An event at the Kansas Capitol in Topeka that organizers are calling a “Black Mass” is being organized in support of pro-choice views on abortion.
That is what Michael Stewart, the organizer of the event, told the Topeka Capital-Journal.
“This is a specific response to our legislatures continuing to pander to groups like the Kansas Catholic Conference and to Kansans for Life, where they keep trying to come back and attack abortion rights, much less other rights,” Stewart told the paper.
On Jan. 29, Stewart heckled participants of the Topeka March for Life (event pictured above). Participants who attended the March report that he shouted satanic slogans at children and told them “Your parents are lying to you,” while urging them to embrace Satan.
Chuck Weber, of the Kansas Catholic Conference, released a statement about the claims that this month’s satanic event is being planned, saying, “If true, this explicit demonstration of anti-Catholic bigotry will be an insult to not only Catholics, but all people of good will.”
He added that additional “spiritual and legal responses are being explored,” by the Catholic Conference but said, in the meanwhile, “The Catholic bishops of Kansas ask that first and foremost, we pray for the conversion of those taking part in this event, as well as each person’s own conversion of heart during this sacred Season of Lent.”
Stephen D. Minnis, the president of Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, called for “urgent” prayers from the college in response to the call from bishops.
“Your prayers have proven powerful, and they are urgently needed now,” President Minnis said in a March 11 email to members of the college Memorare Army. Benedictine College announced March 10 that throughout the month, Benedictine’s weekly all-college Eucharistic Hour and Wednesday Rosary will be dedicated to a conversion of hearts in response to the event.
He also called for members of the Memorare Army prayer campaign to devote 10 Memorare prayers a day for the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe regarding the event. The Memorare Army at Benedictine College, modeled on efforts by Mother Teresa, has held prayer campaigns for various intentions, including a national effort to pray for religious freedom, and, most recently, an effort to pray for the college’s efforts to Transform Culture in America.
Minnis said in a statement that he sees the Eucharistic Hours and Weekly Rosaries as central to these efforts.
“Pope Francis has reminded the Church that our greatest battle is a spiritual one against evil and said ‘For this spiritual combat, we can count on the powerful weapons that the Lord has given us,’ especially the Eucharist and the Rosary,” he said.
He added: “The immense power of the Eucharist is something our alumnus, Bishop Andrew Cozzens, has stressed in the National Eucharistic Revival he is leading. Benedictine College began a weekly Holy Hour in support of the Revival. In March, those hours will be dedicated to the conversion of all those involved in the sacrilegious event that has been announced.”
Minnis specified in his email to the Memorare Ary to pray for Our Lady of Guadalupe’s intercession because Our Lady of Guadalupe is central to his presidency and has been the focus of college efforts to Transform Culture in America.
St. John Paul II wrote in his 1999 post-synodal apostolic exhortation The Church in America that through Our Lady of Guadalupe’s “powerful intercession, the Gospel will penetrate the hearts of the men and women of America and permeate their culture, transforming them from within.”
In a Facebook event invitation, the pro-choice satanic group says that the event is meant to “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.”
The Topeka Capital-Journal also reported on the opposition of TFP Student Action to the sacrilegious event. “TFP” is shorthand for the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, best known for its America Needs Fatima campaign. The group has collected more than 30,000 signatures on a petition opposing the Black Mass. Each signature generates a letter sent to Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly and Topeka Mayor Michael Padilla. which says:
“With my whole heart and soul, I express full, complete and vehement rejection of the satanic Black Mass scheduled at the Kansas State Capitol on March 28, 2025. I urge you to cancel this event, which offends 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide, 426,000 Catholics in Kansas and countless more God-loving Americans. Sacrilege is simply not free speech.”
The TFP Student Action group has been active at Benedictine College. When Benedictine College led the National March for Life, students involved in TFP Student Action brought a pilgrim statue of Our Lady of Fatima on the March with the college group.
Catholic Vote has reported on the situation in Topeka several times, including reporting on March 14 that the satanic event will be moved outside the capitol building. Catholic News Agency also investigated the story and spelled out a long line of background to such events, reporting:
“In a direct mockery of the Catholic Mass, groups that have staged so-called ‘black masses’ in recent years have on at least one occasion boasted of possessing a stolen consecrated host with an intent to desecrate the Eucharist in an unspecified but profane ritual.”
The satanic actions in favor of a pro-choice stance on abortion follow an upheaval in abortion laws in Kansas.
In 2019, pro-choice Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a bill which would have required that women be informed of their ability to reverse the early effects of the days-long abortion pill process. The Mifepristone pill, known widely as RU-496, is a major profit center for the abortion industry and the painful reality of its effect on women was dramatized in the movie Unplanned.
Also, on April 26 of that year, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the Unborn Child Protection from Dismemberment Abortion Act violates the state constitution’s Bill of Rights, which the court claimed guarantees a right to abortion. That action has made Kansas a pro-choice magnet for late-term dismemberment abortion customers from states that have cracked down on the abortion industry for its profiting from the barbaric procedure.
St. John Paul II opened his landmark 1995 encyclical opposing abortion, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), with a discussion of the role of the devil.
“The Gospel of life, proclaimed in the beginning when man was created in the image of God for a destiny of full and perfect life, is contradicted by the painful experience of death which enters the world and casts its shadow of meaninglessness over man’s entire existence. Death came into the world as a result of the devil’s envy,” he wrote.
He added that in the battle between the pro-choice and pro-life: “We are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the ‘culture of death’ and the ‘culture of life’. We find ourselves not only faced with but necessarily in the midst of this conflict: We are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.”
Featured image courtesy Kansas for Life
