A Liturgical Lesson From the Satanists

Three years ago, my wife and I received a stamped postcard in our mailbox inviting our children to participate in the newly-founded After School Satan Club at our public elementary school up the street. Thank God our kids were, and continue to be, homeschooled; but I was nonetheless more than mildly uncomfortable with the thought of a dozen kids—after having obtained their parents’ permission—attending the club’s ceremonies and playing in the same neighborhood as our children.

In retrospect, there is one thing I should have done right away. I should have met with our pastor and parish council (the church was just two blocks from the school) to plead that we immediately implement the following norm from the 2004 Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum:

[S]pecial care should be taken to ensure that the host is consumed by the communicant in the presence of the minister, so that no one goes away carrying the Eucharistic species in his hand. If there is a risk of profanation, then Holy Communion should not be given in the hand to the faithful. (92)

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

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I had every reason to do so based on an even more horrifying experience twenty years earlier.

I was attending my first parish council meeting after having moved to a new area of the country. After listening to reports from the director of religious education, the finance council, and the women’s guild, there was one final item on the agenda. The pastor and Catholic school principal raised the issue of students confiscating consecrated, unconsumed Hosts for desecration at black masses. 

About a third of those in attendance at the meeting showed no reaction; a third, mild annoyance; and only a third, utter shock. One member of the women’s guild nearly fainted. The council decided to adopt measures to monitor the reception of Holy Communion at both school Masses and Sunday liturgies. Further inquiries revealed that at least four students were involved in organizing the rituals, which were frequented by 20 to 30 students. 

This is why I am not ready to dismiss last week’s public satanic ritual and counter demonstration at the Kansas Statehouse merely as a staged media frenzy where the central issue was First Amendment rights, even though there were only about 30 members of the Kansas City-area Satanic Grotto in attendance and a hundred or so Christians involved in the counterprotest.

I am also not ready to accept the Satanic Grotto’s leader, Mr. Michael Stewart, at his word when he testified under oath prior to the event that he was not in possession of the Sacred Eucharist. “We now have a sworn statement before a judge that the group does not possess a validly Consecrated Host,” the executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference declared on March 20, 2025. 

The problem, of course, is that there is every reason to believe that Mr. Stewart—like his alleged master, the devil—is a pathological liar. Although highly disturbing, this video proves it. After preliminary prayers to the father of lies, Mr. Stewart pulled from his pocket what appeared to be a communion wafer. The fact that the wafer was apparently unbroken and larger than the host normally administered during the Communion Rite is some consolation that it was not likely to have been the Body of Christ. 

Nevertheless, a bystander—perhaps a participant in the Christian counterdemonstration—dove to the ground in a brave attempt to scoop up the host before Stewart could stamp on it with his foot. Hovering over him, Stewart retaliated with several punches at the man’s head. Seconds later, out of breath and taking a seat on the courthouse steps, Stewart told a reporter that “I was doing a part of our ritual when a man came and tried to tackle me…he was trying to grapple with me.” 

Thanks to several camera angles, it is easy to expose Stewart’s lie. And, for all we know, he may even have lied under oath when he swore that he was not in possession of a consecrated Host, for, immediately after assaulting the aforementioned individual, Stewart also told reporters that the incident occurred while he was “performing the desecration of the Eucharist.”

Later, within the Statehouse Rotunda, Stewart delivered further blows to the head of 21-year-old Marcus Schroeder, who had attempted to take the black mass script from his hands. Stewart was immediately arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly and later released on a $1,000 bond.

The Archdiocese of Kansas City and the Kansas Catholic Conference are to be commended for taking steps beforehand to address the issue of a potentially stolen Host, to organize a simultaneous Eucharistic Holy Hour at Assumption Catholic Church across from the Statehouse, and for exhorting the faithful to remain peaceful in their counterprotest of the public satanic ritual. God bless Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann for “calling upon the faithful to pray for the spiritual conversion of those promoting and participating in the satanic worship ritual.”

Yet, it goes without saying that we should be extremely wary of taking satanists at their word, even under oath. Black masses are real. Those who preside over them find ways of obtaining and desecrating the Most Holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must make this clear when training ordinary and extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion. If a parish is unable to keep constant vigil lest the Holy Eucharist be removed from the church other than for ministering to the sick and homebound, may the norm provided by Redemptionis Sacramentum suffice. Yet, it goes without saying that we should be extremely wary of taking satanists at their word, even under oath. Black masses are real. Tweet This

If there is one thing we can learn from satanists, it’s that in some cases—probably more than we would like—limiting the reception of Holy Communion to the tongue is not a matter of being “conservative.” It’s simply a matter of taking every possible means to safeguard the integrity and dignity of the Divine Sacrament, the source and summit of our Christian life (cf. Lumen Gentium, 11).