Brother Maloney: I just now saw your "challenge" to me to respond to your post of 2-25-2013. There seems to be quite of bit of anger in your posts, not that it matters, but I seem to have touched a nerve. BTW, its never smart to predict that someone won't respond to your post. It comes off as arrogant. It says, "my reasoning and logic is so on the money, and so correct and irrefutable, that I predict it will leave you speechless." If your post was so irrefutable that they do not post, then you didn't need to make the prediction in the first place. But, if they do respond to you, then they have proven you wrong. Ouch!
Anywayyy. I'm sorry I didn't respond sooner, but I don't spend a lot of time here on this forum.
You asked: "Are you claiming that there is actually something valid about allegations made about Freemasonry being inherently anti-Catholic or inherently anti-Christian? Exactly HOW would the Roman Catholic Church reversing its stance mean that Freemasonry has somehow become 'Rotary with ritual'."
My answer: Of course not! I never claimed that the RC Church's allegation that Freemasonry is "anti-Catholic" or "anti-Christian" was valid.
You know, you shouldn't use these kind of tactics in debate. When you put words in the other man's mouth, attempting to set up a paper tiger that will make you look good when you knock it down, falls apart when the other party says, "Wait a minute. I never said that. You put words in my mouth." Which, of course, he will.
But, I digress. You asked: "Exactly HOW [all caps - nice touch - I'll try to use that, too] would the RC Church reversing its stance mean that Freemasonry somehow become 'Rotary with ritual'." In order to answer that, I need to educate you, apparently, on what the RC Church's historical objections to Freemasonry have been.
The objections that the RC Church have against Freemasonry are not only that Freemasonry is anti-Catholic or anti-Christian, although they do include those. The RC Church first condemned Freemasonry and its members when Pope Clement XII issued his Bull, In Eminenti, in 1738. In that, Clem (I call him "Clem") stated that Freemasons assume "natural virtue," and "associate in a close and exclusive bond ... and are bound by a stringent oath sworn on the Sacred Volume, and conceal their doings under heavy penalties." (Oh! Well. We certainly can't have any of that.) He continued to say that "If they are not acting ill, they need not avoid the light."
Over the next 160-some-odd years, no less than sixteen (16) Bulls were issued by seven of his successors in office, Pope Pius IX being the most prolific, issuing six anti-Masonic Bulls between 1846 and 1873. But, most scholars recall the 1884 Bull issued by Pope Leo XIII, titled "Humanum Genus." In that particular 25-page essay, Pope Leo XIII, speaking on behalf of his church, spelled out most, if not all, the pent-up objections the church had long harbored against our fraternity. He really cut loose, and let it all hang out. Here's a summary of excerpts from old Leo's Humanum Genus:
1.) "The human race is divided into two opposing parties, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. Freemasonry belongs to the latter." (This is just his opening salvo. He explains this later.)
2.) This "capital enemy" (referring to Freemasonry) "is a danger to Christianity as well as to society." (It gets better.)
3.) It is the "real supreme sin of the Freemasons to persecute with untamed hatred Christianity." (Wait for it. He's just getting warmed up here.)
4.) "By opening their gates to persons of every creed they promote ... religious indifference." He explains that "the Catholic [church], which being the only true one, cannot be joined with others without enormous injustice." (Ah. Here we have it. According to Pope Leo, the ecumenical nature of the Craft, by itself, condemns the fraternity in the eyes of the church. It's the fault of all you Baptists and Methodists. LOL)
5.) Freemasonry "leaves to the members full liberty of thinking about God whatever they like, affirming or denying His existence." (Of course, this is not entirely true. Regular Freemasonry does not admit atheists. But, Anderson's Constitutions did state that Freemasonry only obliges Masons "to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves." The Freemasons call this "religious liberty," which the RC Church always despised, and old Pope Leo could never abide.)
6.) Freemasons "trust the education of their children to laymen and allow them to select their own religions when they grow up." (So, now he is attacking the public school system and religious liberty, and blaming the Freemasons for it. Well, we were complicit, after all. But, its interesting that RC Church, which has never, to my knowledge rescinded or denounced Pope Leo's Bull, points to Freemasonry's support of public education and religious liberty as one of the reasons that the fraternity is "allied with Satan.")
7.) The Freemasons teach that "the people are sovereign, those who rule have no authority but by the commission and concession of the people." (So, here, in one short sentence, Pope Leo condemns the American Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, blames it all on the Freemasons, and reveals that he is still clinging to the old notion of the divine right of kings, and he writes all of this over a century AFTER the American Revolution.) The Pope continued by adding that it is "a capital error to grant to the people full power of shaking off at their own will the yoke of obedience." (I love that part – "yoke of obedience." He's a hoot! Again, the Pope condemns the American Revolution, a democratic republic, and the American government to boot. He's a fun guy.)
8.) The Freemasons believe that "the origin of all rights and civil duties is in the people or in the state." (I guess he didn't want to leave the Bill of Rights out of his condemnation. Actually, the Declaration of Independence states that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights." So, that document states that individual rights come from God, and not from the state. Of course, Freemasonry, in its formative documents is silent on this point, but the Pope is blaming Freemasonry for the American experiment in self-government.)
Okay, that's enough. It goes on. But, that's plenty for now.
(To read more, see the article on "Anti-Masonry" in Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia.)
So, the Church's historic condemnation of Freemasonry is based primarily on the fact that the fraternity admits men of all faiths, supports freedom of religion, public schools, democratic and representative government, the ability of nations of men to determine their own destinies and their own government, and all the other noble ideals that were embraced by the great revolutionary leaders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But, there is more to it than that. For one and a half millenia, the church had a monopoly on being the one and only bridge between man and God. The church ceded temporal power to the kings of Europe, but only insofar as the kings were anointed and crowned by the Archbishop of that jurisdiction. Maintaining this monopoly was easy, so long as the populace was illiterate, and only the priesthood could read and write. But, with the invention of the printing press, and the education of the populace, all this began to change. Soon, men could read the word of God on their own, and they could reason and debate spiritual and political matters, and they did! And they could publish their thoughts and beliefs, and spread their ideas over the continent for all to read. This was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, and the RC Church quickly lost its monopoly over spiritual matters.
Then, the American Revolution proved that educated men could create their own government, elect their own representatives, pass their own laws, and govern themselves with no need for a king, the Pope realized that the monopoly over temporal matters was lost as well. What part did Freemasonry play in all of this? There is plenty written that attempts to answer that question.
In the second decade of the 18th century, the Freemasons of London knew that meeting in secret, with secret passwords and signs of recognition, might bring unwanted government scrutiny upon them from a paranoid government. Some have suggested that the four lodges that formed the first grand lodge did so in order to separate their lodges full of conservative Whigs from the other lodges across town that leaned heavily toward support of the Tories and Jacobites.
In the mid-1700s, the Paris police, after raiding Masonic lodges and questioning the officers of those lodges, discovered that these Freemasons were actually electing their own officers, operating their lodges according to by-laws, and allowing their members to vote on decisions. This early experiment in democratic government was seen as seditious, conspiratorial and a danger to the welfare of society and the monarchy. (See the book Living the Enlightenment, by Margaret C. Jacob; 1991, Oxford Univ. Press.)
But, it was not just about politics. Churchmen have always looked askance at the Freemasons and their secret, mystical doings behind closed doors. In 1638, just a few years after the rise of speculative Freemasonry in Scotland, a poem titled "The Muses Threnodie" linked Freemasonry with clairvoyance ("second sight") and the mysterious "Brethren of the Rosie Crosse," all in one neat six-line passage. But, the common folk of Scotland already knew about the mysterious "Mason Word" and the alleged magical powers that it bestowed on those that had it.
Of course, today, all this makes many members of the fraternity very uncomfortable, because they don't understand our own history. So, rather than take the time to learn about our history, and learn about Freemasonry's place in the turbulent history of the past few centuries, they prefer to portray the Craft as a simple form of Rotarianism, or just another "civic club" that bases its metaphors on a half-dozen working tools that any do-it-yourself carpenter can understand. If Freemasonry really were that simple, it would have never survived the 17th century.
The question is: Can it survive the fraternity's current crisis in direction and leadership?
So, Brother Maloney, there's your answer that you predicted you'd never see. I hope it enlightens you.
BTW: Any member of this fraternity, who feels that, in order to become a Freemason, he must first get "permission" from his priest (or any other man, for that matter), is no Freemason. You need to learn to throw off that "yoke of obedience" that old Pope Leo talked about.
