<div dir="ltr"><h1 class="gmail-m_-6082272850109501214gmail-article-title">The real reason Catholics can’t be Freemasons</h1>
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<div class="gmail-m_-6082272850109501214gmail-article-author">by <b><a href="http://www.catholicherald.co.ukwww.catholicherald.co.uk/author/edward-condon/" title="Posts by Ed Condon" rel="author" target="_blank">Ed Condon</a></b></div>
<div class="gmail-m_-6082272850109501214gmail-article-date">posted <time datetime="2017-08-10 12:10:00">Thursday, 10 Aug 2017<br><a href="http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/august-11th-2017/the-real-reason-catholics-cant-be-freemasons/">http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/august-11th-2017/the-real-reason-catholics-cant-be-freemasons/</a><br></time></div>
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An 1891 cartoon in Puck shows Pope Leo XIII doing battle with Freemasonry </div>
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<p class="gmail-m_-6082272850109501214gmail-article-standfirst">The principles of Freemasonry are fundamentally incompatible with Catholic teaching</p>
<p>The mutual antagonism of the Catholic Church and Freemasonry is
well established and longstanding. For most of the past 300 years they
have been acknowledged, even in the secular mindset, as implacably
opposed. In recent decades the animosity between the two has faded
somewhat from the public consciousness as the Church’s direct
institutional involvement in civil affairs has become less pronounced
and as Freemasonry has waned dramatically in numbers and prominence. But
as Freemasonry turns 300 years old, it is worth revisiting what was at
the core of the Church’s absolute opposition to the group. Freemasonry
can appear to be little more than an esoteric men’s club, but it was and
remains a highly influential philosophical movement – one which has
made a dramatic, if little-noticed, impact on modern Western society and
politics.</p>
<p>The history of Freemasonry itself is long and interesting. Its
gradual transformation from the medieval workers’ guilds of stonemasons
into a network of secret societies with their own Gnostic philosophy and
rituals is a fascinating tale in itself. The era of the latter version
of Freemasonry began with the formation of the Grand Lodge of England in
1717 in the Goose & Gridiron pub near St Paul’s Cathedral. In the
early days, before the Church made any formal pronouncement on the
subject, many Catholics were members and the English Catholic and
Jacobite diaspora was crucial to spreading Freemasonry to continental
Europe. At one point it was so popular among Catholics in some places
that Francis I of Austria served as a formal patron.</p>
<p>And yet the Church became the greatest foe of the Masonic lodges.
Between Clement XII in 1738 and the promulgation of the first Code of
Canon Law in 1917, a total of eight popes wrote explicit condemnations
of Freemasonry. All provided the strictest penalty for membership:
automatic excommunication reserved to the Holy See. But what did and
does the Church mean by Freemasonry? What are its qualities which are so
worthy of condemnation?</p>
<p>It is sometimes said that the Church opposed Freemasonry because of
the lodges’ supposedly revolutionary or seditious character. There is a
widespread assumption that Masonic lodges were essentially political
cells for republics and other reformers, and the Church opposed them as
part of a defence of the old regime of absolute monarchy in which she
was institutionally invested. But while political sedition would
eventually come to the front of the Church’s opposition to Masonic
membership, this was by no means the initial reason the Church opposed
the Masons. What Clement XII described in his original denunciation was
not a revolutionary republican society but a group spreading and
enforcing religious indifferentism: the belief that all religions (and
none) are of equal worth, and that in Masonry all are united in service
to a higher, unifying understanding of virtue. Catholics, as members,
would be asked to put their membership of the lodge above their
membership of the Church. The strict prohibition, in other words, was
not for political purposes but for the care of souls.</p>
<p>From the outset, the primary concern of the Church has been that
Masonry suborns a Catholic’s faith to that of the lodge, obliging them
to place a fundamental secularist fraternity above communion with the
Church. The legal language, and penalties, used in the condemnations of
Freemasonry were actually very similar to those used in the suppression
of the Albigensians: the Church sees Freemasonry as a form of heresy.
While the Masonic rites themselves contain considerable material which
can be called heretical, and is in some instances explicitly
anti-Catholic, the Church has always been far more concerned with the
overarching philosophical content of Freemasonry rather than its ritual
pageantry.</p>
<p>Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the Catholic Church and its
privileged place in the government and society of many European
countries became the subject of growing secularist opposition and even
violence. Now, there is little if any historical evidence of the lodges
playing an active role in beginning the French Revolution. However, the
anti-clerical and anti-Catholic horrors of the Revolution can be traced
back to the secularist mentality described in the various papal bulls
outlawing the Masonic lodges. Masonic societies were condemned not
because they set out to threaten civil or Church authorities but because
such a threat was the inevitable consequence of their existence and
growth. Revolution was the symptom, not the disease.</p>
<p>The alignment of Church and state interests, and their assault by
seditious and revolutionary secret societies, were clearest where the
Church and state were one: in the Papal States of the Italian peninsula.
As the 19th century began, a new iteration of Freemasonry came to
prominence which was explicit in its revolutionary character and avowed
in its opposition to the Church; they called themselves the Carbonari,
or charcoal merchants. They sanctioned and practised both assassination
and armed insurrection against the various governments of the Italian
peninsula in their campaign for a secular constitutional government, and
were perceived as an immediate threat to the faith, the Papal States
and the person of the pope.</p>
<p>The link between the passive threat of the philosophy and secrecy of
Masonry and the active revolutionary plots and acts of the Carbonari was
laid out in Pius VII’s apostolic constitution <i>Ecclesiam a Jesu Christo</i>,
promulgated in 1821. While the Carbonari’s avowed and active opposition
to the temporal governance of the Papal States was addressed and
condemned, it was still made clear that the gravest threat posed even by
these violently revolutionary cells was their philosophy of secularism.</p>
<p>Throughout all the various papal condemnations of Freemasonry, even
when lodges were actively supporting military campaigns against the
pope, as they did with Garibaldi’s conquest and unification of Italy,
what was always the first objection of the Church to the Lodge was its
threat to the faith of Catholics and the freedom of the Church to act in
society. The undermining of the teachings of the Church in the lodges,
and the suborning of her authority on matters of faith and morals, were
described repeatedly as a plot against the faith, both in individuals
and in society.</p>
<p>In the encyclical <i>Humanum Genus</i>, Pope Leo XIII described the
Masonic agenda as the exclusion of the Church from participation in
public affairs and the gradual erosion of her rights as an institutional
member of society. During his time as Pope, Leo wrote a great many
condemnations of Freemasonry, pastoral and legal. He outlined, in
detail, what the Church considered to be the Masonic agenda and, reading
it with contemporary eyes, it is still shockingly relevant.</p>
<p>He specifically referred to the aim of secularising the state and
society. He referenced in particular the exclusion of religious
education from state schools and the concept of “the State, which
[Masonry believes] ought to be absolutely atheistic, having the
inalienable right and duty to form the heart and the spirit of its
citizens.” He also decried the Masonic desire to remove the Church from
any control in, or influence over, schools, hospitals, public charities,
universities and any other body serving the public good. Also
specifically highlighted was the Masonic push for the reimagining of
marriage as a merely civil contract, the promotion of divorce, and
support for the legalisation of abortion.</p>
<p>It is almost impossible to read this agenda and not recognise it as
the underpinning of almost all of our contemporary political discourse.
The settled view on these matters of many, if not all, of our major
political parties, indeed the very concept of the secular state and its
consequences on Western society, including the pervasive divorce culture
and near universal availability of abortion, is a victory of the
Masonic agenda. And this raises very real canonical questions about
Catholic participation in the modern secular political process.</p>
<p>Throughout the centuries of papal condemnations of Freemasonry, it
was normal for each pope to include the names of new societies that
shared the Masonic philosophy and agenda and which should be understood
by Catholics to come under the heading of “Masonic” in terms of canon
law. By the 20th century, this had come to include political parties and
movements such as communism.</p>
<p>When the Code of Canon Law was reformed, following Vatican II, the
canon specifically prohibiting Catholics from joining “Masonic
societies” was revised. In the new code, promulgated in 1983 by St John
Paul II, explicit mention of Freemasonry was dropped completely. The new
Canon 1374 referred only to societies that “plot against the Church”.
Many took this change to indicate that Freemasonry was no longer always
bad in the eyes of the Church. In fact, the reforming committee made it
clear that they meant not just Freemasons, but many other organisations;
the “plot” of its secularist agenda had spread so far beyond the lodges
that to keep using the umbrella term “Masonic” would be confusing. The
then Cardinal Ratzinger issued an authoritative clarification of the new
law in 1983, in which he made it clear that the new canon was phrased
to encourage broader interpretation and application.</p>
<p>Given the crystal-clear understanding in Church teaching regarding
what the Masonic plot or agenda against the Church includes (marriage as
a merely civil contract open to divorce at will, abortion, exclusion of
religious education from public schools, exclusion of Church from the
provision of social welfare and or control of charities), it seems
impossible not to ask: how many of the major political parties in the
West can now be said to fall under the prohibition of Canon 1374? The
answer may well be rather uncomfortable for those who want to see an end
to the so-called culture wars in the Church.</p>
<p>More recently, Pope Francis has repeatedly spoken of his grave
concern at Masonic infiltration of the Curia and other Catholic
organisations. At the same time, he has warned against the Church
becoming a mere “NGO” in its methods and goals – which is the direct
danger of that secularist mentality which the Church has always called a
Masonic philosophy.</p>
<p>Masonic infiltration of the hierarchy and Curia has long been treated
as a kind of Catholic version of monsters under the bed, or McCarthyite
paranoia about commie infiltrators. In fact, when you speak to people
who work in the Vatican, you will quickly discover that for every two or
three people who laugh at the very notion, you can find someone who has
directly encountered it. I myself know at least two people who were
approached about joining during their time working in Rome. The role of
Masonic lodges as a confidential meeting point and network for those
with heterodox ideas and agendas has changed little from
pre-Revolutionary France to the modern Vatican; 300 years after the
founding of the first Grand Lodge, the conflict between the Church and
Freemasonry is still very much alive.</p>
<p><i>Ed Condon is a canon lawyer. He wrote his doctoral dissertation
on the history of the Church’s legal sanctions against Freemasons</i></p>
<p><i>This article first appeared in the August 11 2017 issue of the
Catholic Herald. To read the magazine in full, from anywhere in the
world, go <a href="http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/magazine/" target="_blank">here</a></i></p>
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