MASONS
AND CATHOLICS
May 23, 2014 By Philip Jenkins
I have been posting on the pervasive influence of Freemasonry in Anglo-American culture. Usually, that tradition was very wide-open and generous in terms of its racial and religious attitudes, but there is one enormous exception to that rule, and that concerns Roman Catholics. Indeed, much of European and American politics over the past two centuries has involved a running and often bitter confrontation between Masons and Catholics. Why is that?
As a social and political movement, modern Freemasonry developed
in the British Isles, in the early eighteenth century. It was devoted to the
idea of brotherhood, and admitted anyone who could subscribe to belief in one
God, however that figure was imagined. Christians, Jews and Muslims all
qualified under that criterion, as did any Hindus who could assert that the
various gods of that faith were manifestations of a higher monotheism. . .
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Freemasonry became the principal vehicle for militant secularism and
anti-clericalism. Those struggles almost led to overt civil war in France in
the Dreyfus years, and they actually did spark armed violence in Spain and
Mexico in the 1930s. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that if you ignore
Freemasonry, you have no hope of understanding Mexican history over the past
century or so. Meanwhile, Masonic support of Jewish emancipation in Europe
provoked reactionary denunciations of the “Masonic-Jewish” conspiracy, which was later expanded to include Bolsheviks.
Protestants enjoyed the great advantages of the Masonic order, in supplying mutual support in times of trouble, and also in creating invaluable networks in business, law and government. Feeling themselves excluded, the growing immigrant population (mainly Catholics) created their own pseudo-Masonic counterparts, most successfully the Knights of Columbus, which dates from 1882.
Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2014/05/masons-and-catholics/#ixzz33Ur3j500
