Why Catholics Can’t Be Freemasons.

(It should be noted that the Post Vatican II Church is NOT Catholic and the “Popes” are infact Antipopes.)

Why Catholics cannot be Freemasons. F.Miller—J.E.Doherty ONE of the questions frequently asked of Catholics is why their Church raises such a hullabaloo about Freemasonry, even to the extent of forbidding Catholics to join it under the penalty of excommunication. “After all,” many a Mason has said to his Catholic acquaintances, I have never heard anything said against Catholics in any lodge meeting I have attended. I have many Catholic friends. I even go to a Catholic Church once in a while. I don’t see why there should be this opposition on the part of the Catholic Church toward an organization that is working hard toward the betterment of living conditions all over the world…

It is not the Catholic Church that has created the barriers between itself and freemasonry; it is the latter that has officially declared itself to be an agency bent on destroying the Church. the Church merely recognizes this aim and is bound to act accordingly. the official organ of Freemasonry in the United States is The New Age, a monthly publication which expresses the aims of the organization. It is supplemented by a News Bulletin and a Clip sheet that are sent out to editors and many clergymen all over the land. It is impossible to read even the headlines of these handouts without recognizing the unifying presence of a very bitter opposition to the Catholic Church. Indeed, one can, with but little research,traceback to these propaganda vehicles many of the popular charges against the Catholic Church that make the rounds. Here, however, is some of the clear and concrete evidence.

Writing in The New Age in the September,1921, issue, James W. Cook, a 32nd degree Mason, had this to say about Masonry’s attitude toward the Catholic Church: “Masonry ought to be and must be a World Power. But there is a World Power with which Masonry is face to face,a World Power, cunning, crafty, and secretive, that seeks to dominate and control the life,the intelligence and the conscience of our people and subject them by intellectual bondage and servitude to a foreign potentate…That World Power comes to us in the name of Jesus, garbled and twists His teaching, and proclaims itself His sole representative on earth. Yet,when it considers itself safe,it throws aside the garb of religion and reveals its true nature as agitator political organization, determined to crush individual liberty and freedom of thought, and by superstition, ignorance and fear to being all people into subjection to its tyrannic will. That World Power has muzzled nearly all our press. It has captured or poisoned our sources of information. it is organizing an army of knights, who are sworn to bring our country to the knees of their pontiff in humble obedience.”

It would be difficult to find a more definite statement of the attitude of official Masonry toward the Catholic Church; difficult, too, to find a statement that more deliberately and diabolically misrepresents the aims and methods of the Catholic Church. To take but one of many points as an illustration,it ignores the essential fact that the Catholic Church offers its teachings first and fundamentally to the intelligence and freewill of individual men. It claims and wields no authority except that which men can, by studying the evidence,come to see has been bestowed on it by God. It resolutely refuses to accept as a member any person who has not been convinced that it represents the truth. It has no secret policies or stratagems; everything it does and says is open for all to see and read in books and ponder. But the secret society called Freemasonry has decreed that the Church is “cunning,crafty, secretive,seeking to dominate lives, to crush liberty etc.” This is not an isolated case of a high-ranking Mason stating Masonry’s eternal opposition to the Catholic Church. In the November,1923,issue of The Living Age , H. M. Mayes, also a 32nd degree Mason,wrote as follows about what he called the Crisis,i.e., the attempt of the Pope and Bishops to steal the American government: “This papal  ecclesiastical scheme has ever been,and is now,the destructive factor of the menace to human liberty in society and the affairs of men. Roman priests assert by the authority of the Pope and the alleged ‘holy Fathers’ — that they alone possess the right and the power to direct political(temporal) and spiritual affairs and conduct of men,and that no one has any rights contrary to the will and authority of the said ‘holy Father the Pope’; that the most penitent submission to his decrees in matters both spiritual and temporal is necessary to salvation, and without his pardon,extended through his ‘holy priest,’ on any actor thought, his anathema and purgatory are assured to the offending soul. All decrees must be obeyed; …public schools in America must be destroyed because they are ungodly, not being created and controlled by the Pope; the Church must rule the State;the Church is supreme!”

This sounds exactly like a battle cry,which it was intended to be. The sad thing is that there are so many people by whom it was taken as a challenge in behalf of a just cause. It is a matter of history,of fact,of everyday evidence,that the Catholic Church sets down clearly defined limits of authority in the spiritual and temporal realms;that she has always upheld the authority of the States as the one established by God for all temporal affairs. It is therefore pure fabrication to state that Roman priests assert that “the Pope and the holy Fathers alone possess the right to direct the political and spiritual affairs and conduct of men.” The men who speak thus hate the Catholic Church enough not even to want to know the elementary truth about it.

Why Catholics cannot be free masons by  F.Miller—J.E.Doherty