Blasphemy in Milan

Naughty boys, perverts, and the world's few serious Satanists have for centuries amused themselves with much talk and rare observance of the luridly infamous Black Mass. Capable of infinite variation in its pseudo-liturgical mumbo jumbo, the Black Mass usually has as its basic ingredients a consecrated host, an apostate priest, a prostitute and a virgin, combined to achieve a maximum of orgiastic blasphemy.*

Last week the Italian city of Milan buzzed with rumors of a secret society, the "Demons," under the leadership of a "Devil's Prelate," which practised the Black Mass in lonely country houses and Milan hotel rooms. The bare fact: for at least the 15th time in five years, consecrated hosts had been stolen from a church near Milan. (Authorities believe such thefts occur frequently without being reported to the police; also, that old women and children are bribed to carry hosts out in their mouths. Valuable jeweled pyxes, in which the wafers are kept, have not been taken.)

Milan's Archbishop, Cardinal Schuster, took a grim view of the sacrilegious thefts. Said he in a pastoral letter published in the press: "There exist individuals and organized groups of people who are trying to get consecrated hosts, which they profane and use for unmentionable purposes during their meetings." In another letter he wrote: "A sect which sustains the part of Judas the Traitor is at work, and is all the more repulsive because . . . boys are abused."

*A typical ritual, according to William Seabrook, late, hard-drinking popularizer of the incredible: "Before an altar surmounted by a crucifix turned upside down, and on which the girl who is a virgin lies naked, the black-robed priest intones parts of the true Mass backward, in dog Latin, substituting the word 'evil' for 'good' and the word 'Satan' for 'God.' The prostitute, robed in scarlet, performs the duties of acolyte; the goblet of wine is placed between the breasts of the recumbent virgin and a part of the wine is spilled over her body. At the supreme moment, the sacrament, the consecrated wafer . . . is debased instead of elevated, and subsequently defiled." (Witchcraft; Harcourt Brace, 1940).

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