OTTAWA, August 19, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Seven priests and over 120 Catholics prayed outside heavy metal bar The Koven Saturday night as a Satanic black mass took place inside.

The Catholics met on the steps of Notre Dame Cathedral, about a five-minute walk from The Koven, where Ottawa’s Archbishop Terrence Prendergast and Auxiliary Bishop Guy Desrochers of Cornwall blessed them before they set out on their vigil, as reported in Catholic News World.

A number of people, other priests, and members of the Sisters of the Queenship of Mary remained behind in the Cathedral with the bishops and Auxiliary Bishop Christian Riesbeck for Adoration.

Watch excerpts of the event, filmed by Catholic News World, here:

You can watch the full 5 minute video produced by Catholic News World here.

The seven priests included well-known Companion of the Cross Fr. Mark Goring.

“It was a tremendous witness to faith,” wrote Michael Dopp, one of the organizers of the vigil, in an email to supporters.

“To see over a hundred Christians praying together and outside in the market at 11:00 on a Saturday night! I was doing laps around the block and for about an hour was behind a group of six 25-ish-year-old people from Quebec who were praying the Rosary in Latin as they walked,” Dopp noted.

“It struck me as I followed them that while Satan wishes to push Christians to the peripheries, this brought us into the light,” he wrote.

“It’s time for the Catholic Church to stand up,” agreed one of the priests there that night. “It’s time for us to take the bushel basket off the lamp … so we can be a light to the nation.”

Priests also need to “exercise their fatherly ability to govern and guide, to raise up and build the people up,” he told LifeSiteNews.

Satanic ritual hateful and harmful

National director of the Satanic Temple in Canada Nicholas Marc organized the blasphemous ritual and sold 50 tickets to the four-hour event, which began at 10:00 p.m. He told Global News it was the first public black mass in Canada.

Prendergast denounced the black mass last week as hateful and urged all Catholics to pray in reparation for the spiritual harm being planned.

“To tamper with and mock the Mass — which is what this satanic ritual does — is hateful and will affect more than those who participate in it,” said Prendergast.

He also sent a memo to all “us priests, personally,” inviting them to pray in response to the blasphemous ritual, a priest present Saturday night told LifeSiteNews in an earlier interview.

In response to enquiries from the archdiocese and LifeSiteNews, Marc said the Satanic ritual would involve blasphemy but that he would not be using a consecrated host.

He said the Satanic Temple members are atheistic Satanists and revere the mythology of Satan.

However, Fr. Chad Ripperger, an exorcist based in Colorado, told LifeSiteNews that “what they say is unreliable to begin with, because their father is the father of lies, Satan.”

As for atheistic Satanism, “my question is, if it’s just a myth, why are you reenacting all this, why are you doing it,” said Ripperger, founder of the Doloran Fathers.

Moreover, because Satan does exist, “in that sense it doesn’t matter if they actually believe if he’s real or not; if they do the particular ritual which will actually invoke him, he will possibly, God permitting, show up, or it will have an effect on the spiritual level independent” of what the Satanists believe, he said.

“Demons don’t work off the subjective, they don’t work off what we tend to think or feel. They work off what the objective law of God is and what the objective reality of things are, so that being the case, the black mass could end up having an effect that they had not intended,” Ripperger said.

Opportunity to evangelize

John Pacheco, who help Dopp organize the vigil outside The Koven Saturday night, echoed this.

“It’s a blasphemous act and the organizer of this event has said it is blasphemous from his own mouth. That is a form of hatred. It is a form of hatred against our faith, it is a hatred against the culture that built our country,” he told CTV News.

“And that’s why we’re here to show our opposition and also our love and our witness for the people who are going in,” said Pacheco, who blogged about his experience.

“We are genuinely concerned that many of them don’t know what they’re doing from a spiritual perspective.”

But there is a positive side to the event, Pacheco told LifeSiteNews.

“It gave us an opportunity to evangelize,” he said. “If this didn’t happen we would not be out on the street engaging people...and every day there’s things that are being done that are almost as bad and we’re never there.”

Toronto street preacher Dorre Love of Christ’s Forgiveness Ministries as well as members of other Christian denominations were also onsite to evangelize, CTV News reported.

Pacheco described the Satanic black mass as “a wake-up call for us,” and pointed out that there will be more such blasphemous rituals and that the Catholic Church is under attack.

That’s why it’s important for Catholics to attend the Rosary Bowl at Lansdowne Park in Ottawa on Wednesday, the feast of the Queenship of Mary, he said.

“The Rosary Bowl is so important, it’s a public manifestation of our faith,” he said.

“Our Lady is kind of leading the way. We need either to engage in a serious and public fashion, or things are just going to get darker. There’s no turning back.”