Answers to your Catholic Questions

After perusing this forum, I have noticed that a seemingly inordinate amount of posts in this sub-forum deal with questions regarding the Catholic Church, accompanied by a great many misunderstandings.

I would like to help rectify that. I myself am Catholic, and am pretty knowledgable in most aspects of the Church, from dogma to canon law to liturgy to the day-to-day "in' sand out's". At one point in my life, I was in the seminary studying for the priesthood (I am no longer studying for the priesthood).

So please, feel free to pick my brain about any and all things Catholic here.

Are you part of The Brotherhood ?

On the subject (kind of). I was delighted to read the Pope's comments on evolution and the Big Bang theory. I know this isn't unprecedented from some previous Popes but was still refreshing to hear

It's always nice to see the Pontiff relate to other groups. This Holy Father is a saintly man.

And no, as of yet I am not a Mason (if this is what you mean by brotherhood). I will petition a lodge as soon as I am old enough to do so in my jurisdiction.

A united church would be great. For a Catholic, that can only be achieved when our separated Christian brethren return to communion with Rome and the Successor of Peter, the Pope.

It's not about the Pope's power, but his authority. Catholics understand that Jesus Christ instituted the Church, giving authority to Peter and his successors. The giving of the keys to heaven, as well as the power of binding and loosing, are all scriptural authority given to Peter. A unification will require our separated brothers to return to recognizing the authority of the successor of Peter, to the truest understanding of the faith (which is contained, we believe, in the dogmas of the Church, which is guided by the Holy Spirit), and the perfection of worship in the sacraments.

The Pope is not a Christ for the people. He is the Vicar of Christ, simply the prime bishop to guide the Christian community in the faith and the practice of the faith. Pope Francis expressed this beautifully on the night of his election during the Habamus Papam announcement.

Amigo; each sect of Christianity (all 3,000+ of them), each sect of EVERY religion, believes they have "the truest understanding of faith," which is why their followers join. It is also why there isn't one universal religion.


Sent from my iPhone using My Freemasonry

Catholics believe that our faith expresses the fullness of truth, that fullness defined in the doctrine and practice of the Catholic faith. We believe that this full expression of the truth finds it's origin in Christ. For a Catholic, our believes are not arbitrarily tacked on, but originate in Christ and in his mystical body, the Church.

This is why Mason's stay away from religion and politics, no one wins.

It's not about winning and losing. And, admittedly I may not know much about masons since I am not one, but I think it is unfair to say masons stay away from politics. In lodge, this is the case. But I understood revering God as one of the duties of a mason, to be applied to his daily life.

A casual stroll through an insane asylum should be enough to convince any reasonable man that belief is the weakest form of proof.

pointwithinacircle2 said:

A casual stroll through an insane asylum should be enough to convince any reasonable man that belief is the weakest form of proof.

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What is this in reference to exactly?

pointwithinacircle2 said:

A casual stroll through an insane asylum should be enough to convince any reasonable man that belief is the weakest form of proof.

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Very true..

Wow as non-members you both got it wrong. Yes Freemasonry is about God or The Great Architect of the Universe, we use the Bible or The Volume of Sacred Law to help guide us with our life's, and many of or other symbols can be used with the condensation of God. But when we talk of God and religion out side of the lodge we don't talk about who's dogma is right or wrong because in the end it is your personal agreement with God that is correct, as is my agreement with God that may differ than yours also correct. You also confuse term 'Lodge', The Lodge is just like many other symbols in Freemasonry, it could be use a meeting night or the building we use, but more importantly it is used about us the Brothers for it is we the Brothers who make the lodge. Not a building or a time for meeting but us, and one thing we truly believe in is peace and harmony in our lodge. To offend a brother would break the peace and harmony, and when taking of this topics we tread lightly as not to offend because that is where a lodge will loss.

AmigoKZ said:

Only in The Lodge meetings, sir.

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Till you become a mason, please don't tell me what it is to be one. You have a lot to learn, and you seem to be missing the lessons that others here have tried to explain. Begin a Mason in the end is about respecting you're follow Brothers and you have show little of that in this forum.

Still though, I did not start this thread to proclaim Catholics are right. I started it because I am Catholic and So I might answer questions people here may have, as it seems to be a popular subject in this sub forum.

NY.Light said:

Still though, I did not start this thread to proclaim other Catholics are so right. I started it because I am Catholic and I answer questions people here may have, as it seems to be a popular subject in this sub forum.

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I know that you did not intent that, but I felt that another persons was trying to back you into a corner about your beliefs, and as a Freemason we should not tell other Masons (and I hope one day you our that and I can call you a Brother ) what is right when it come to God.

Ok. I do want to become a Freemason. I had to really investigate it without spoiling anything because the Church still holds a negative view towards freemasonry, officially anyway, but arrived at the conclusion that the two are compatible. I am eager to learn from the example of the brothers here.

I have learned that expertise, especially when it comes to my own, can point down the wrong direction and distract from making a thorough decision.

Read the rulings and see what you think of them. Today the current status is that Masonry is a choice of personal conscience. What does your personal conscience say? Do you give the Church, as an organization of humans, the power to dictate the matter to you independent of whether they claim the authority to do so? Authority and power are not the same thing. Authority is what the rules say they can do. Power is what they can get away with telling you to do.

Then start stepping through the levels in the authority hierarchy asking a pattern of questions. The current Pope, your current Cardinal, your current Archbishop, your current Bishop, your current Priest, your current group of other ordained and lay minsters who answer to the hierarchy, your peers in your parish, yourself. Does this year's (level here) agree with the documented stance of the Church organization and each layer on down? Does the Church hierarchy give that person the authority to override the official stance for members within their care? Do you give that person the power to override for you that official stance and/or to override the stated changes at higher levels in the hierarchy?

Then consider the question from a viewpoint of others. Do you consider the person you are about to ask to be an expert who has authority to tell you what the policy is if they agree or disagree with the current set of written rules? Do you give the person power to tell you how to act on the current set of written rules? Have they done their homework as I describe above? Note that at any point in the sequence if you answered no to the question about power then that was all of the homework that was needed, and if your expert answered no at any point you need to take that context into account.

I could say what my stance on the encyclical and the subsequent evolution of written rules is but that's not relevant at this point and not even because I'm not Catholic. It's not relevant because at each step the questions are one person at a time.

The official instruction of the Magisterium is that Masonry is something Catholics should not be a part of, as per Cardinal Ratzinger's clarification of the 1983 Canon Law that does not explicitly mention Freemasonry as banned (as the 1917 Code did), but only prohibits Catholics from joining societies that conspire against the Church.

I think that the Fathers have confused individual Masons with the Fraternity. As Catholics self-segregated themselves from Masonic lodges, the majority of Christian masons belong to Protestant sects. Certainly, in the past, there have been individuals who were masons that were anti-Catholic, yet I think this stemmed from the individual, not any tenet or practice inherent to Masonry.


The encyclical "In Eminenti" which first publicaly decried Masonry, encyclicals are not in themselves infallible pronouncements.

Further, although published with the approval of Pope Saint John Paul II, it (the 1983 clarification) is not an infallible (infallibility can only be declared by the Holy Father when he speaks on matters on faith or morals, and when he speaks ex cathedra) declaration. While the Church hierarchy is prejudicial against the faithful who are members (not to long ago, a priest in France was suspended when his bishop learned of his masonic membership), given the above, I feel that the two (Masonry and Catholicism) are computable.