Freemasonry and The Fall of the West
Why Pope Leo XIII was right
Many popes have explicitly condemned Freemasonry — a total of eight from Clement XII in 1738 to the promulgation of the first Code of Canon Law in 1917 — but Pope Leo XIII might have proven to be the most prophetic.
In the encyclical Humanum Genus, he outlined the Masonic agenda: exclude the Church from the public sphere and remove her rights as a social institution.
This agenda had various angles of attack, and all of them aimed at secularising the state and society:
Remove religious education from state schools.
Remove any Church influence in any public bodies such as hospital, charities or universities.
Make marriage merely a civil contract.
Promote divorce.
Legalise abortion.
Masonry, Pope Leo XIII said, believes ‘the State…ought to be absolutely atheistic, having the inalienable right and duty to form the heart and the spirit of its citizens.’
This underpins everything wrong with the West today, and only a return to integralism can reconnect us to our roots so we can resist and rebuild.
The state must be subordinate to the Church because, as Pope Leo XIII explains in Libertas (37-38),
“To reject the supreme authority to God, and to cast off all obedience to Him in public matters, or even in private and domestic affairs, is the greatest perversion of liberty and the worst kind of liberalism…From this teaching, as from its source and principle, flows that fatal principle of the separation of Church and State; whereas it is, on the contrary, clear that the two powers, though dissimilar in functions and unequal in degree, ought nevertheless to live in concord, by harmony in their action and the faithful discharge of their respective duties.”
But isn’t it enough that citizens practise their religion privately? No, says Pope Leo XIII wisely (Libertas, 39):
“Many wish the State to be separated from the Church wholly and entirely, so that with regard to every right of human society, in institutions, customs, and laws, the offices of State, and the education of youth, they would pay no more regard to the Church than if she did not exist; and, at most, would allow the citizens individually to attend to their religion in private if so minded. Against such as these, all the arguments by which We disprove the principle of separation of Church and State are conclusive; with this super-added, that it is absurd the citizen should respect the Church, while the State may hold her in contempt.”
He could have added that human nature means that when the State holds the Church in contempt, the citizen tends to do so as well. Vice comes easily to man. He need. only let himself go. Virtue is hard.
The role of Protestantism in this is rarely mentioned, but it is significant. As liberalism in the religious sphere, Protestantism underlies social liberalism. Consider Luther’s advice to the princes (Luther’s Works, Wiemar Edition, XXXII, pp. 391, 439, 440):
“…you have people under you and you wish to know what to do. It is not Christ you are to question concerning the matter but the law of your country…Between the Christian and the ruler, a profound separation must be made…Assuredly, a prince can be a Christian, but it is not as a Christian that he ought to govern. As a ruler, he is not called a Christian, but a prince. The man is a Christian, but his function does not concern his religion…Though they are found in the man, the two states or functions are perfectly marked off, one from the other, and really opposed.”
By contrast, Catholicism told princes, as Bertrand de Jouvenel tell us in On Power (Indianapolis, 1976), p. 33, that ‘through this crown, you become a sharer in our ministry.’
That’s why Pope Leo XIII called the separation of Church and State the ‘fatal principle’. The US Constitution was originally an integralist document. Not only did the general police powers deriving from the Tenth Amendment encompass morality, but from 1791 to 1947, eight of the thirteen states had official Christian State establishments, and the other five were supposed to. Indeed, the First Amendment made it illegal for Congress to disestablish Christianity. Not until Everson vs. Board of Education in 1947 did this change.
Just over decade afterwards, JFK’s Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association delivered Sept. 12, 1960 relegated religion from public life:
“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute… I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me…Whatever issue may come before me as president—on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject—I will make my decision…in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.”
This was a major Masonic victory — no ‘outside religious pressure or dictates’ in politics. And its fruits are clear.
Anyone who thinks the 1950s were a Golden Age the West needs to recover doesn’t understand the rot had already set in by then.
Separation of church and state is not a founding principal of our nation, it’s essentially a myth. 1A is meant to protect the church from the government, not the other way around. Sadly, many Americans don’t realize this since revisionist history is taught in schools. It’s wild, since a basic perusal of US history shows that religion was always an active part of American public life.