Catholics in Minnesota will gather to ask for God’s protection and to pray against the nation’s first Satanic monument approved for display on public land.
Lay members of the Catholic church will gather July 15 for a rosary rally to pray for America’s protection from Satan, in light of a Satanic monument approved in May for display in a veterans memorial park in Belle Plaine, Minn. The monument, a large black steel cube engraved with a golden inverted pentagram topped with an upturned soldier’s helmet, is the first such monument approved for display on public grounds in the U.S. The rosary rally is organized by America Needs Fatima (ANF) and Return to Order (RTO), two campaign branches of a Catholic lay organization called Tradition, Family, and Property.
“The best way that Satan can accomplish his mission of luring souls into damnation is to erode the horror, the natural horror, that men have of the devil,” said Robert Ritchie, director of America Needs Fatima, in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Once that natural horror is eroded, the devil has a better chance of having people accept his presence. So our job as Catholics is to remind people of the truth that they already know — that Satan is our ultimate enemy who wants our ultimate failure in life and who wants to destroy the purpose of life which is to correspond to God’s plan for each person and to go to Heaven. And the devil wants people not to live according to God’s plan and wants them to go to Hell,” Ritchie said.
The co-founder of The Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves, said in an interview with The New York Times, eroding man’s horror to Satan is one of the goals of installing the monument.
“We wouldn’t be doing this if it didn’t mean something to us,” Greaves said. “The more we do these types of things, the less shocking this will be as time goes by.”
ANF and RTO have no plans to pursue legal actions, but instead will focus on prayer and fasting to combat Satanic influence in America.
“We’re going to be concentrating on prayer right now,” Ritchie said. “We think that it’s important to pray and fast for God’s intervention and to raise awareness about it.”
The Satanic Temple’s efforts to gain approval for a Satanic monument in the park started, ironically, with a Christian monument’s installation. The Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a complaint about the monument, which featured a soldier kneeling before a cross. The city of Belle Plaine ordered the removal of the monument in January, but reversed the order when citizens rallied to protest, according to the Star Tribune. The city then designated the park as a limited public forum, or “free speech zone,” in which any faith could be displayed. Satanists saw their chance and pounced on it.
The Satanic monument’s approval garnered little controversy and no pushback from the Belle Plaine city council, according to Greaves.
Ritchie told The DCNF that The Satanic Temple’s activity in Belle Plaine was not surprising, given their national campaigns to push for attention, like the dozen After School Satan Clubs the temple tried to establish in elementary schools across the nation to counter after school Christian clubs. The temple also attempted to have a statue of Baphomet installed at the Oklahoma state capitol to counter a Ten Commandments display, but could not gain approval when Oklahoma declared religious displays at the capitol to be unlawful.
Ritchie concluded with a solemn warning against what he believes is the danger of Satanism.
“The devil is bad business,” Ritchie said. “Every time the devil is accepted, mankind is the loser, because he’s only capable of doing evil. The more accepted he is, the more evil he will bring to us. And that’s why it’s important to pray against it.”
No date has been set at this time for the installation of the monument.
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