A Comment on Etsi Nos

Received on Facebook from Peter Hansen commenting on Pope Leo XIII's Encyclical Etsi Nos, condemning Freemasonry, which I shared here.

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Many people have forgotten why, exactly, Freemasonry is condemned. This encyclical explains it. Freemasonry was the political club that sought to exclude the Catholic Church from civil power. Its secrecy, at least in continental Europe, protected its members against laws against sedition in Catholic states. The odd thing about the present-day anti-Masonic stance is that officially, the Catholic Church has adopted the masonic ideal of the state. The popes since the 1960s have been renouncing their titles and claims, and have been fulsome in their praises of democracy, so-called. This has freed up the Masons to concentrate on their charitable works and to add a little color to the bourgeois life of shopkeepers, small-town insurance brokers, and presidents of county savings and loan banks,(assuming that any S&Ls have survived the economic vicissitudes of the past twenty-five years). [The last sentence is only true in the US and Lodges chartered by an American Grand Lodge. In most countries, Masonry is not a mass organisation. One would never see a decal with the Square & Compass saying '2 B 1, Ask 1' in England, Europe or Latin America, where the Lodge is an 'elite' organisation to which you must be invited. - JW]

What Pope Leo predicted came true, and we continue to live with the squalid after-effects of the establishment of agnostic states. One wonders how many bishops would support the re-constitution of Catholic Europe or the Americas? Most likely, to suggest the renunciation of the Italian Concordat would elicit blank stares in from most of the sacred college of cardinals. In fact, a warmer reception to the idea would probably be forthcoming from the local lodge of the Order of the Eastern Star than in the Pope Paul VI audience hall.