Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Catholic Church first prohibited Catholics from membership in Masonic organizations and other secret societies in 1738. Since then, at least eleven popes have made pronouncements about the incompatibility of Catholic doctrines and Freemasonry.
The Catholic Church argues that the philosophy of French Freemasonry (the Grand Orient, not the dominant variety of Freemasonry or the branch that is active in the English-speaking world) is antithetical to Christian doctrine and that it is at many times and places anti-clerical in intent. [4]
The Catholic Church has long been an outspoken critic of Freemasonry, and some scholars have often accused the fraternity of anticlericalism. [1] The Catholic Church forbids its members to join any Masonic society under pain of interdiction. Freemasons usually take a diametrically opposite view, stating that there is nothing in Freemasonry that ...
The Vatican has confirmed a ban on Catholics becoming Freemasons, a centuries-old secretive society that the Catholic Church has long viewed with hostility and has an estimated global membership ...
Historian Jasper Ridley says that Freemasonry is "the world's most powerful secret Society". [5] The organization "Opus Dei" (Latin for "Work of God") is portrayed as a "secret society" [6] [7] [8] of the Catholic Church. Critics such as the Jesuit Wladimir Ledóchowski sometimes refer to Opus Dei as a Catholic (or Christian or "white") form of ...
The Orthodox critique of Freemasonry agrees with both the Catholic and Protestant versions: "Freemasonry cannot be at all compatible with Christianity as far as it is a secret organisation, acting and teaching in mystery and secret and deifying rationalism."
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote that "Freemasonry has succumbed to the Jews and has become an excellent instrument to fight for their aims and to use their strings to pull the upper strata of society into their designs". He continued, "The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry" is then ...
Freemasonry in the United States is the history of Freemasonry as it was introduced from Britain and continues as a major secret society to the present day. It is a fraternal order that brings men together (and women through its auxiliaries) to gain friendship and opportunity for advancement and community progress.