ATLANTA (OSV News) -- Archbishop Gregory J. Hartmayer of Atlanta has called on all Catholics to counter -- with prayers of reparation and penance -- the sacrilege of a so-called “black mass” being organized by the satanic temple of Atlanta and scheduled to take place Oct. 25.
“Even though tickets are being sold for this event as if it were merely some sort of dark entertainment, this satanic ritual is a serious sacrilege," he said in an Oct. 8 memo to clergy, religious sisters and staff of the archdiocese. "It is a blasphemous and obscene inversion of the Catholic Mass.
"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."
Archbishop Hartmayer said that "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."
He called on all Catholics of the Archdiocese of Atlanta "to face this attack to our faith through prayer, penance and prayers of reparation. I am asking that each parish conduct a Eucharistic Holy Hour with Benediction to honor the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, ideally on Friday, October 25, at 9 p.m., or between now and October 25 as an act of reparation to this proposed sacrilege."
"We commend our efforts to the Lord through the loving intercession of Mary, the Mother of God,” he concluded.
On its website, the archdiocese posted suggested prayers of reparation in English and Spanish: "An Act of Reparation to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament" and a "Litany of Reparation in Honor of the Blessed Sacrament."
"Jesus, my God, my Savior, true God and true Man, with that most profound homage with which the faith itself inspires me," the reparation prayer says, "I adore and love you with my whole heart, enclosed in the most august Sacrament of the Altar, in reparation for all the acts of irreverence, profanation, and sacrilege committed. Jesus, my God, my all , I adore you, I love you, and I praise you every moment, in the most holy and divine Sacrament of the Altar. Amen. I adore you every moment, O living Bread of Heaven, Great Sacrament!"
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