KCTV-TV in Topeka, KS reports that The Satanic Grotto has arranged for a “Black Mass” to be performed at Kansas’ state capitol building on March 28 at11 a.m.
Read their news coverage: https://www.kctv5.com/2025/03/07/catholics-decry-black-mass-scheduled-take-place-kansas-state-capitol/
The FB events page for this BM features this statement:
“Join us at the Topeka Capitol building in Kansas as we dedicate the grounds and our legislature to the glory of Satan. We will be performing rites to the Black Mass and indulging in sacrilegious blaspheme. God will fall and Kansas will be embraced by the black flame of Lucifer.
“Hail Satan”
All fine, though they should have run this statement through grammar check methinks.
Interestingly, as I looked for additional news sources via an online search I could find nothing preceding the coverage of the outcry from Catholic-adjacent orgs that’s just started surfacing. Whoever tipped these folks off has generated a lot more media coverage for the event than it had been getting.
Also, KCTV-TV mentions that a Catholic students group is circulating a petition to have this ritual blocked. The Catholic News Agency specifies that it’s a “traditionalist Catholic group called the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property” that’s behind the petition. This group has stated to the Wilson County News that “the Kansas State Capitol events coordinator confirmed the ‘black mass’ via phone and said that it will occur on the first floor, under the building’s rotunda.”
Me, I’m curious as to what liturgy the officiants will be utilizing as there have been many versions of a Black Mass mentioned in literature over the centuries, and ne set of court records documenting a BM performed in the 17th century by Catherine Monvoisin and the priest Étienne Guibourg for the sake of Madame de Montespan, the mistress of King Louis XIV of France, intended to win her his love. BMs run the gamut from any sort of parody of the Roman Catholic Mass to affairs featuring a Catholic priest (frocked or unfrocked) who subjugates Christ, present in the transubstantiated host, to the power of Satan (don’t ask me how you actually pull that bit off theurgically — seems like a tall order).
Oh yeah, the Satanic Grotto’s website includes The Law of the Grotto, a set of precepts starting with”
“1) To do as thou wilt is the purpose of the law…”
I think I’ve heard that one before.
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