St. Maximillian Kolbe was shocked when he saw that “In the years preceding the war, in Rome, the capital of Christianity, the massonic mafia, repeatedly disapproved of by the Pontiffs, was dominating in an ever more brazen manner. (Writings 1328) The brothers with the apron "were celebrating in honor of Giordano Bruno, sporting a black banner with the image of St. Michael the Archangel under the feet of Lucifer and waving their banner in front of the windows of the Vatican”.…which is the center of Christianity. The young cleric immediately began to study their methods and purposes. (Note: Giordano Bruno was a former Dominican friar in the 16th century, who became a heretic and rejected the Catholic Faith.)
Dispersed in a more or less evident way all over the world, the cells of this mafia aim precisely at this purpose: "Destroy any religion, especially the Catholic one." They also make use of a whole host of associations with the most varied names and purposes, which however, under their influence, spread religious indifference and weaken morality. (Note: Masons promote the notion that all religions are the same and it does not matter which religion you belong to.)They pay particular attention to the weakening of religion, in accordance with the resolution they have taken: 'We will not conquer the Catholic religion by reasoning, but only by perverting morals'. They drown souls in a dredge of literature and art aimed at weakening the moral sense: the invasion of moral filth flows everywhere carried by a wide river. The personality collapses, domestic life falls apart, and sadness grows very deep in the depth of soiled hearts. Not sensing within themselves the strength to shed the yoke that holds them bound, such persons flee the Church, or even rise up against it ”(Writings1328). More than 100 years have passed and all this is before our eyes, terribly true, more and more true.
And he writes again: "We are witnesses of a feverish activity directed against the Church of God, of an activity which unfortunately is not without results and which has at its disposal numberless propagators ... At first glance, the statement that the principal, greatest and most powerful enemy of the Church is Freemasonry may seem exaggerated "(Writings 1254). The plan is centuries-old and the saint identifies in history some key figures who have carried it forward: “From their workshop came the French Revolution, the whole series of revolutions from 1789 to 1815, and also the world war. According to their indications, Voltaire, D’Alambert, Rousseau, Diderot, Choiseul, Pombal, Aralda, Tanucci, Hangwitz, Byron, Mazzini, Palmerston, Garibaldi and others worked ... Freemasonry puts the people it wants on the pedestal; and throws them off when these feel like acting on their own. Napoleon himself experienced this in a very evident way "(Writings1254).
But the Masonic sect is not limited to immorality. It originates and / or supports all political or cultural movements that go against the Church; we read in the calendar printed by the Militia in 1939: "Communist atheism seems to be clamoring in the loudest way and is doing everything to sow its reactionary prejudices wherever it can. At the origins of it we can easily place that criminal mafia called freemasonry”. Vision of other times? Outdated stuff? "The aim of the Militia of the Immaculate Conception is the conversion of all and especially the Freemasons in the first place, because unfortunately in our times they are at the head of the action against the Church, even where they are least seen. If then the time comes that the head of the serpent wants to call himself something else, this does not change what it really is.” (Writings 803) It is this wide-ranging vision of the Polish saint who wants to understand and make us understand the deeper reasons for what happens in the world, in a context of a theology of history that begins at least from Genesis 3:15: "I will place enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; this offspring will crush her head and you will injure her heel ”.
In the consecration to that Woman, whom God first called to work for the conversion of the world, St. Maximilian saw the main instrument of opposition to evil; so that every consecrated soul, "transubstantiated" in her, was Katechon against the mystery of iniquity (cf. 2 Thess 2) and anticipation of the triumph of her Immaculate Heart. (Note: Katechon is a Greek word in the New Testament meaning restrained or held chained.) The quoted passages are all taken from the writings of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe.
Catholics may not be freemasons under pain of mortal sin. The basic Christian objection to Freemasonry is that it constitutes a religious sect in opposition to the revealed truths of the Gospel. Whatever the religious doctrines of the Masonic sect it is plain that they do not embrace the central Christian doctrines. But though in ancient times Masons were charged in every country to be of the religion of that country or nation, whatever it was, yet 'tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves." Clearly, whatever constitutes "that religion in which all men agree," it is not Christianity or revealed religion. Modern speculative Freemasonry as opposed to those, who are masons by trade, began in 1717 with the establishment in London of the Grand Lodge of England. A little more than two decades later Pope Clement XII forbade Catholic membership in these lodges, and the opposition of the Catholic Church has been restated by seven other popes.
Another major reason for the Church's hostility [to Masonry] is the Masonic oath, or rather, the series of oaths required of initiates. The use of solemn oaths taken on the Bible in order to join a fraternal society or advance to its higher degrees has never been countenanced [by the Catholic Church]. Objectively speaking, those who swear such oaths are guilty of either vain or rash swearing. For most American Masons, the oaths are given for what turns out to be the supposed secrecy of a few passwords and handshakes.
Anyone who has investigated Masonry knows what these "secrets" are anyway. In fact, someone has said that the greatest secret about Freemasonry is that there are no secrets. If there are not, then Christians have no justification for making such solemn oaths. Father Walton Hannah posed the basic dilemma of the Masonic oaths when he wrote: Either the oaths mean what they say or they do not. If they do mean what they say, then the candidate is entering into a pact consenting to his own murder by barbarous torture and mutilation should he break it. If they do not mean what they say, then he is swearing high-sounding schoolboy nonsense on the Bible, which verges on blasphemy. (Darkness Visible, p. 21).
At the very least one would suppose that anyone professing minimum expertise in the area of Freemasonry would have studied the ritual of the Lodge, as well as basic Masonic sources, such as Pike's Morals and Dogma, the major encyclical. Humanum Genus by Leo XIII and such criticisms as Father Walton Hannah's Darkness Visible and Christian by Degrees and William A. Whalen's Christianity and American Freemasonry. We should understand that, worldwide, Freemasonry shares many beliefs and customs, but is not a unified organization; it includes the United Grand Lodge of England; the fifty independent grand lodges in the United States; lodges in Canada, Australia and New Zealand; Prince Hall Masonry; the so-called Christian Masonry of Germany and the three Scandinavian countries; the various Grand Orients of Europe and Latin America; co-Masonic bodies; irregular lodges, such as the Italian P2 Lodge; and others.
A century ago, in his encyclical on Freemasonry, Humanum Genus, Leo XIII defined naturalism, which he saw as the primary objection to the Masonic system: Now the fundamental doctrine of the naturalists, which they sufficiently make known by their very name, is that human nature and human reason ought in all things be mistress and guide. For they deny that anything has been taught by God; they allow no dogma of religion or truth which cannot be understood by human intelligence, nor any teacher who ought to be believed by reason of his authority. Freemasonry is a religious system which gives alien meanings to Christianity in its rituals, books, and symbols.
After six years, the German [Catholic] episcopal conference reported its conclusion in the June 1980 issue of Amtsblatt des Erbistums Koln, pp.102-111. On this particular point, the German hierarchy observed: The religious conception of the Mason is relativistic: All religions are competitive attempts to explain the truth about God which, in the last analysis, is unattainable. Therefore, only the language of Masonic symbols, which is ambiguous and left to the subjective interpretation of the individual Mason, is adapted to this truth about God. God is called the Grand Architect of the Universe a deist term. (Note: Deism means belief in God based on reason rather than revelation or the teaching of any specific religion is known as deism.)
Every Lodge works with an open Bible on its altar, and to some Masons this seems to affirm its Christian orientation. The preferred term and the one used in English Freemasonry is the Volume of the Sacred Law. That no special authority is attached to the Old and New Testaments is clear since a lodge of Moslems may substitute the Koran, a predominantly Hindu lodge, the Vedas, etc. as the Digest of Masonic Law makes clear. To say that a candidate professes a belief in the divine authority of the Bible is a serious innovation in the very body of Masonry. The Jews, the Chinese, the Turks, each reject either the Old or the New Testament, or both, and yet we see no good reason why they should not be made Masons. In fact, Blue Lodge Masonry, the main structure of Masonry has nothing whatever to do with the Bible. It is not founded on the Bible. If it were, it would not be Masonry, (p. 206).
BACK TO LIST