Catholics Should Be Wary of Freemasonry Within the Republican Party

Could this also have something to do with the GOP's move away from the anti-child murder position and its support of the anti-natural IVF procedure?

From LifeSiteNews

By Peter Wolfgang

Catholics should be wary of yoking themselves to the GOP over its ties with Freemasonry and the spiritual and political dangers which accompany such an affiliation.

There is a story about the political affiliation of Catholics in 20th century America with which you may be familiar. It goes something like this.

Most Catholics in the United States are tied, in one way or another, to the immigrant experience of our country. Many are Irish, their ancestors having come here in the 1800s to escape the Great Potato Famine. Many others are of either southern or eastern European descent.

Their arrival in such large numbers sparked a nativist anti-Catholicism in what had largely been a homogenous White Anglo Saxon Protestant nation. There were riots, attacks on convents, the “Know Nothings,” the Ku Klux Klan, public school attempts to Protestantize the children of those swarthy Catholic immigrants, the Blaine Amendments forbidding government funding of Catholic schools, and so forth.

Some of this is captured in the 2002 movie Gangs of New York. Or the 2024 movie Cabrini.

Much of this nativist anti-Catholicism found its political home in the Republican Party. As a result, most Catholics naturally gravitated toward the Democratic Party. The urban political machines that they built, and the party bosses who controlled them, are a part of 20th century American history.

Recall Al Smith’s presidential campaign, doomed by the anti-Catholicism of 1928. Or the victory of JFK in 1960, which seemed to represent the Catholic political machine finally overcoming the WASP establishment against which the Kennedys and other Catholics had long fought.

But just when Catholics seemed to arrive at the center of American political life, the center shifted. Beginning with the McGovern Campaign in 1972, a new Cultural Left disestablished the party bosses and took control of the urban machines inside the Democratic Party. Catholics, and astute politicians like Ronald Reagan, took note.

By the 1980s, then, we had the “Reagan Democrats,” Catholics disenchanted with their former party who were now trending Republican. Michael Barone captured this late 20th-century Catholic political migration in his 1990 book Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan.

I am too young to have voted for Ronald Reagan. But my own personal history represents a sort of Generation X version of this story. I’m the grandson of immigrant Catholics who held Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy in the highest esteem. By the early 1990s I was the president of the College Democrats at my university.

But Bill Clinton’s unyielding support for abortion appalled me beyond measure. Clinton set his face against Pope John Paul II, who stopped him from writing abortion into international law at two U.N. conferences in the 1990s. When Clinton vetoed the ban on partial-birth abortion, he surrounded himself with women who had the procedure and he pointed out which ones of them were Catholic, as a dig at his Catholic opponents.

I’ve told the story multiple times of how all of this caused me to go from Democrat to Republican while in my 20s. My point today is not to rehash that or the GOP’s growing departure from the issue that caused Catholics to switch parties in the first place.

No, I want to talk about an aspect of my own personal experience of the Republican Party that has always troubled me. In all the analyses of Catholic affiliation or disaffiliation with the Republican Party that I have ever read, stretching back decades, I have never seen anyone mention it before.

I am talking about the GOP’s creepy affiliation with Freemasonry.

Spiritual dangers in the GOP

It was a recent two-part episode of the podcast The Exorcist Files, on Freemasonry, that got me thinking about it. Hear Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

What follows is anecdotal. Perhaps the Democrats are just as involved in Freemasonry and I never noticed. They are certainly involved in other demonic things, the things which caused me and millions of other Catholics to switch parties ever since the Reagan Revolution.

But historically, the two parties relied on the support of distinct ethnicities. The ones that made up the Democratic coalition were Catholic and less given to dabbling in Freemasonry. The Republicans, apparently not. At least not in my experience.

When I was in my early thirties, I was elected as a Republican to the board of education in the Connecticut town in which I then lived. A short while later, I was made a member of the Republican Town Committee.

I had been a lifelong active Democrat a few years earlier and had no experience of Freemasonry. But now, in the early stage of my joining the Republican Party, they were all over me.

There were Republican Party events, to which I was frequently invited, that took place in local Masonic halls. I never attended them.

There was the guy who served with me on the board of education who was very active with the Masons. He was constantly trying to recruit me. I told him Catholics could not be Masons. He insisted this was not true and that many of the members at his lodge were Catholics.

I read the Ignatius Press book on the subject and informed him that, while there had been some confusion in the 1970s, the Vatican reaffirmed in 1983 that Catholics cannot be Masons (it did so again last year). He refused to believe me and brought it up almost every time we were together.

The PAC of the pro-life organization I work for? One of our top candidates in the mid 2000s was a big-time Mason. I know this because the other Republicans whom I got to know in later years would reference each other’s memberships.

The socially liberal Republican activist who nonetheless defended me to his own wing of the party? A Mason with a WASP pedigree stretching back almost to the Mayflower. Like my board of education colleague, he could not stop talking up the Masons. But by that stage of my life, he knew better than to try to recruit me.

The black Republican who is a perpetual local candidate for office? His Facebook is replete with pictures of ceremonies from inside his local lodge with them wearing their special initiation outfits. “We raised six brothers to the degree of Master Mason today.” “Tonight, I had the personal honor of presiding over the Masonic Funeral Rites of the late Worshipful Brother [so-and-so].” The current head of Connecticut’s Republican Party, too, had similar pictures of himself, before he deleted his Facebook.

You see these guys cluster together at Republican fundraising dinners. The Masonic membership in the GOP doesn’t break down along ideological lines, either. The guy on the board of education was the only conservative besides me. The candidates that we backed for office were pro-life.

The Republican operative with the long pedigree, and also the current State Party Chair, meanwhile, are both social liberals. In fact, the only thing they all have in common, besides their membership in the Lodge, is that they have all been good to me. Even when I am politically at odds with them.

Saddest of all was a now-deceased pro-life and pro-family legislator who was one of the Catholic Church’s greatest defenders at our state legislature. He was a devout Catholic himself and was particularly close to a religious order in his district that was renowned for its Catholic orthodoxy. He was also a Mason.

He was the one, more than any, to whom I made the sharpest objection. I told him how incompatible his membership in Freemasonry was with his Catholicism. He would not hear of it. He claimed the religious order in his district said it was permissible and that he could belong both to the Masons and to their lay wing.

I know there are some Catholic critiques of the United States itself, and Masonic influences in its founding, that run much deeper than the anecdotes I am recounting here. But what concerns me in particular are those of us, like me, who have been leaving the party of our Catholic ancestors ever since Ronald Reagan took up the cause of the unborn child.

We did so for very good reasons. I regret none of it. The Democrats have only gotten worse since then.

But the GOP, in key ways, has gotten worse too. And in thinking of my friend, the deceased Catholic legislator, I can’t help but wonder.

Are there other spiritual dangers to which Catholics expose themselves by being yoked specifically to the GOP?

Are there questions about the Catholic/Republican alliance that even its critics never thought to ask?