that are going on in the world.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I think that's, that's, that's one of my biggest key factors right there, is the adversarial, rebellious attitude.

Right.

Some people are just born with it.

We are naturally that way.

And I think that's where a lot of Satanists originate from, right?

Right.

Down to their core, is that need to rebel.

In other words, for the Satanic Grotto, a lot of this isn't actually about believing in Satan, because they're atheists.

It's about the equivalent of, I don't know, getting a giant face tattoo or having a weird-looking beard where y- you have to use a rubber band on.

It's a way of s- showing how different you are, how, how special and unique you are compared to society around you, and how you don't fit in 'cause you're a rebellious nonconformist.

And so, just realize that's what it is, not an actual thought-out theological position.

Nevertheless, I mean, I wanna stress, this is about the dumbest actual rebellion you can do, because if the devil does exist, and he does, you're creating a real possibility to bring spiritual damage upon yourself and those around you.

Like, just get a weird face tattoo.

The worst that'll do is hurt your chances at employment.

And if it wasn't clear enough that this is what's actually going on, well, Michael Stewart says he's studied Saul Alinsky and community organizing and he is a pro-choice counter-protester for things like the Right to Life's marches in Kansas.

So, this is someone who i- this is a political thing.

This is, as well, just like a personal expression thing, not a theological kinda statement.

That's what's up here.

Now, additionally, you might be wondering, what is a Black Mass?

And this is a complicated question to answer, because a lot of the alleged Black Masses in history have been alleged by people who didn't celebrate them themselves and weren't defending them.

They were accusations other people celebrated.

But broadly, it's any kind of liturgical rite meant to mock the Mass, and particularly involving desecration of a consecrated Eucharist.

So, there's all sorts of, uh, versions of this, from, you know, like, in trying to inflict physical violence upon the Eucharist by stabbing it, to having an altar with a naked woman to, you know, as a sign of sexual desecration, to, you know, slaughtering, uh, small children on, you know A lot of these are probably made-up stories, but nevertheless, this is what a Black Mass historically is or is alleged to be.

And so, if you look at the, uh, the flyer that the Satanic Grotto puts out for what they're claiming they're going to do, the components are, an opening, a denounciation of the Word, a denounciation of Christ, desecration of the Eucharist, corruption of the blood, or coo-ruption of the blood, and then closing.

It's hard to know how many of these typos are meant to be puns of some kind and how many are just bad spelling, but there you have it.

It's meant to clearly mock Christ and to desecrate the Eucharist, and that's something that we as Catholics take extremely seriously.

Back in 2014, there was a proposed Black Mass in Oklahoma and it was thwarted, thanks be to God, because the Archdiocese of Oklahoma, uh, Oklahoma City, uh, very quickly filed suit and said, You've stolen the Eucharist from a church.

I mean, if you've got a consecrated host, you clearly didn't consecrate that yourself.

You're not a Catholic priest.

You've stolen this.

You need to return the Eucharist.

And they succeeded.

They returned the consecrated host, and I have no idea if they went forward with any kind of like Black Mass, but it was no longer a desecration of the Eucharist 'cause they no longer had a Eucharist to desecrate.

And so, this time around, uh, Michael Stewart, uh, claimed that they'd already secured a consecrated host, and so the archbishop, Archbishop Naumann of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, filed suit.

Same thing.

This time, it resolved a little differently because under oath, Stewart said he actually didn't have a consecrated host.

He was lying earlier.

Uh, they were not in possession of the Eucharist.

Now, you might be saying, Okay, well, how do we know we can take a Satanist's word for it?

I'm not sure you can, but he did have receipts.

He did have receipts proving that he didn't get this from a church.

He got this off of Amazon and that they were unconsecrated hosts.

So, turns out he maybe doesn't even know what consecration is or the difference between bread and the Eucharist, which, by the way, so many of the articles covering this describe this as a symbol of Jesus, which is not what a consecrated host is.

The Eucharist is Jesus.

If you want a book on that, I've written one by that name.

But the point being, this isn't, it would seem, a real Black Mass, in as much as we can describe anything as a real Black Mass.

So, this is a pretty ineffective kind of act of desecration for a number of reasons.

It doesn't mean it's harmless.

I think it's still doing real damage, but calling it a Black Mass, there's a reason I've been kinda using quotation marks.

And ironically, I think people like Anton LaVey would find this kind of stupidity ridiculous.

He actually spoke against this kind of Black Mass in The Satanic Bible, which, I don't know, is not the place you expect to find opposition to a Black Mass.

He puts it like this.

He says, No other single device has been associated with Satanism as much as the Black Mass.

To say that the most blasphemous of all religious ceremonies is nothing more than a literary invention is certainly a statement which needs qualifying, but nothing could be truer.

Okay, well, first of all, if it needs qualifying, then it's also not true that nothing could be truer.

Those two statements can't both be true, but fine.

That's the least of our issues here.

he's right that many of the kind of legends of Black Masses are probably just the invention of somebody's macabre imagination, not an actual liturgy that's gone on.

When you have, like, the mass murder of small children at these satanic altars, and no bodies found afterwards, sometimes people are just dreaming this stuff up out of kind of a religious paranoia.

I think it's totally fair to acknowledge that.

And it's fair to acknowledge that much of what we know about, whatever Black Masses may have occurred, like in the medieval period, much of what we know comes from unreliable opponents of those people.

So, there may well be actual satanic rites that were being performed, but our knowledge of them is, is heavily compromised.

And on that point, I, I don't think there should be any major disputes.

And LaVey argues that the church even, like, wants this kind of image to exist, because it shows how gross Satanists are.

He says, If this sounds repugnant, then the After describing, I'm not going to go into all of the, the gory details he described.

I think I gave enough of a graphic, uh, depiction earlier.

He says, If this sounds repugnant, then the success of the reports of the 'Black Mass' and keeping the devout in church is easy to understand.

No decent person could fail to side with the inquisitors when told of these blasphemies.

Now, I would just point out that, rhetorically, what he's doing in invoking the inquisitors is the same thing he's accusing Catholics of doing in invoking the Black Mass.

You take something that is likely to turn your audience against the person you're describing to try to win them over to your side.

It's a clever move, and you see that kind of thing a lot.

But the idea there is pretty simple.

Like, Black Masses, to the extent they exist, the church does want to call out and say, Hey, this is evil and demonic, and is a reason we should be Christian and not demon worshipers, say.

But LaVey has a deeper critique as well.

He says th- this is not actually something Satanists do.

The usual assumption is that the satanic ceremony or service is always called a Black Mass.

A Black Mass is not a magical ceremony practiced by Satanists.

The Satanist would only employ the use of Black Mass as a form, a form, of psychodrama.

This is written in 1969, when everybody is kind of doing this kind of ridiculousness.

But yeah, sure, psychodrama.

And that's actually gonna be a fair way, I think, of characterizing the proposed Black Mass of just a public expression of feelings.

This is LaVey's argument, that such a kind of protest Black Mass, if you want to call it that way, uh, makes sense in the medieval period, does not make sense today.

That if you want to say, I'm rebelling from the system, and to show you I'm rebelling, I'm going to desecrate all the stuff you consider holy, well, in the medial- in the medieval period, that would obviously be the Mass, because everybody's Catholic.

Today, it doesn't really make sense to do that.

Here's his argument.

Any ceremony considered a Black Mass must effectively shock and outrage, as it seems to be the measure of its success.

In the Middle Ages, blaspheming the Holy Church was shocking.

Now, however, the church does not present the awesome image it did during the Inquisition.

The traditional Black Mass is no longer the outrageous spectacle to the dilettante or renegade priest that it once was.

In other words, like, yeah, if this is 1300 and you want to show the world how rebellious you are, a Black Mass definitely accomplishes that.

But in 1969, being anti-Catholic is not a shocking move.

It's just normal.

And I would argue that in 2025, that's also the case.

Like if you I understand, there are a lot of people who hate the Catholic Church because of its stances on political issues.

But maybe you've noticed, this is not a small number of people.

Maybe you've watched TV and thought to yourself, Huh, are Catholic priests usually portrayed in comedies or dramas or, fill in the blank, in a positive light or a negative light?

In other words, whatever the sacred cows are, the untouchable things of our modern era, the Catholic Mass does not appear to be one of those.

As evidenced by the fact that almost no journalist covering this story even knows what the Mass is, or the difference between a Protestant and Catholic understanding of the Lord's Supper/Eucharist.

Like, it is just not 1350 anymore.

And Anton LaVey agrees.

He says, A 'Black Mass' today, like if you're trying to go for the thing that's shocking and outrageous and all this, would consist of blaspheming of such'sacred' topics as Eastern mysticism, psychiatry, the psychedelic movement, ultraliberalism, et cetera.

Patriotism would be championed, drugs and their gurus would be defiled, acultural militants would be deified, and the decadence of ecclesiastical theologies might even be given a satanic boost.

Now, he's being funny here, but he's saying, like, the really rebellious, renegade thing isn't, I'm not a Christian.

It would be like, I believe the teachings of the Catholic Church.

That in 1969, or I would add 2025, that kind of stance is actually much more shocking and rebellious than, you know, I'm a person in my 20s or 30s who likes to wear black and have, like, pentagrams and stuff.

That no longer raises an eyebrow nearly as much.

And certainly, being anti-Catholic, being anti-Mass is just not some bold, avant-garde, edgy position.

So, I would suggest that even according to Anton LaVey, that the proposed satanic grotto kind of Mass, it fails.

It's, like, not a good Black Mass, because it's going after the true Mass rather than any of the kind of cultural untouchable things of the day.

Now-I would suggest you see this even in these sort of, uh, unique way, to put it gently, that the Black Mass is described as being proposed for tomorrow.

There is, after the ritual from 11:30 to 12:00, a 12:30 PM praise and worship.

Now, obviously it's to, like, praise and worship the devil.

But the fact that you liturgically innovated even the Black Mass is actually a little bit embarrassing.

There's something, a kind of darkly comical about the whole thing.

And if that's not enough, when you read their description of what this is about, it's about expressing their beliefs and emotions.

And then it's, for us this is therouputic blasphemy.

I cannot tell if blasphemy was supposed to be a play on, like, it's a blessing blasphemy.

But given how badly the word therapeutic is spelled there, I think he just doesn't know how to spell therapeutic or blasphemy.

Fine, fair enough, but how do you not have someone spellcheck your flyers?

This is the other abomination going on, and it's against grammar.

So, therapeutic blasphemy, and represents how religious oppression has shaped our rebellion.

Look, Catholics in Kansas, last I checked, were somewhere between about 13% and 17%, roughly the portion of the population African Americans are in the US. If you think that a group that size is controlling the state and oppressing you, that's laughable.

Like, it just, that doesn't make sense.

You don't live in that society.

So, you know, you can take off your Handmaid's Tale bonnets, or your, you know, Satanic costumes, and just live in reality.

And the reality in which you live isn't one in which the Catholic Church has less political sway now than it did a generation ago, or two generations ago.

Before that, may be different, because it was a pretty oppressed minority itself in the US. But, oh yeah, this has never been a Catholic country.

So, targeting the Catholic Mass points to something corrupt and absurd, and I would suggest genuinely demonic, even though the people who are articulating it maybe aren't aware of the demonic forces present.

So, it just becomes this whole thing about feelings and the like, and, I don't know, it just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that's going to, uh

Make the religious people who want to tell us we can't be in spaces, um, run screaming the way they do when they hear your voice.

So, perhaps the best way of describing it is going back to that original claim.

In the same Reddit post in which he claimed that they had a consecrated host, he said what was going to make this special as a Black Mass is, We plan to lean into expressing our own personal emotions.

And hey look, I think it's really good that you can express your own personal emotions.

That is about the least shocking, edgy, controversial thing you can do in therapeutic America.

You don't need a permit from the State of Kansas to express your own personal emotions.

But fine, this is what Black Masses have descended into.

And don't get me wrong, I'm happy that this is not a real Black Mass, and I'm disappointed that there will be actual acts of religious desecration, and they should be recognized for what they are.

They're hate crimes.

If hate crime means anything, these are hate crimes.

When you get a Bible for the purposes of ripping it up, you're clearly acting in a way meant to offend, shock, humiliate another person's religion.

I don't know, it seems like if someone was burning a Quran, there would be no question in the mainstream media that this was a hate crime.

And yet, for some reason, the only religion viewed as worth protecting is this fake Satanism.

So, so much for the Black Mass, so much for the fake Satanists.

What can we draw from this that's good?

And I don't just want to mock this.

I do want to mock it a little bit, it's pretty dumb.

But what can we take from this positively?

And I would suggest that what we should take from it is posing the question, would Satan cast out Satan?

And I'm aided here, well, you'll see.

I want to start with House Resolution number 6016.

This passed, I wanna say like a 110 to 10, something like that.

I don't have the exact number in front of me.

And it's a non-binding House Resolution, but it's just denouncing this Black Mass, and it's actually kind of striking it didn't get unanimous, uh, kind of approval.

But it shows that even a lot of non-Catholics think this kind of maneuver is gross.

So, not only does this fail from, like, a Satanist perspective of you're not really rallying, uh, everybody and shocking them, it also fails from a Saul Alinsky perspective, that you're not getting people organized for some greater political cause.

You're just making them not like you.

So, on either count, I think the Black Mass fails, but I want to draw your attention to what I think should be pretty basic.

The planned Satanic worship ritual is an explicit act of anti-Catholic bigotry, and an affront to all Christians.

And then it goes on to be described as a despicable, blasphemous, and offensive sacrilege, to not only Catholics, but all people of goodwill.

But I want to focus your attention on that.

The Black Mass is particularly in opposition to the Catholic Church.

Now, that may be obvious.

That's pretty basic.

It's certainly historically where the Black Mass comes from, it's why it's called the Black Mass, and so on.

What can we make of that?

Well, I want to turn, uh, of all people, to Michael Stewart, the organizer of the Satanic Grotto.

So, when it was announced they, they were being pushed outdoors from the capitol by Governor Laura Kelly, someone commented with the frankly kind of insane comment, She's the OG devil worshiper.

That Laura Kelly invented devil worship.

I don't think they mean that, but that's what they claimed.And Michael, uh, Stewart, the guy who founded this satanic grotto, responded by saying, Why would a devil worshiper shut down devil worshipers?

And twice he misspelled the word.

Worshipers.

Doesn't matter.

He's right, and although he probably doesn't realize it, he's almost quoting Jesus Christ verbatim, because in Matthew 12, when the Pharisees complained and Jesus was doing exorcisms and they said, It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons, Jesus makes almost the exact same point that Michael makes, which is, Yeah, it doesn't make any sense.

He says, Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and No city or house divided against itself will stand.

And, If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself.

How then will his kingdom stand?

Right?

So it doesn't make sense to say, yeah, the devil is fighting the devil.

So here's what I would suggest, any Christians watching this.

I know, and you know, that many of the people who are putting on Black Masses and the like are LARPing as demon worshipers and as Satanists, and they're, they're trying to be edgy and provocative, and so on.

But hopefully you also know that behind this are truly dark spiritual forces, that this is not of God, and that this stuff is coming, in some or all of these cases, authentically from Satan, authentically from hell, that these ideas are not simply their own, but they're being encouraged to do so by a series of diabolical temptations.

I hope that is not a stretch to believe in as a fellow Christian.

Like, if you're a Catholic, if you're a Protestant, if you're a whatever, hopefully you realize, like, yeah, if the devil's tempting anybody on anything, then one of the most obvious places of temptation would be the people who find themselves performing satanic rituals.

Like, if we can't say that might be satanic, that doesn't leave a lot that could be described that way.

So if that's true, why does the devil hate the Mass?

Because consider a few of the popular Protestant critiques of the Mass.

One critique is simply that the Mass is evil because it's idolatrous.

So this makes sense on its face.

As Catholics, we believe that the bread and wine, when consecrated, are not just a symbol of Jesus's body and blood, but again, actually become the flesh and blood of Christ.

We offer worship to Christ in the Eucharist.

Like, when the Eucharist is displayed, we fall down in adoration and worship.

Now, that is either very high act of Christian worship or an extreme act of idolatry.

And I would suggest, if it's an extreme act of idolatry, you would think the devil would be like, Yeah, leave that one alone.

We want them to do that, because idolatry helps my diabolical purposes.

And yet, we don't see that.

Now, that's an argument on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

But even among people who believe Christ is present, somehow, in the Eucharist, there is still a second objection, that the sacrifice of the Mass, by presenting Christ to the Father is evil and blasphemous and so forth.

So here is one very confident, very ill-informed Protestant's explanation for how Catholics officially teach that we re-crucify Christ.

I'll explain why that's not true in a second, but here you go.

Number one, because the Roman Catholic Church is wrong, because of the doctrine of Christ being offered over and over in the Mass.

When the priest went hoc est corpus meum and lifted the host up and down, Roman Catholic dogma, that's their doctrine that's written in all of their books, say that the priest is crucifying Christ again for the people.

So Hebrews 8:10 says Jesus was offered once for all.

The Roman Catholic Church offers Jesus Christ every time there's a Mass, on every altar, in every church around the world, all day long.

And that is probably the, the worst doctrine of Romanism, is the Mass and the re-crucifixion of Christ.

So I'm gonna show you that none of that was true.

Like, Catholic sources do not teach that we re-crucify Christ.

This is not a dogma of the church.

This guy, who, by the way, has 500,000 YouTube subscribers, who there's 344,000 views of this insanely ignorant video.

You can literally just type in Mass crucifying Christ and then CCC for the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Google's terribly unreliable AI overview will actually do a better job by saying the Catholic Church teaches that the Mass is a re-presentation, not a re-crucifixion of Christ's sacrifice on the cross.

And then it gives details.

And somehow this guy, who put together an entire talk about church teaching, uh, somehow feels comfortable claiming falsely that this isn't just his understanding of Catholic theology, but an actual dogma declared as such in all of the sources of the Catholic Church.

So let's look at a couple of those sources real fast.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, this is literally, like, the 101 place you go.

If you wanna know what do the Catholics believe about XYZ, this is a great place to look.

When it's discussing the Eucharist, in paragraph 1366, it quotes the Council of Trent, which spoke in an authoritative way on this question.

And it says, and I'm gonna quote here, Christ, our Lord and God, was once for all to offer Himself to God the Father by His death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption.

Ha!It's almost as if the catechism of the Catholic Church and the Council of Trent, and if you wanted to press me on this, I don't know, several dozen other sources, if not more, that are official church teaching in a magisterial kind of way, clearly say, We don't believe we are crucifying Christ again.

As Hebrews says, this is a once for all act, Christ's death on the cross.

But okay, let's keep reading.

But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper, on the night when he was betrayed, he wanted to leave to his beloved spouse, the Church, a visible sacrifice, as the nature of man demands, by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and its salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of the sins we daily commit.

So it is explicitly not a re-crucifixion.

It is explicitly a re-presentation.

Google AI, one.

This guy, zero.

Like, this is basic.

In the next paragraph, we understand why we can say this is still the sacrifice of Christ.

The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice that, I've mentioned this several times, I did an entire two-hour-long debate on this with James White, a sacrifice in the Jewish world, and for that matter in the pagan world, wasn't just the act of killing.

There was an offertory aspect.

You set aside the victim or the object, uh, for sacrifice.

Then there was killing, and then in the case of food sacrifices, including, uh, the Passover, significantly, you then had to eat the sacrifice to be united to it.

The Jewish Encyclopedia has a great article on this involving the Passover sacrifice.

I might do a video just on that topics, and you might hear some of this again.

But the point is, it's not a re-crucifixion.

It's not a re-sacrifice.

And the same Christ who once for all, who, who in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross, is contained and is offered in an unbloody manner.

Now, I understand Protestants who don't have a sacrificial theology, who don't know how sacrifice works in the Bible, might read that and be confused.

How is eating the Passover lamb the same sacrifice as the Passover lamb being slain the day before?

Good question.

We can talk about that.

It's all one sacrificial action in Judaism and in Christianity.

Some people aren't familiar with this.

I totally get it.

But one thing you can objectively say is, it's ludicrous to say we are re-crucifying Christ when we explicitly say this is once for all, only happens once, and so on and so forth.

But fine.

This is nevertheless tied to this idea that the mass being offered is this horrible action.

So Martin Luther was a particular opponent of this.

He hated this doctrine.

In his On the Abrogation of the Private Mass, he says, The priest offers up once again the Lord Christ who offered himself only once.

Now notice, he's making the same conflation you just heard.

Just as he died only once and cannot die again or be offered up again.

For though his one death and sacrifice, excuse me, Through his one death and sacrifice, he has taken away and swallowed up all sins, yet they go ahead and every day offer him up more than 100,000 times throughout the world.

According to Luther, They thereby deny, both of their deeds and in their hearts, that Christ has washed sin away and has died and risen again.

Then he says this, and this is a kicker.

This is such an abomination that I don't believe it could be sufficiently punished on Earth if it rained pure fire from heaven.

The blasphemy is so great that it must simply wait for eternal hellfire.

Horrible, shocking kind of language.

He wants to see all priests damned to hell, him, an ex-priest, because of their offering the mass, because he thinks this is a terrible abomination.

But I think he does a good job.

This is quoted in Table Talk.

Uh, Table Talk is sometimes unreliable, but we have it in so many other of his writings.

I, I think it's trustworthy here, and it's gathered by Lutherans, so it's not like gathered by people who don't like Luther, but it's just people recording things he'd said.

In Table Talk, he, I think he does a good job of laying out the stakes.

He says, No man can make the papists He can't say Catholics, 'cause that would acknowledge that, you know, he's not Catholic.

No man can make the papists believe that the private mass is the greatest blaspheming of God and the highest idolatry upon Earth, an abomination the like to which has never been seen in Christiandom since the time of the apostles.

And then he says, They hope, meaning we, that to be the most upright and greatest service of God, which in truth is the greatest and most abominable idolatry.

So, if you take the mass seriously at the level of theology, I actually don't know why more Protestants don't consider this.

I've watched, for job reasons, not just for fun, I've watched a lot of videos of people explaining why Catholicism is evil or why Catholics aren't Christians, et cetera, and a lot of it is just really secondary stuff.

Oh, we've got different books in the Bible.

We don't like what you guys do in terms of asking Mary and the saints to pray for you, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think all that stuff is missing the mark completely.

Like if you want to show that Catholics aren't Christians, you want to show they're idolatrous and are engaged in abominable practices, Martin Luther is your guy, because this is the actual fight.

There's two possibilities, and I see only two.

Number one, as he says, this is the most upright and greatest service of God.

We are offering divine worship.

There is no higher offering you can make than the offering of Good Friday, and that we continue to present this offering to the Father.

Or number two, this is this horrible, abominable idolatry that is completely damnable.Those are the only two positions I think you could reasonably take if you understand the theology of the sacrifice of the mass.

And so then I would just ask you, why would a devil worshiper shut down devil worshipers?

Why would Satan drive out saint?

If this is really wicked, then don't do a black mass.

Leave the mass alone, because it's the worst offense you could possibly have.

It, a black mass is gonna be less blasphemous than the regular mass.

Do you see what I mean?

So if Satan is at all involved in Satanism, which I think it's fair to say he is, it makes no sense why he would push people towards a black mass.

Why not have them mimic, mock, desecrate, defile a Protestant service if that's the thing that is giving honor to God?

Why not have them do that?

Wouldn't that be the logical thing if that's the highest act of Christian worship?

And yet what does he have them do instead?

Now, I debated whether to include this next part because I thought there was no way it could be true.

But Martin Luther, one of his arguments made against the mass was actually invoking the devil having spoken to him.

Now, I realize that sounds incendiary, but it's right there in Luther's works.

This is Luther's Works, Volume 38, uh, Word and Sacrament, Volume 4. It's, uh, beginning around page 149 in his argument against the private mass.

And I should note, I'll explain more in a second, that he might mean this in a non-literal way, like the Satanists of old or the Satanists now, where he might be using the devil as a literary figure rather than explicitly saying he's getting his arguments from the devil.

But I'm gonna give you Luther's arguments from Satan against the mass that he thinks we should listen to, and that I think we shouldn't listen to.

He tells this story where he says, Once I awakened at midnight and the devil began the following disputation with me in my heart, for he's able to make many a night bitter and troublesome for me.

Okay, already that's a bit of a red flag.

Listen, you very learned fellow, did you know that you said private masses for 15 years almost daily?

Did you not in reality commit sheer idolatry with such a mass?

And did you not worship there simply bread and wine rather than Christ's body and blood and enjoin others to worship them?

So that's the framing.

And here, I wanna quickly caveat that this doesn't appear in the original versions of this work against the private mass.

This is only in the third edition of it.

And so the editors of Luther's work tell us that they don't think this really happened, that they think he's doing this just as a literary device, and maybe, maybe they're right.

Uh, I think it's still a weird and disturbing argument, but it might be more than that.

He might have decided in the third edition of this argument that he's making to tell a real story that happened.

It's a pretty lengthy, um, argument that he makes or that he describes the devil as having made.

And it's kinda bizarre to hear a Christian say, Here's what the devil said, and we're supposed to side with the devil and not with the church, but this is what he does, and there's pages of this stuff.

Luther argues that, The devil can kill the body, but he can also scare the soul with disputes so that it almost departs from the body, and he's quite often very nearly done to me.

Now, he challenged me in this dispute, and I did not really want to be guilty of such a number of abominations in the presence of God, but wanted to defend my innocence, so I listened to him to hear the grounds on which he opposed my consecration and my consecrating.

Listen, this is what Eve did.

Don't do that.

This is kinda 101.

Don't get in a battle of wits with the devil.

And one of the reasons we don't, well, it's right before that.

The devil knows how to muster his arguments well and make an impression with them, and he possesses a convincing, powerful way of speaking.

Like, yeah, you get into an argument with the devil, you might come away thinking the devil is right because he is smarter than you, but he's also wicked , and you know he's wicked, so why are you listening to his theological arguments, Luther?

But okay.

Luther goes on to try to defend himself against the devil after several pages of the devil's arguments against the mass, and particularly the mass said in private.

Luther says, Well, I said mass according to the faith and intention of the church, for even though I did not have the right faith and intention, the church did have the right faith and intention.

So he's r- again, revealing kind of a lot about himself and the deficiencies of his own faith, but he is nevertheless trying to argue, Well, you know, the church still has the right intent.

And then the devil tells him, Uh, you can't really know that, and so on and so forth.

And so he, uh, comes to the conclusion that the mass is actually evil, that the mass in the Catholic sense should not be celebrated, and as we heard before, it is the greatest blaspheming of God and the highest idolatry upon Earth.

Now, I would pose, how likely is it that you can trust the devil when he tells you that?

And so when you see the devil tempting Martin Luther to reject the mass or when you see Satan as mocking the mass, these are really good arguments to believe that the mass really is, as Catholics have always held, the most upright and greatest service of God, that this is the heart of what divine worship is meant to look like upon Earth.

All right, there's one last point I wanna make, and this is one I think we should all take to heart.

Whatever your view is on the mass, this is something we should seriously remember, which is that in the Christian life, we should be taking spiritual warfare more seriously.

And I say this with a little bit of hesitation, because sometimes there can be a sort of unholy and unhealthy interest in the macabre and the dark and the demonic, and I'm not suggesting that.

But I do think that we need to take, well, Ephesians 6 seriously.

When St. Paul says that we need to, Put on the whole armor of God because we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principality and this, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.We need, in his words, to stand against the wiles of the devil.

Now, Saint Thomas Aquinas has a beautiful commentary on this passage.

He says, We need to remember that our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, so that when flesh and blood attack us, it's not of themselves principally, but from a higher moving force, namely from the devil.

When Satanists are at work, even atheists who don't think they're really Satanists, we need to recognize in that that Satan himself is actually at work.

And then he quotes a medieval, like, scriptural gloss which says, Evil men are horses and the devil's their riders.

Hence, if we kill the riders, the horses will be ours.

Now, think about a medieval war, 'cause that's the imagery being invoked there.

When you're at war, it's easy to imagine that the horse bearing down upon you, threatening to stampede you and stomp you is your enemy.

It's not.

That horse does not have a malicious bone in its body towards you.

It is being driven towards you by its rider, and so you would defend yourself against the rider.

Well, likewise, as Christians, we need to remember that our enemy is not flesh and blood.

It's not atheists, it's not pro-choicers, it's not Satanists, it's not any of these people.

They are being used by forces more powerful than them, forces they often don't even believe in, but which can be drivers for their actions.

Not in a way that gives rid of personal culpability, but in a way that helps to explain what's going on.

And so, it helps how we respond to it.

If I think my enemy is the pro-choicer down the street, my atheist neighbor, the Satanist at the capitol, I'm likely to want to respond by just crush, destroy, and so on.

But if instead I think of him the way you would a medieval horse, like, hey, such a one should be salvaged, right?

Like, best case scenario in a medieval battle, you don't just win the battle, you win the horses.

You got a bunch more horses now.

That's fantastic.

Well, likewise in the spiritual life, we don't just wanna win the argument.

We wanna win the person.

We wanna actually win over the flesh and blood who we are encountering even if they are in the act of advocating for something stupid, evil, blasphemous.

How do we do that?

According to Saint Paul, we need to take on the whole armor of God.

What does that look like?

Well, he says we need to gird our loins with truth, put on the breastplate of righteousness, shod our feet with the equipment of the Gospel of peace, above all, taking the shield of faith with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one, and take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit which is the word of God.

Pray at all times in the spirit with all prayer and supplication.

That's how we do it.

If it's just mano a mano, flesh and blood against flesh and blood, then sure, you might resort to, you know, a fistfight or physical violence or legislation or any of those things might be the ultimate answer to those questions.

But once he realizes this is a spiritual battle, it needs to have a spiritual solution.

And so as the very last thing I want to leave you with, if you've made it this far, I would encourage you to actually take this issue to prayer.

Uh, Chuck Weber on behalf of the Kansas Catholic Conference, uh, mentions that Archbishop Naumann is calling upon the faithful to pray for the spiritual conversion of those promoting and participating in the Satanic worship ritual.

And he warns that they are also planning to defile a Bible, a crucifix, and other Christian symbols.

These are horses, and they need to be won over, because they have evil riders.

Archbishop Naumann then says, These actions are an affront to all Christians.

I urge all Catholics, other Christians, and people of goodwill not to succumb to anger or violence, as that would be cooperating with the devil.

Rather, approach this situation with confidence in God's ultimate victory over Satan, sin, and death as stated in Matthew 16:18.

Right?

The gates of hell won't overcome.

We don't need to panic because someone decided they wanted to choose the losers in the great Biblical battle.

We just pray for them, we entreat them, we try to win them over for Christ.

And then finally, especially for those of you living in the area, you should know that the Archdiocese of Kansas City and Kansas has scheduled the Eucharistic Holy Hour at 11:00 AM at Assumption Catholic Church, which is right across from the capitol, followed by noon mass, so that while they're doing their stupid, silly little thing, we are offering the highest praise and worship to God.

Now, if you can't do it there, I'd encourage you to take time to do that somewhere.

Spend time in front of Jesus in the Eucharist, spend time at mass if possible, and offer it for the conversion of Satanists and that the world can see the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus Christ in the mass.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.