April 30 (UPI)
By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI Religious Affairs Editor
WASHINGTON

May 1st is Walpurgisnacht, the night of Walpurgis or Walpurga, the most important feast of the year for devil worshipers.

The night before May 1, when according to ancient lore, witches ride their broomsticks around the Blocksberg in Germany's Harz Mountains, blood sacrifices will be traditionally offered, said the Rev. George Mather, one of America's foremost expert on cults.

The victims are primarily animals, continues Mather, pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in St. George, Utah. Mather has obtained photographs to back up this claim. One shows a cat nailed to a cross upside-down, and then torched to death.

There have always been claims that humans, too, are made to suffer grisly deaths to honor the Prince of Darkness.

The ritualistic murder on Holy Saturday 24 years ago of a nun by the Rev. Gerald Robinson, 66, a Catholic priest in Toledo, Ohio, has lead some to speculate whether this killing could be cult-related. Robinson's arraignment Monday has brought the story renewed attention.

The assertion that Satanists are at work inside the church -- and not just its Roman Catholic branch -- is in itself nothing new.

"Indeed, there have been claims that priests serving Lucifer are active even in the Vatican," related Claus-Peter Clausen, editor and publisher of a conservative Catholic newsletter in Germany.

"But no proof of this has ever been offered," added Clausen, a man with excellent connections at the Holy See.

However, details surrounding the Rev. Robinson's arrest suggest ghoulish practices by clergymen, at least in this case. The Toledo Blade newspaper reported that the case was reopened after a woman had revealed to a diocesan commission that priests had forced her to perform ignoble acts, which included being placed in a coffin filled with cockroaches.

Moreover, the paper reported, "She alleged that the group of clerics killed an infant and a 3-year old child, performed an abortion on her, and mutilated dogs during the rituals."

"This pretty much corresponds to the type of abuse I have been told about when counseling survivors of Satanist rituals five or six years ago in Connecticut," the Rev. Bernard Bush, a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist who now runs a retreat house in Los Altos, Cal., told United Press International Friday.

"I have learned about such rituals conducted by priests," he added. "However, they did not involve murders." But Bush confirmed that patients he counseled reported to him black masses in which "children and freshly aborted fetuses were sacrificed."

"Not so long ago, a young man came to me asking for help. He had become part of a Satanist cult and participated in blood sacrifices (of animals), but was working himself up to participating in human sacrifices."

The Rev. Mather, who has investigated incidents involving possible Satanist activities throughout the United States and acts as a consultant to police departments around the country, said so far he has not seen any evidence that priests had murdered humans in Satanist rites.

However, both Bush and Mather said that liturgical churches -- Catholic, Episcopal and Lutheran -- are the preferred target of the most lethal group of devil worshipers, the so-called Traditionals, whom Mather described as highly secretive and usually very well educated.

They constitute the first of five categories of Satanists. Traditionals are defined by the following points, according to Mather:

-- They believe that Satan really exists.

-- They celebrate black masses, especially on the night before May 1 -- the Walpurgisnacht -- by passing chalices filled with their victims' blood (mainly the blood of animals).

-- Their rituals involve drug use and illicit sex (Satanist web sites always contain links to sadomasochistic images and photographs depicting death, for example, aborted embryos in trashcans).

The most important feature of this type of Satanists is a "deep hatred of Christianity," explains Mather, whose findings were confirmed to United Press International by a Catholic researcher in New England, a woman lay theologian who insisted on anonymity after receiving several threats.

Chiefly, however, this segment of cultists is convinced that Christ has failed in a cosmic struggle, and consequently Lucifer, the "crafty" fallen archangel referred to in the Bible (Genesis 3:1; Isaiah 14:12), will be victorious.

This is why they serve Satan by mocking Christ, and especially the Eucharist, in which the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans and Anglicans affirm the "real presence" of Christ's true body and blood in the sacrament.

In this contexts it makes little difference whether Christians accept as true that bread and wine "transubstantiate" into Christ's flesh and blood, as Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics believe, or whether Christ is present "in, with and under" these two elements, as the Lutheran and Anglican doctrine of "consubstantion" holds.

The fact remains that Satanists violate first and foremost sacramental churches and why "you don't see such things in synagogues or Baptist sanctuaries because there they can't physically abuse God," said the Rev. Bush. "Non-liturgical churches are vandalized instead," reported the Rev. Mather.

Hence, Satanists attack denominations according to their respective beliefs. For example, Mather saw black wax on the altar of an Episcopal church in Plymouth, Mass., indicating that a black mass had been celebrated there. "Later police discovered the remains of animals sacrificed in this area." And in a Roman Catholic church in West Yarmouth, Mass., feces were found on the altar.

In a Lutheran congregation, also in New England, the woman Catholic researcher found that the pastor celebrated the Eucharist in the sanctuary every Sunday morning, sticking faithfully to his liturgical manual, the Lutheran Book of Worship. But at night he would conduct black masses in the basement, again using the same book yet turning all their essential Eucharistic texts on their head.

The Rev. Jack Cluney, a Baptist pastor and psychologist, told this correspondent years ago that non-liturgical denominations are by no means safe from the onslaught by devil worshipers. "Evangelical churches are in great danger of being subverted by Satanists," he warned.

And the Rev. Bush told UPI of a discovery that the day care operation of a non-liturgical, Presbyterian congregation had been taken over by a Satanist cult. And that, he said, was also in Ohio, where the Catholic Church is now reeling from the Robinson case.

Copyright 2004 by United Press International.
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