Fr. Z's Blog

A thought…

One can recognize that Freemasonry is the Anti-Church in the following astonishingly frank witness of Giuliano Di Bernardo, Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge Gran Loggia Regolare d’Italia, which he gave during his television appearance on April 11, 2001, on the Italian TV Channel, Rai 2. He said: “You become a Mason through an initiation. Initiation is a constitutive act that gives man a dimension he did not have before. An analogy we find in baptism. You are not born a Christian, you become a Christian through baptism. And so, you become a Mason with the initiation. This means that you remain a Mason for life. Even if one then rejects Freemasonry, he remains a Mason. Even if you are asleep, even if you become an enemy of Freemasonry, you are always a Mason because you have received initiation, and initiation is a sacred act.”

We also have to bear in mind the following shocking words, written by the excommunicated Catholic priest Antonio Fogazzaro, a leading Italian Modernist, in a book published in 1905: “We want to organize our whole action purposefully. A Catholic Freemasonry? Yes, a Freemasonry of the catacombs. […] One must work towards reforming Roman Catholicism in a progressive, theosophical sense through a pope who is convinced by these ideas.”

To put this into the perspective of salvation history, when Jesus Christ came into the world and the Apostles preached the Gospel, the world was governed by an evil, pagan society, and so it is again today. After some seventeen hundred years, Christian society in Europe, which began with Constantine, has collapsed. We are again in a neo-pagan society, but to some extent it is worse because the Gnostic and Satanic invention of gender ideology is now destroying the human being in his or her natural sexual reality and destroying the family as well.

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And…

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People sometimes wonder why it is so important to place God at the center of society. Why is it that when we divorce ourselves from God or the natural law, civilization itself collapses?

“Civilization” comes from the Latin, civis, citizen—it means citizens creating a civitas, a city. In a city, there has to be order, law, beauty, hierarchy. Without these, there is no city—only anarchy and chaos. When you eliminate the laws of God, either in the natural law, which is written by God, or in the supernatural law, in the divine revelation of Holy Scripture, you begin to dismantle this beautiful city, and then chaos ensues in the private and public sphere. This brings us to another principle of the Freemasons, which is the principle of chaos. They say, “We must create chaos in society occasionally and then, from chaos, we will create our order.” Significantly, one of the ideological and strategic mottos of Freemasonry is: “ordo ab chao.”

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Source:

Christus Vincit: Christ’s Triumph Over the Darkness of the Age

by Bp. Athanasius Schneider

US HERE – UK HERE

Compare and contrast with HERE, which explores the sort of Liberation Theology at work in the mind of Francis.  Note especially his four governing principles, originally extracted from an Argentinian dictator and now enshrined in his first encyclical Evangelii gaudium.

You will remember them:

• time is greater than space
• unity prevails over conflict
• realities are more important than ideas
• the whole is greater than the part

Juan Carlos Scannone’s ‘El papa Francisco y la teologia del pueblo’ (in Razón y Fe. 86) and Tracey Rowland (Catholic Theology US HERE – UK HERE) and others have uncovered the source of these principles: a 1834 letter of the 19th c. Argentinian dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793– 1877) sent to another Argentinian caudillo [a type of personalist leader wielding political power], Facundo Quiroga (1788– 1835).

How might one in a swift and reductive way apply these to what is going on?

First, “wait them out”.

Second, “let there be chaos – eventually things will sort out, in a Hegelian way”.

Third, “lived experience trumps expressions of doctrine – eventually doctrine must adapt, in a Hegelian way, to lived experience.”

Fourth, “if there is a group that is not conforming to the larger group’s needs, reject them – in a Rawlsian way the whole remains the whole even if you lop off a few limbs.”

Review Evangelii gaudium for explanations of these four postulates.

What does Francis sign off on with EG?

“Conflict cannot be ignored or concealed. It has to be faced. But if we remain trapped in conflict, we lose our perspective, our horizons shrink and reality itself begins to fall apart. In the midst of conflict, we lose our sense of the profound unity of reality.” (no. 226)

“When conflict arises, some people simply look at it and go their way as if nothing happened; they wash their hands of it and get on with their lives. Others embrace it in such a way that they become its prisoners; they lose their bearings, project onto institutions their own confusion and dissatisfaction and thus make unity impossible. But there is also a third way, and it is the best way to deal with conflict. It is the willingness to face conflict head on, to resolve it and to make it a link in the chain of a new process.” (no. 227)

Face the conflict head on!

But create the conflict first.