by Giacomo Galeazzi
In Vatican Insider
Cassock and compass: the relationship between Christianity and Freemasonry is an authentically “ecumenical” knot. It is not only the Catholic Church, in fact, that has secular difficulties with the “freemasons,” but also other Christian denominations. In 2003, Archbishop of Canterbury and primate of England, Rowan Williams (who had recently been made spiritual head of the Anglicans) was forced to apologize to 330,000 Freemasons in the United Kingdom for saying that their beliefs were incompatible with Christianity and for saying that he himself had excluded them from positions of responsibility in his diocese. The outcry from British Freemasonry was such that primate Rowan Williams wrote to Robert Morrow, the Grand Secretary of the United Grand Lodge of England, in an attempt to put out the fire of controversy unleashed from his statement about the incompatibility of Freemasonry and Christianity.
In his message, the Archbishop of Canterbury apologized for the “distress” he caused with his words and revealed that his father “was a member of the Craft.” The freemasons, many of whom are active members of the Church of England, have reacted animatedly to the fact that the primate acknowledged having doubts, fears, and prejudices about the compatibility between Freemasonry and Christianity. They protested his admission that, as Bishop of Monmouth, he had blocked the promotion of masons to important posts. His critical statements on Freemasonry were contained in a private letter partially revealed by the UK mass media as Downing Street confirmed the appointment of Rowan Williams as head of the Church of England. His colleagues’ subsequent attempts to calm the clamor only caused further controversy. In fact, a spokesman confirmed that the Archbishop of Canterbury was worried about the ritual component of Freemasonry, which was seen as “satanically inspired.”
In the Catholic Church, it is uncommon for a bishop to speak publicly about Freemasonry. Even more surprising is that the person to have done it is someone with an eye toward the ecclesiastical hierarchy like Monsignor Luigi Negri, Bishop of Marino-Montefeltro and President of the John Paul II Foundation for the Social Teachings of the Church. In November 2007, the Communion and Liberation (CL) bishop - a very close collaborator with Father Luigi Giussani - found the occasion to speak out in a history book on the Risorgimento by Angela Pellicciari, entitled The Popes and Freemasonry (Edizioni Ares, 2007, 320 pp.). In the preface to the essay, Bishop Negri says he is happy to introduce “this meaningful and relevant effort” by Angela Pellicciari, calling the book “an extremely intelligent and well-documented re-reading of the Papal teachings over the last centuries on the extremely long-standing and current topic of Freemasonry and its disruptive effect on the Church and Christianity.” At its base, emphasizes the CL bishop, there are actions that all the Pontiffs over the last two and half centuries have taken, “constantly keeping pace with the growth of the Masonic project in the life of culture and society, and attempts to hegemonically participate in the great secular revolutions, starting with the French Revolution and concluding, it is now clear enough, with the Russian Revolution of 1917.”
What Monsignor Negri makes clear in this abundant teaching is the depth of the study that the Popes did on the Masonic story and its ultimate foundations: anthropological, metaphysical, cultural, ethical. It is a study that followed, step by step, the evolution of Freemasonry, to the foundations of its assumptions, many times predicting the results, in society and in relationship with the Church, that were then in fact realized. “With perfect consistency, and according to the logic of continuity (which Pope Benedict XVI calls the hermeneutics of continuity[CDB1] ), it is clear that the Church has not ceded, not even a moment, to any temptation to accord or peace-making,” emphasizes Monsignor Negri. “Freemasonry is an enemy of the Church; born with this enmity and pursuing the realization of this enmity with the destruction of the Church and Christian Civilization and its replacement with a culture and a society that is substantially atheistic, even when referring to the architecture of the universe.”
In the judgment of Monsignor Negri, there is no question that this is a reference to values designed and conceived within a rationalistic Enlightenment mentality. To deal with the still-tangled knot of the more or less hidden relations between the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the Freemasons, we must go back to the relationship between the Church and modernity. “It is not the Church that is anti-modern, but modernity that is anti-Church,” says Bishop Negri. “Modernity is anti-Church, and the maximum point of attack on the clergy is really represented by a Freemasonry that - as a component secretly connoted and dynamically launched into the creation of an civilization alternative to that created by faith - represents, to my way of thinking, a radical element of modernity.”
In Freemasonry, in fact, modernity is expressed with maximum clarity and identity and, according to the bishop, also garners the maximum cultural and social impact. The issue of relations between the Church and Freemasonry should be contextualized, therefore, in the great story of the Church in relation to the modern secular, contemporary project. “Basically, it is a very unique counterpoint to the social doctrine of the Church, in the sense that this teaching against Freemasonry, in some ways, is already an indicator of the fundamental issues that the social Doctrine of the Church will then face and deploy along all the articulations that the secular project will assume, during the modern, contemporary phase,” Negri points out. According to this, Freemasonry has certainly found its strength in secrecy, in the ability to identify and assimilate the leadership of men who are unconditionally obedient to its directives, as well as its ability to influence ever-wider strata of the culture and leadership of civic and institutional life. That is, Freemasonry has strategically represented a point of attack, on the principles and on the mentality of those who, in the abstract, should have stood as a bulwark of these traditional principles, but instead have become fully instrumental in the erosion of tradition and revolution against it. “This is also an intuition that the Papal teachings maintained on Freemasonry,” says Negri, “The Popes were agreed in indicating, even from different perspectives, that Freemasonry was conquering, slowly but inexorably, even those who had the duty to defend all the richness, the truth, and the beauty of the traditional position.”
Furthermore, “not only has Freemasonry conquered the revolutionary avant-garde in Europe and in the world but, above all, it has strongly conditioned the regimes that, arising from these masonic-liberal revolutions, would result in the great totalitarian systems.” The CL bishop gives voice to the belief, strongly rooted in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, of a greater “identity-orientation” – certainly a very serious and disturbing presence, now widely documented - of many freemasons with positions of responsibility in the great totalitarian systems. In the crosshairs of Monsignor Negri and of the traditionalist wing of the international episcopate, is “a popular doctrine that has been artfully spread, including by certain ecclesiastical personalities, about a change in the position of the Church with regard to Freemasonry,” and those who even maintain that a collaboration between the Church and Freemasonry would be desirable since, fundamentally, they both work in the fields of charity and solidarity initiatives which are, obviously, pursued with different associations but join into a single project: the well-being of humanity. Says Monsignor Negri: “I happened to hear, in person, similar statements come from the mouth of a very high representative of the Italian church, but such claims have no foundation. No one who wants to seriously deal with the Church-Freemasonry issue can stay at this superficial level that, if it is intolerable for everyone, is even more intolerable for representatives of the ecclesiastical community.”
