Sunday 3 November 2013

ENGLISH AND CONTINENTAL MASONRY.

Are Their Aims the Same ?

A QUESTION OF THE HOUR.

M. Valentin Brifaut, advocate of the Court of Appeal of Brussels, Belgium, writes to "America," directing attention to the recent efforts at a closer union between the Grand Orient of France and Masonic lodges all over the world. "This question," he says, "is becoming more and more a live one throughout Europe. Catholics are beginning to perceive that the centre of all anti Christian activity is to be sought nowhere else than in Freemasonry. .. .the object of which is to wipe Christianity out of the world, and even to destroy all Christian civilisation." To those who object that in North America at least this question is unimportant: he replies that this is a great mistake, which he had occasion to point out more than once during five months which he spent, in 1904 travelling over the United States with a view to observing the tactics and influence of American Freemasons. He maintains that the essential principles of Freemasonry are the same in Protestant as in Catholic countries. The only difference is the period of evolution. Time will reveal the secret evolution of Protestant Freemasonry. Referring to Mr. Roosevelt's recent reception by the Mayor of Rome, he writes that this "proves how urgent it is to remove from all men of good faith in your country the illusion under which they have fallen, and thanks to which in America and England Freemasonry, by its influence on the movement of ideas, will make possible the evolution toward paganism and anarchy of countries hitherto so deeply impregnated with Catholicism. For how can we explain that Mr. Roosevelt himself, so Christian, so convinced of the necessity of religion, and of the forces it represents in the cause of social order, should have strayed, into the company of a fanatic like Mr. Nathan, who is not only anti-Clerical in the ordinary sense, but a militant anti-Christian Jew, a natural son of Mazzini, who destroyed the temporal power of the Popes, that pet scheme of Freemasonry, and its first step towards the complete destruction of the Papacy and Catholicism. Nathan Mazzini and Mr. Roosevelt have ideals that are as the poles asunder. How explain their hobnobbing except through Mr. Roosevelt's ignorance of the true role of Freemasonry in Europe, and in the whole world.
A similar warning appeared in the London "Tablet" of March 20. Under the heading, "Freemasonry and the Church," Father Herman Gruber, S.J., of Feldkiren, Austria, writes to the editor, describing the various unitive efforts between the Grand Orient of France and the German lodges, efforts which have been momentarily stopped, owing to the reaction produced by incisive articles of "Germania," which alarmed the Prussian Government. Father Gruber adds: "The event is of the greatest importance also for English-speaking Catholics. For if the closer union of the Grand Orient with the German Grand lodges should be accomplished, the union also of the Grand Orient with the British and American would follow, or at least partially, and practically be realised. And this would be very dangerous for the generalisation of the French Kulturkampf throughout the whole world. Think of the Ferrer agitation. I wonder that the foreign press has so little seized this aspect of the matter."

 The Catholic Press 23 June 1910,

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