A Reminder about Freemasonry
10-11-2020Weekly ReflectionThe Church has always rejected Freemasonry. It is alive and well in our world and is international in its reach. It is part of a current globalism, the movement to subvert the sovereignty of individual countries with a so-called new world order ruled by oligarchs, power-elites, whose rules don’t apply to them. One of the reasons Freemasonry is rejected is that it is a pseudo-religion. God is simply the Grand Architect of the Universe a form of deism. Deism accepts a notion of God as having nothing to do with this world, who does not intervene in this world or with human beings. Freemasonry gives religious symbols alien meanings and promotes naturalism, the view that only the things of this world count and there is nothing beyond this world. Religion in freemasonry is totally private and can be whatever you want, hence there is no truth in religion and all religions are the same. Brotherhood is based solely on human concerns and endeavors not on God or His Revelation. The pivotal Church teaching on Freemasonry is Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Humanum Genus,(The Human Race)
However, below is a succinct description of this cult in another encyclical by Pope Leo, Inimica Vis (The Enemy Power):
The enemy forces, inspired by the evil spirit, ever wage war on the Christian name. They join forces in this endeavor with certain groups of men whose purpose is to subvert divinely revealed truths and to rend the very fabric of Christian society with disastrous dissent. Indeed, how much damage these cohorts, as it were, have inflicted on the Church is well-known. And yet, the spirit of all previous groups hostile to Catholic institutions has come to life again in that group called the Masonic sect, which, strong in manpower and resources, is the leader in a war against anything sacred.
The Anthropological Question and Points of Christian Anthropology
"You live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because, in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing." —Walker Percy (1916-1990), American Catholic convert and writer, author of The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos
The Catholic Faith teaches that man/woman is a creature of body and soul made in the image and likeness of God and that God created us to know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him in heaven. St. Ignatius Loyola calls this the Principle and Foundation of Life. He puts it this way: Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him in praising, reverencing, and serving God, and saving his soul. To come to this freedom we need at all times, where it is left to our own choice, to hold ourselves open and ready for all things, wealth or poverty, fame or disgrace, health or sickness, a long life or a short one, and with everything else. So we want to be graced by God into a spiritual freedom that is both deeply interior and gratefully responsive to God’s prior love in creating us, to desire and choose in all things what better helps each of us to share the life for which God has made us all.
The human being is hindered by original sin, a state of alienation from God, inherited from the first man and woman, who freely sinned against God and passed down to their offspring a wounded human nature. Baptism restores man to God in friendship and as an adopted son/daughter and fills the person with the life of God the Blessed Trinity. This is called the state of grace.
However human being continue to suffer from the weaknesses of original sin a certain darkening of the understanding, weakness of will, and desires that war against the spiritual good of each person. These disordered desires or loves are called concupiscence. They manifest themselves through seven tendencies called deadly or capital sins: pride, sloth, lust, anger, gluttony, greed, and envy.
This disorder is healed by God’s grace especially through the Holy Eucharist, Confession, prayer and penance which nourishes not disordered love but the order of God’s love through Faith, Hope, and Charity, which tie us directly to God and are called theological virtues and the cardinal virtues which help us to live well: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance and help us to get to God.
Faith ties us to God as believable since He neither deceive nor be deceived. Hope ties us to God as our anchor in all difficulties. Charity ties us to God in friendship. Prudence helps us to make right decisions especially about right and wrong. Justice helps us to give what is due to our neighbor and to practice the special form of justice to God called religion. Fortitude helps us to do what is right when we are pressured to do wrong. Temperance helps us to balance bodily desires so that they occupy a balanced and proper place in our lives and do not work against us and our relationship with the Lord.
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