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Pope Benedict's Trial in Perspective:

(Freemasonry and the Catholic Church)

Christopher A. Ferrara

REMNANT COLUMNIST, New Jersey

Editor’s Note: This spring and summer will feature two major book publications by our longtime columnist Christopher A. Ferrara. Heading to the presses in a matter of days is The Church and the Libertarian, a defense of the Catholic teaching on Man, Economy and State against its radical libertarian opponents. (Remnant Press)

Coming on September 1 is Liberty: the God that Failed, which examines “the long chain of frauds and usurpations” by which the common man was subjected to the power of secularized central governments founded on the very principles radical libertarians defend (even as they complain about the resulting abuses of state power and call for an “anarcho-capitalist” utopia).

One cannot understand the perilous situation in which our Pope finds himself today without recognizing that he is struggling against a social order whose anti-Catholic and Masonic foundations have long since been forgotten. In the following excerpt from Liberty: the God that Failed, Mr. Ferrara provides a sketch of Pope Leo XIII’s own struggle against the forces that were constructing political modernity during his pontificate by the violent overthrow of Catholic social order in country after country. By reviewing this history we can learn not only how the Church arrived at her present state of crisis but also what we can expect in the future if she is not completely reformed according to her own sacred Tradition. MJM

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Pope Leo XIII and the New Zeitgeist

The pontificate of Leo XIII (1878-1903) spanned the historical transition between the Church’s militant opposition to emerging political modernity, as summed up in the Syllabus, and a conditional truce with the new order of Liberty for lack of any practical possibility of overturning it, especially in France. Leo’s pontificate also spanned the Progressive Era in America (1890 to the early 1900s) and the rise of what has been called “the Americanist heresy” among liberal American Catholics who, like their European counterparts, opposed the “ultramontanes,” slighted the Syllabus, and sought not merely a prudential accommodation to the new order, but the Church’s embrace of Liberty as a positive good and indeed the divinely ordained future of the human race. Leo charted a course through these developments that left the Church’s opposition to the new order intact in principle and rejected “Americanism,” but recognized the insuperable practical realities that had come into play after a century of revolution and social upheaval had all but destroyed Christendom.

By the time Pope Leo ascended to the papacy in 1878, the post-Christian state was already a reality in America, France, and Italy, where the Pope’s temporal possessions now extended no further than a Vatican enclave surrounded by a republic that Masonic heroes had imposed by the usual means: force of arms, followed by token plebiscites and the passive popular acceptance of a fait accompli. As the turn of the century approached no one was more aware than Leo that, as the mid-20th century liberal Catholic luminary, John Courtney Murray, S.J. put it, “a new Zeitgeist was on its conquering march, [and] a new climate of opinion and feeling had rolled in from many quarters upon the world, especially upon the European world which was closest to him." ^[i]

In his inaugural encyclical, Inscrutabili (1878), on “the evils of society,” Leo offered this withering assessment of what the new Zeitgeist had produced after a century of violent revolution, war and devastation:

… widespread subversion of the primary truths on which, as on its foundations, human society is based;… obstinacy of mind that will not brook any authority however lawful;… endless sources of disagreement… civil strife, and ruthless war and bloodshed;… contempt of law which molds characters and is the shield of righteousness;… insatiable craving for things perishable, with complete forgetfulness of things eternal, leading up to the desperate madness whereby so many wretched beings [] scruple not to lay violent hands upon themselves;… the shamelessness of those who, full of treachery, make semblance of being champions of country, of freedom, and every kind of right; in fine, the deadly kind of plague which infects in its inmost recesses, allowing it no respite and foreboding ever fresh disturbances and final disaster.^[ii]

In his next encyclical, Quod apostolici, issued in the same year, Leo repeated the theme of a “deadly plague that is creeping into the very fibres of human society and leading it on to the verge of destruction…”^[iii] A line of subsequent Popes, including Pope Pius XII, would track the progress of the “plague” in their own pronouncements, offering a series of increasingly grim prognoses culminating in Pius XII’s observations after World War II that “We are overwhelmed with sadness and anguish, seeing that the wickedness of perverse men has reached a degree of impiety that is unbelievable and absolutely unknown in other times,”^[iv] and that “[t]he human race is involved today in a supreme crisis, which will issue in its salvation by Christ, or in its destruction.” ^[v]

Leo versus Freemasonry

Murray notes, with evident condescension, that “it is characteristic of [Leo’s] thought that the Masonic sect should be identified as the source and carrier of this disease.” That identification, Murray writes, “is made in the first year of his pontificate… [and] is maintained with increasing emphasis throughout his long years of teaching.” ^[vi] But the Masons themselves were only too happy to proclaim that their “order,” as they called it, was indeed the source and carrier of Liberty, although the “order” denied any responsibility for the immense bloodshed and social devastation necessary to impose Liberty on the “benighted masses” that had never asked for it.

Even Murray, who would champion the Americanist conception of “religious liberty” at Vatican II, was constrained to admit that, at the time Leo was writing, “the fact of Masonic influence on the governments of France and Italy was altogether patent.”^[vii] Speaking of France in particular, Leo declared: “[A]ll the evils which overwhelm you have as their origin the hatred of a caliginous [dark] society, the irreconcilable enemy of the Catholic faith.” ^[viii]

Masonic influence was no less patent in North America. In fact, during the immediately preceding reign of Pius IX the kidnapping and murder of William Morgan for having revealed Masonic “secrets,” and the perpetrators’ suspicious avoidance of any criminal prosecution, was still provoking a national reaction against Freemasonry in America which had led to the creation of an anti-Masonic third party that ran a candidate opposing Andrew Jackson, a Freemason,^[ix] in the presidential election of 1828 (during the reign of Leo XII).

By the 1870s, when Leo was pronouncing against it, American Freemasonry had recovered its membership losses following the Morgan affair and was undergoing a revival of its influence, even though “[i]t would never again recover the exalted position that had once seemed Masonry’s due” during the period in American history (1790-1826) when Masonry “formed a part of the post-Revolutionary infrastructure of power and authority” and was to be found “in almost every place where power is of importance.” ^[x]

Furthermore, the influence of Freemasonry was “altogether patent” in the Latin American revolutions and uprisings of Leo’s time. Like their French and American counterparts, the Masonic leaders seeking to overthrow “popery” in South America were well familiar with “the works of Tom Paine [and] the speeches of John Adams, Jefferson and Washington [and]… many of the precursors and leaders of independence visited the United States and saw free institutions at first hand.”^[xi] These Masons, like the ones who had helped found the American republic, understood Liberty “precisely in the interpretation given it by the philosopher John Locke” ^[xii]—that is, a pluralist society organized for the protection of property and commerce, with “one body politic under one supreme government,” premised on the Law of Toleration and the separation of Church and State.

Before and during Leo’s reign, Masonic heroes agitated and took up arms for the overthrow of Spanish rule and Catholic social order in every single Latin American country: Simón Bolívar, the “George Washington of South America,” in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and Bolivia;[xiii] Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla,[xiv] Vicente Guerrero and José María Morelos in Mexico;[xv] Francisco de Miranda in Venezuela;[xvi] José Marti, the “apostle of independence,” in Cuba; [xvii] Bernardo O’Higgins in Chile;[xviii] Francisco de Paula Santander in Colombia;[xix] and Antonio José de Sucre in Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia. [xx]

Denslow and Truman observe matter-of-factly that “The liberation of the South American republics was planned by Freemasons in Spanish lodges meeting in London,” where de Miranda had founded the Lautaro Lodge as part of a “Grand Orient” of three lodges (Lautaro, Caballeros Racionales, and Gran Reunion Americana) for the express purpose of “liberating” Latin America. [xxi]

“Die, Destroyer of Liberty!”

In Ecuador, Masonic influence during Leo’s reign was so obvious that Dr. Gabriel Garcia Moreno, the nation’s devout Catholic president, was able to predict his own assassination by the Masons after he had taken measures to reestablish Catholic social order in that country following its emergence as a separate nation with the breakup of Bolívar’s Gran Columbia upon “the Liberator’s” death in 1830. Unable to control the forces he himself had unleashed and which “finally destroyed him,” a chastened Bolívar (who came back to the Church on his deathbed) left behind an Ecuador “torn to pieces by internal revolutions.” ^[xxii]

By 1869, however, Garcia Moreno had signed a concordat with the Vatican (1863), publicly dedicated Ecuador to the Sacred Heart, obtained a new Constitution (1869) that declared Catholicism to be the religion of the Ecuadorian state, restored control of education to the Church, banned divorce, and carried out political and economic reforms which, as even the Encyclopædia Britannica admits, “reduced corruption, maintained relative peace, [and] strengthened the economy…” [xxiii]

Speaking of the new Constitution, Garcia Moreno had dared to defend the Syllabus as binding on Catholics, to the outrage of not only the Masons but (as we shall see in the case of the Americanists) the Liberal Catholics that Pope Leo himself would rebuke, who had made a cottage industry of reducing the Syllabus to a dead letter. As Garcia Moreno declared against them: “They will not understand that if the Syllabus remains a dead letter, society is at an end! If the Pope has put true social principles before us, it is because the world needs them if it be not to perish.” [xxiv] Today, even many non-Catholics might well regard as a prophecy fulfilled Garcia Moreno’s warning (in unison with the Popes) of a world perishing on account of the errors condemned in the Syllabus.

Garcia Moreno’s Catholic reforms, the Britannica further concedes, were “often effective” but  “eventually cost him his life”—cost him his life, that is, because the Masons had him assassinated.

The first assassination plot, organized by Manuel Cornejo shortly after the Constitution of 1869 was adopted, failed when one of the plotters confessed it to Garcia Moreno. But what Liberty demanded had only been deferred for a few years.  Garcia Moreno contemplated his own imminent demise in his last letter to Pius IX, the very Pope who had himself narrowly escaped death during the insurrections led by the Masonic heroes Mazzini and Garibaldi, only to end up a prisoner in the Vatican:

Today, when all the Masonic lodges, excited by those in Germany and Belgium, utter against me the vilest and most horrible of calumnies, and are moving heaven and earth to find means to assassinate me, I need more than ever the power of Divine protection, so as to live and die for the defense of our holy religion and of this dear Republic which God has called upon me to govern. What greater happiness can be awarded to me, most Holy Father, than to see myself detested and calumniated for the love of our Divine Redeemer? But what still greater happiness it would be if your benediction could obtain from the heaven the grace to shed by blood for Him, who, being God, has deigned to shed every drop of his at the pillar and upon the Cross. [xxv]

A few weeks later, on August 6, 1875, the Feast of the Transfiguration, Garcia Moreno’s assassins used a messenger to summon him from the Cathedral in Quito, where he was praying before the Blessed Sacrament, on the false pretext that he was urgently needed at the government palace. When Garcia Moreno stepped into the plaza the assassins, including one Rayo, immediately hacked and shot him to death, with Rayo using a machete to lop off the President’s left arm while screaming: “Die, destroyer of liberty.”

As he lay dying, Garcia Moreno famously replied: “Dios no muere! [God does not die!].” In a risible understatement the Britannica observes: “He was assassinated by a group of young liberals.” Rayo, shot in the leg, was unable to escape along with his fellow conspirators and was dispatched on the spot by an enraged soldier. No doubt heedless of the supreme historical irony of the moment, Rayo screamed: “You have no right to kill me!” [xxvi]

Rayo was quite correct in declaring Garcia Moreno a “destroyer of liberty,” for the Catholic commonwealth Garcia Moreno had dared to rebuild was the intolerable antithesis of Liberty, summed up in Garcia Moreno’s own motto: “Liberty for everyone and for everything, save for evil and evildoers.”

In memory of Garcia Moreno, Pius IX ordered a solemn Requiem Mass to be celebrated in the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere and had a monument to the martyr-president erected in Rome, bearing an inscription praising his Catholic fidelity.[xxvii] Upon succeeding Pius IX, Pope Leo, the new papal nemesis of the Masons, hailed Garcia Moreno’s Ecuador as “the model of a Christian state.”[xxviii] That Ecuador had become precisely that, with the support of the overwhelming preponderance of the Ecuadorian people, was the very reason Garcia Moreno had to die. Faced with a winning hand on the Catholic side of the table, and lacking any significant popular support, the forces of Liberty had played their trump card: assassination.

With Garcia Moreno out of the way, the Masons quickly undid his Catholic reforms. The liberal Borrero, who began the process, was succeeded by the outright dictator Ignacio Vintimilla, who was quite literally a drunken soldier. During Vintimilla’s rule (1877-1883) “the usual decree secularizing education was promulgated,” bishops protesting the decree were exiled, and the Archbishop of Quito was poisoned to death by crystals of strychnine slipped into his chalice.[xxix] But Vintimilla was overthrown by a military coup d’état after he declared himself dictator for life. What followed under the new conservative Catholic president, Josè Maria Caamano, paralleled the Bourbon restoration in France, including a public ceremony of atonement with a Litany of Reparation that was a remarkably concise repudiation of all the works of Liberty in Ecuador:

For all our iniquities.

Pardon us, good Lord.

For the sins of Thy priests.

Pardon! pardon!

For the injustices of our rulers,

For the faults of our magistrates,

For the sins of fathers of families,

For the crimes of unworthy men,

For their impieties and blasphemies,

For their perjuries and sacrileges,

For our Revolutions and fratricidal wars,

For the attacks against ecclesiastical authority,

For the plots against civil authority,…

For the shameful excesses of the Press,

For our political crimes,

For our public scandals,

In a word, for all our social iniquities,

Pardon us, good Lord! pardon us![xxx]

The new Archbishop of Quito presented Pope Leo with a reliquary containing a relic of Blessed Marianne de Jesus and a text of the Presidential address Garcia Moreno had intended to deliver before he was murdered. Leo responded to this tribute with a message delivered to the apostolic nuncio to Ecuador:

We offer our most ardent wishes for the prosperity of Ecuador and its President, to whom we earnestly recommend the interests of the Catholic Faith, which will ensure the happiness of the people. . . . We accept also with joy the precious gift which your Excellency has presented to us on this our happy anniversary. This autograph message which the illustrious Garcia Moreno proposed to read to Congress before he was struck down by the hands of assassins, we shall religiously preserve as a touching remembrance of a man who was the champion of the Catholic Faith, and to whom may be justly applied the words made use of by the Church to celebrate the memory of the holy martyrs, St Thomas of Canterbury and St. Stanislas of Poland: Pro Ecclesia gladiis impiorum occubitit. [xxxi]

But the Catholic restoration in Ecuador, like the one in France, did not last, for the Masons and their fellow defenders of Liberty would never abide it. In 1895, eight years before the end of Leo’s reign, José Eloy Alfaro Delgado—a Freemason, of course [xxxii]—led the so-called Ecuadorian Liberal Revolution, during which he “declared himself anti-clerical dictator and President of Ecuador,” as even Denslow and Truman admit in their catalogue of famous Freemasons. Alfaro imposed on Ecuador the standard requisites of Liberty: separation of Church and State, the legalization of civil marriage and divorce, and liberty of conscience and freedom of speech—which is to say, anti-clerical speech. For like his revolutionary counterparts everywhere, Alfaro “spoke of liberalism, but in practice he could be a tyrant.” [xxxiii] Alfaro’s gangs attacked the offices of pro-Catholic opposition newspapers “and he exiled or jailed the editors.” [xxxiv]

Like all his revolutionary counterparts, Alfaro did have one consistent policy, however: “his crusade against the Church,” [xxxv] including the usual seizure of Church properties, the secularization of education, and an invitation to Protestant missionaries to enter the country and proselytize Catholics. But Alfaro’s dictatorship ended with a dose of his own medicine when an angry crowd confronted and killed him at Quito in 1912. The “liberator” of Ecuador is honored as a martyr for Liberty by Masonic monuments and statues in numerous Latin American countries and at Masonic centers in the United States, including St. Augustine, Florida, Lincoln, Nebraska, the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C., and the George Washington National Masonic Memorial in Alexandria, VA. [xxxvi] The inscription on a Masonic statue erected in honor of Alfaro at Alajuela, Costa Rica rather vaguely avers that he was “murdered by conservatives and drunken priests.”

Given the worldwide political context in which Pope Leo wrote, of which only the barest sketch has been presented here, he was merely stating the obvious when he described Freemasonry as a “‘vast conspiracy,’ international in scope, with a clearly defined goal and a definite strategy.” In the Leonine pronouncements that Murray has collected, the Pope warned that

The [Masonic] Sect is cosmopolitan, everywhere operative: “a wicked sect, spread throughout the world.” Its national branches are linked by a “secret pact”; their unity and their activism are such as Catholics themselves might well emulate. However, the “destructive force” of the Sect “has for a long time been bent especially against the Catholic nations.”…. The dynamic of the sect is “hatred of the Catholic Church, of its divine mission, and of the spiritual power of its supreme Head.” It has launched a “systematic war against everything that is Catholic.” ^[xxxvii]

At the end of his pontificate, Leo described the Freemasonic order as:

... a sort of society retourné; its purpose is to exercise a hidden suzerainty over recognized society... It embraces in its immense nets almost the totality of nations; it strikes relationships with other sects, whose movements it controls by hidden strings; it first attracts and then holds on to its members by the bait of the advantages it can procure for them; it bends governments to its designs, at times by promises, at times by threats. This sect has managed to infiltrate into all classes of society. It forms, as it were, an invisible and irresponsible state within the legitimate state.... It protests that it has no political aims, but in reality it exercises the most profound influence on the legislative and administrative life of states. And although it verbally professes respect for authority and for religion, its supreme purpose (as its own statutes bear witness) is the extermination of the sovereignty and of the priesthood, in which it sees the enemies of freedom. ^[xxxviii]

Considering Leo’s anti-Masonic pronouncements and his tribute to Garcia Moreno, the assassinated “destroyer of liberty,” as a martyr for the Catholic faith, the effort by European and American liberal Catholics of Leo’s day to portray the Pope as a lover of Liberty has to be seen as calculated intellectual dishonesty.

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Excellent historical dissertation. I often wish our Catholic newspapers would publish such detailed true history. Few of us still care about such truths although it often seems that one is utterly alone. Nevertheless I usually do not fail to point to those Catholic popes so long ago when I reply to articles which appear to be a new awakening in America. You certainly deserve credit for your courage to print historical truths which never fail to ascertain a divine inspiration and prophetic sign both today and in the past.
God bless.

Bruno Mueller