Is There No Help For The Widow's Son?

The Metropolitan Police "will robustly defend our decision to require officers and staff to declare if they are Freemasons", and there has just been the annual outpouring of anger at the non-enforcement of the hunting ban. The Masonic Lodges were key to the circulation of the ideas that became the French Revolution against which all three of Gaullism, the non-Gaullist French Right and the non-Marxist French Left are to many extents ongoing reactions. In the Latin world, those Lodges have ever since been organisational bases of attacks on the Church and on Her interests. They were also key to the circulation of the ideas against which the several States had to demand that the First Amendment protect their respective Established Churches.

Freemasonry has been, and to some extent remains, part of petty anti-Catholicism in this country; it was, for example, why Catholics found it so difficult to secure promotion while working for the Consett Iron Company. But it is impossible to imagine a band of men less likely to conspire to overthrow the economic, social, cultural and political order. Simply because it is impossible to imagine a band of men that better epitomised the economic, social, cultural and political order. Masonic influence over the Church in this country, and Catholic influence over the Masons, are both immemorial in certain places. I knew of a ward where the only way to get anything done was through the Catholics within the Masons within the Labour Party.

That was not a post-Conciliar phenomenon: it had ever been thus, and several of the individuals in question were Latin Mass aficionados, while they were all indefatigable battlers for Catholic schools, pro-life, and so on. All aspects of which I was told were fairly unusual but far from unique, whether then, or in the 1950s, or ever. A lot of people were surprised when one was surprised at them. Cardinal Heenan was known expressly to enjoin converts, including convert Anglican clergymen, to remain active in the Lodge. Scotland is a different story, but I should not be at all surprised if Catholics were now the single largest bloc among English Freemasons, and had been for decades. In fact, I should be thoroughly surprised if that were not the case.

To them was and is addressed the message, formulated while he was still an Anglican clergyman, of Fr Walton Hannah, who had no time for lurid Masonic conspiracy theories. It was precisely because the original Masonic rituals in this country had drawn heavily on the Book of Common Prayer, itself drawn heavily from Medieval and earlier sources, but had later been redacted to exclude expressions of orthodox Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, that they were now unconscionable to those who continued to adhere to that orthodoxy. That argument is unanswerable. On these shores, we ought therefore to deploy that, and not detain ourselves with Abroad's lurid theories, or even lurid facts, for which Fr Hannah had no time.