May 18, 2014
The Black Mass at Harvard
By Fay Voshell
“Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae.”
“Truth for Christ and the Church.”
“Truth for Christ and the Church.”
In
view of what Harvard has become today, it seems oddly shocking to read what was
once the motto of America’s oldest university.
It
seems odder still that an early directive to Harvard students laid out the
purpose of all education as follows:
“Let every student be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ at the bottom as the only foundation of all sound learning and knowledge.”
How things have changed since the Christian piety of John Harvard.
Nowadays, such is the adherence to the progressivism’s principle of unthinking push for “diversity” that the Harvard Community of Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics positively glowed about Atheist Coming Out Week. The community noted in a post on their website entitled “Out of the Profane Closet” that the Harvard Crimson applauded the coming out of atheists as “a very valuable initiative that we hope will raise awareness of the value of nonreligious ethics, as well as promote further dialogue and coexistence between those who seek their codes of conduct in the realm of the divine and those who don’t.”
Perhaps the development of “diversity” and the erasure of any sense that any stance is profane contributed to Harvard’s newer motto and seal, which contains just one word: “Truth.”
“Let every student be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ at the bottom as the only foundation of all sound learning and knowledge.”
How things have changed since the Christian piety of John Harvard.
Nowadays, such is the adherence to the progressivism’s principle of unthinking push for “diversity” that the Harvard Community of Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics positively glowed about Atheist Coming Out Week. The community noted in a post on their website entitled “Out of the Profane Closet” that the Harvard Crimson applauded the coming out of atheists as “a very valuable initiative that we hope will raise awareness of the value of nonreligious ethics, as well as promote further dialogue and coexistence between those who seek their codes of conduct in the realm of the divine and those who don’t.”
Perhaps the development of “diversity” and the erasure of any sense that any stance is profane contributed to Harvard’s newer motto and seal, which contains just one word: “Truth.”
The
idea that Truth can and should be separated from the Christian concept of a
transcendent God who reveals Himself as Truth means that Truth can be anything
one chooses it to be. It means the erasure of any distinction between the
sacred and the profane.
The reliance on human reasoning without faith and strict adherence to the progressive doctrine of cultural diversity may have been reasons the Harvard Extension Cultural Club decided to conduct a “black mass” as an exercise in “Truth,” describing the satanic rituals as “educational.”
It’s hard to comprehend just how students’ minds would be broadened if they indulged in satanic worship, but according to a Boston Globe report on the Club’s attempts to create a Faustian atmosphere at the august university, the Harvard Extension Cultural Club “has continuously urged critics to widen their understanding of satanic worship.”
The Globe reports that one unidentified spokesman said the event was meant “to be educational, not offensive,” adding that “Many Satanists are animal rights activists, vegetarians and artists with a strong sense of community.” Satanists, it seems, are actually do-gooders.
The club tapped the New York-based Satanic Temple to conduct the rituals, which, following the tenets of the blasphemous Marquis de Sade, have sometimes been accompanied by bizarre sex acts performed on an altar dedicated to Satan. Usually the ceremony also includes the desecration of consecrated host and wine, which Catholics regard reverentially as the actual body and blood of Christ.
The “black mass” itself is entirely unoriginal. Worshipping Satan is accomplished by mocking and imitating by negation the holy rite of the Eucharist, which is a sacrament at the core of the Catholic (and Protestant) faiths.
The black mass is not perceived by any but the deliberately deluded as “educational.” It is more correctly perceived as a vicious attack on Christianity, particularly on Catholicism. Certainly many Boston area Catholics correctly perceived the proposed enactment of a black mass as a blatant attack on their faith and protested accordingly, much to the faux shock of Lucien Greaves, spokesman for the New York Satanic Temple, who stated:
“Everyone involved, outside of the Satanic Temple, got really scared. And I don’t necessarily blame them, because I understand that they were getting a lot of vitriolic hate mail, and I don’t think they expected it.”
Greaves seems to have absorbed the meaning of Dostoevsky’s observation in The Brothers Karamazov that “if there is no God, then everything is permitted,” including a black mass. Such is the hubris of those who dismiss matters of faith as unimportant or remnants of a superstition that should be discarded as belonging to the trash bin of history. Greaves probably did not expect, along with the nascent and real Satanists invited to the educational event, much protest and outright anger from what he sees as deluded Catholics.
But many Catholics were quite understandably outraged and protested loudly. For them, if not Greaves, the black mass was as offensive and outrageous as deliberately desecrating the Koran is for Muslims.
Catholics’ outrage was potent enough to make the promoters of the black mass back down. The devotees of Satan finally decided to move the proposed celebration to the Hong Kong Lounge on Harvard Square, where evidently their enthusiasm for defiling the Eucharist fizzled out, ending in a few rounds of drinks.
Regardless of the fact the event was cancelled, the very fact it was to be held at Harvard, an institution once devoted to the education of the clergy, holds some lessons for all Christians, but particularly for Catholics.
First, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, apparently anti-Catholicism is still an acceptable prejudice.
But matters are worsening to a degree unanticipated by Catholics and other Christians.
According to the National Catholic Register, Professor Robert George of Princeton University, an institution also once as profoundly Christian as Harvard was, recently told attendees of the Catholic National Prayer Breakfast that he had a “somber message for them and other Christians: “The days of acceptable Christianity are over. The days of comfortable Catholicism are past.”
George went on to warn that a “price is now demanded of all committed believers.” The professor went on to say that there can be no more socially acceptable, tame Catholics who are ashamed of the gospel of Christ. There will be increased costs for Christians who stand up for the traditional teachings of the Church on the dignity of human life and marriage.
“To believe in the Gospel is to make oneself a marked man or woman,” George said. Certainly the vicious attacks against the twin Benham brothers, who are very deliberately being ruined by the atheistic Left, their very livelihood now being attacked because of their stand for traditional Christian values, are but one example ratifying George’s warning.
Author Peter Jesserer Smith goes on to write that Dr. George “reminded his audience that while Jesus Christ has won the ultimate battle, those who live during this time must one day ‘give an account for all we do’ before the ‘Lord of truth, the God of history […] One thing and one thing only will matter: Was I a faithful witness to the Gospel? My friends, the Gospel is true, and that is the most important thing to know. We’re betting our whole lives on it.”
John Harvard would have approved of George’s commitment to the veritas of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It’s tragic to see how far Harvard, still one of the most revered educational institutions in the world, has strayed from not just the gospel of Christ, but even from the quest for any solid bases for Truth at all, substituting instead puerile, unthinking and dangerous ventures into the Dark Side.
Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Her articles also have been published in National Review, RealClearReligion and PJMedia. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
The reliance on human reasoning without faith and strict adherence to the progressive doctrine of cultural diversity may have been reasons the Harvard Extension Cultural Club decided to conduct a “black mass” as an exercise in “Truth,” describing the satanic rituals as “educational.”
It’s hard to comprehend just how students’ minds would be broadened if they indulged in satanic worship, but according to a Boston Globe report on the Club’s attempts to create a Faustian atmosphere at the august university, the Harvard Extension Cultural Club “has continuously urged critics to widen their understanding of satanic worship.”
The Globe reports that one unidentified spokesman said the event was meant “to be educational, not offensive,” adding that “Many Satanists are animal rights activists, vegetarians and artists with a strong sense of community.” Satanists, it seems, are actually do-gooders.
The club tapped the New York-based Satanic Temple to conduct the rituals, which, following the tenets of the blasphemous Marquis de Sade, have sometimes been accompanied by bizarre sex acts performed on an altar dedicated to Satan. Usually the ceremony also includes the desecration of consecrated host and wine, which Catholics regard reverentially as the actual body and blood of Christ.
The “black mass” itself is entirely unoriginal. Worshipping Satan is accomplished by mocking and imitating by negation the holy rite of the Eucharist, which is a sacrament at the core of the Catholic (and Protestant) faiths.
The black mass is not perceived by any but the deliberately deluded as “educational.” It is more correctly perceived as a vicious attack on Christianity, particularly on Catholicism. Certainly many Boston area Catholics correctly perceived the proposed enactment of a black mass as a blatant attack on their faith and protested accordingly, much to the faux shock of Lucien Greaves, spokesman for the New York Satanic Temple, who stated:
“Everyone involved, outside of the Satanic Temple, got really scared. And I don’t necessarily blame them, because I understand that they were getting a lot of vitriolic hate mail, and I don’t think they expected it.”
Greaves seems to have absorbed the meaning of Dostoevsky’s observation in The Brothers Karamazov that “if there is no God, then everything is permitted,” including a black mass. Such is the hubris of those who dismiss matters of faith as unimportant or remnants of a superstition that should be discarded as belonging to the trash bin of history. Greaves probably did not expect, along with the nascent and real Satanists invited to the educational event, much protest and outright anger from what he sees as deluded Catholics.
But many Catholics were quite understandably outraged and protested loudly. For them, if not Greaves, the black mass was as offensive and outrageous as deliberately desecrating the Koran is for Muslims.
Catholics’ outrage was potent enough to make the promoters of the black mass back down. The devotees of Satan finally decided to move the proposed celebration to the Hong Kong Lounge on Harvard Square, where evidently their enthusiasm for defiling the Eucharist fizzled out, ending in a few rounds of drinks.
Regardless of the fact the event was cancelled, the very fact it was to be held at Harvard, an institution once devoted to the education of the clergy, holds some lessons for all Christians, but particularly for Catholics.
First, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, apparently anti-Catholicism is still an acceptable prejudice.
But matters are worsening to a degree unanticipated by Catholics and other Christians.
According to the National Catholic Register, Professor Robert George of Princeton University, an institution also once as profoundly Christian as Harvard was, recently told attendees of the Catholic National Prayer Breakfast that he had a “somber message for them and other Christians: “The days of acceptable Christianity are over. The days of comfortable Catholicism are past.”
George went on to warn that a “price is now demanded of all committed believers.” The professor went on to say that there can be no more socially acceptable, tame Catholics who are ashamed of the gospel of Christ. There will be increased costs for Christians who stand up for the traditional teachings of the Church on the dignity of human life and marriage.
“To believe in the Gospel is to make oneself a marked man or woman,” George said. Certainly the vicious attacks against the twin Benham brothers, who are very deliberately being ruined by the atheistic Left, their very livelihood now being attacked because of their stand for traditional Christian values, are but one example ratifying George’s warning.
Author Peter Jesserer Smith goes on to write that Dr. George “reminded his audience that while Jesus Christ has won the ultimate battle, those who live during this time must one day ‘give an account for all we do’ before the ‘Lord of truth, the God of history […] One thing and one thing only will matter: Was I a faithful witness to the Gospel? My friends, the Gospel is true, and that is the most important thing to know. We’re betting our whole lives on it.”
John Harvard would have approved of George’s commitment to the veritas of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It’s tragic to see how far Harvard, still one of the most revered educational institutions in the world, has strayed from not just the gospel of Christ, but even from the quest for any solid bases for Truth at all, substituting instead puerile, unthinking and dangerous ventures into the Dark Side.
Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Her articles also have been published in National Review, RealClearReligion and PJMedia. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
“Veritas
Christo et Ecclesiae.”
“Truth for Christ
and the Church.”
In view of what Harvard has
become today, it seems oddly shocking to read what was once the motto of
America’s oldest university.
It seems odder still that an
early directive to Harvard students laid out the purpose of all education as
follows:
“Let every student be plainly
instructed and consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to
know God and Jesus, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ at the
bottom as the only foundation
of all sound learning and knowledge.”
How things have changed since the
Christian piety of John Harvard.
Nowadays, such is the adherence
to the progressivism’s principle of unthinking push for “diversity” that the
Harvard Community
of Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics positively glowed about Atheist Coming
Out Week. The community noted in a post on their website entitled “Out of the
Profane Closet” that the Harvard Crimson applauded the coming out of atheists
as “a very valuable initiative that we hope will raise awareness of the value
of nonreligious ethics, as well as promote further dialogue and coexistence
between those who seek their codes of conduct in the realm of the divine and
those who don’t.”
Perhaps the development of
“diversity” and the erasure of any sense that any stance is profane contributed
to Harvard’s newer motto and seal, which contains just one word: “Truth.”
The idea that Truth can and
should be separated from the Christian concept of a transcendent God who
reveals Himself as Truth means that Truth can be anything one chooses it to be.
It means the erasure of any distinction between the sacred and the profane.
The reliance on human reasoning
without faith and strict adherence to the progressive doctrine of cultural
diversity may have been reasons the Harvard Extension Cultural Club decided to
conduct a “black mass” as an exercise in “Truth,” describing the satanic
rituals as “educational.”
It’s hard to comprehend just how
students’ minds would be broadened if they indulged in satanic worship, but
according to a Boston Globe report on the Club’s attempts to create a
Faustian atmosphere at the august university, the Harvard Extension Cultural
Club “has continuously urged critics to widen their understanding of satanic
worship.”
The Globe reports that one
unidentified spokesman said the event was meant “to be educational, not
offensive,” adding that “Many Satanists are animal rights activists,
vegetarians and artists with a strong sense of community.” Satanists, it seems,
are actually do-gooders.
The club tapped the New
York-based Satanic Temple to conduct the rituals, which, following the tenets
of the blasphemous Marquis de Sade, have sometimes been accompanied by bizarre
sex acts performed on an altar dedicated to Satan. Usually the ceremony also
includes the desecration of consecrated host and wine, which Catholics regard
reverentially as the actual body and blood of Christ.
The “black mass” itself is
entirely unoriginal. Worshipping Satan is accomplished by mocking and imitating
by negation the holy rite of the Eucharist, which is a sacrament at the core of
the Catholic (and Protestant) faiths.
The black mass is not perceived
by any but the deliberately deluded as “educational.” It is more correctly
perceived as a vicious attack on Christianity, particularly on Catholicism.
Certainly many Boston area Catholics correctly perceived the proposed enactment
of a black mass as a blatant attack on their faith and protested accordingly,
much to the faux shock of Lucien Greaves, spokesman for the New York Satanic
Temple, who stated:
“Everyone involved, outside of
the Satanic Temple, got really scared. And I don’t necessarily blame them,
because I understand that they were getting a lot of vitriolic hate mail, and I
don’t think they expected it.”
Greaves seems to
have absorbed the meaning of Dostoevsky’s observation in The
Brothers Karamazov that “if there is no God, then everything is permitted,” including a black mass. Such is the hubris of those who dismiss
matters of faith as unimportant or remnants of a superstition that should be
discarded as belonging to the trash bin of history. Greaves probably did not
expect, along with the nascent and real Satanists invited to the
educational event, much protest and outright anger from what he sees as deluded
Catholics.
But many Catholics were quite understandably outraged and protested loudly. For
them, if not Greaves, the black mass was as offensive and outrageous as
deliberately desecrating the Koran is for Muslims.
Catholics’ outrage was potent
enough to make the promoters of the black mass back down. The devotees of Satan
finally decided to move the proposed celebration to the Hong Kong Lounge on
Harvard Square, where evidently their enthusiasm for defiling the Eucharist
fizzled out, ending in a few rounds of drinks.
Regardless of the fact the event
was cancelled, the very fact it was to be held at Harvard, an institution once
devoted to the education of the clergy, holds some lessons for all Christians,
but particularly for Catholics.
First, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, apparently
anti-Catholicism is still an acceptable prejudice.
But matters are worsening to a
degree unanticipated by Catholics and other Christians.
According to the National Catholic Register, Professor Robert George of
Princeton University, an institution also once as profoundly Christian as
Harvard was, recently told attendees of the Catholic National Prayer Breakfast
that he had a “somber message for them and other Christians: “The days of
acceptable Christianity are over. The days of comfortable Catholicism are past.”
George went on to warn that a
“price is now demanded of all committed believers.” The professor went on to
say that there can be no more socially acceptable, tame Catholics who are
ashamed of the gospel of Christ. There will be increased costs for Christians
who stand up for the traditional teachings of the Church on the dignity of
human life and marriage.
“To believe in the Gospel is to
make oneself a marked man or woman,” George said. Certainly the vicious attacks
against the twin Benham brothers, who are very deliberately being ruined by
the atheistic Left, their very livelihood now being attacked because of their
stand for traditional Christian values, are but one example ratifying George’s
warning.
Author Peter Jesserer Smith goes
on to write that Dr. George “reminded his audience that while Jesus Christ has
won the ultimate battle, those who live during this time must one day ‘give an
account for all we do’ before the ‘Lord of truth, the God of history […] One
thing and one thing only will matter: Was I a faithful witness to the Gospel?
My friends, the Gospel is true, and that is the most important thing to know.
We’re betting our whole lives on it.”
John Harvard would
have approved of George’s commitment to the veritas of
the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It’s tragic to see how far
Harvard, still one of the most revered educational institutions in the world,
has strayed from not just the gospel of Christ, but even from the quest for any
solid bases for Truth at all, substituting instead puerile, unthinking and
dangerous ventures into the Dark Side.
Fay Voshell is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Her articles also have been published in National Review, RealClearReligion and PJMedia. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com
1 comment:
Here's a strange thought for atheists. Of there is no God then there can be no Satan. Then both are fiction. As for the Black Mass, I say let them be proud. Fully publish the full rites and meanings of the mass and all the real aims and rituals of satanism itself. Print all this out in mainstream papers and you tubes. Let everyone see. Then see just how many will rise up for "that" nightmare. Can you "handle" the TRUTH. Probably not, ace.
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