Did Joe Biden join the Freemasons?
It's more complicated than you might think
An announcement surfaced online Friday, issued the Conference of Grand Masters of Prince Hall Lodge Freemasonry, and stating that the Grand Lodge of South Carolina had conferred membership on President Joe Biden.
According to the announcement, dated Jan. 19 — the day before Biden left office — the president was granted a “resolution of membership” by the lodge in recognition of his “exceptional dedication and service to the United States” which “reflects the core values of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of South Carolina, including brotherly love, relief, and truth.”
It is not uncommon for outgoing presidents to be honored by groups and organizations.
But as the second Catholic to hold the office, Biden’s new “membership” of the lodge presents a particular issue: Catholics have been banned from joining masonic lodges and organizations since 1738, and are subject to canonical penalties for doing so.
So, is Joe Biden now a Freemason? And if so, what canonical penalties does he face? Based on the facts available, the situation is more complicated than you might think.
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A little Masonic history
While many lodges like to pretend to have links back to ancient, or even biblical times, the real beginning of Freemasonry, as people think of it now, was in 1717, when the first Grand Lodge was founded in the back room of a London pub.
In the first years after they emerged, some Catholics, even prominent ones, joined the lodges, which became a hub for free-thinkers, religious non-conformists, political dissidents, people interested in pseudo-sciences like alchemy, and peddlers of Gnostic philosophies and Christian heresies.
Before long, Pope Clement XII banned Catholics from joining because, while Freemasonry was religiously tolerant, allowing people of any denomination to join, the pope found that it actually promoted religious indifferentism — the belief that it doesn’t matter what religious creed a person believes because everyone in the lodge understood themselves to be serving a higher notion of natural virtue.
As Masonry spread across Europe, the papal condemnations kept coming, and eight popes issued encyclicals or papal bulls imposing a penalty of automatic excommunication on any Catholic who joined the Freemasons, until the promulgation of the first Code of Canon Law in 1917, which also included the ban on membership and the penalty.
But the Church has always condemned the idea of Freemasonry because, the Church said, it removed Catholics from legitimate ecclesiastical oversight while they were being, effectively, catechised into a new philosophy — a different way of looking at the world.
Some Catholics, though, thought the Church had changed its mind about Freemasonry after the Second Vatican Council because, when the new Code of Canon Law was promulgated in 1983, the explicit mention of Freemasonry was removed from the penal code.
Instead, the new law banned Catholics who join societies which “plot against the Church,” and said they should be punished with “a just penalty.”
But before the new law came into force, the then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued a public clarification stating that “the Church’s negative judgment in regard to Masonic association remains unchanged,” because the “principles [of Freemasonry] have always been considered irreconcilable with the doctrine of the Church and therefore membership in them remains forbidden.”
Ratzinger also clarified that explicit mention of masonry had been removed because the new wording was meant to capture “broader categories” of societies and not be limited to masonic lodges.
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A little more Mason history
The Church has maintained the same position about Freemasonry, what is wrong with it, and that Catholics are absolutely forbidden from joining since the 1700s.
And, while Freemasonic lodges have taken very different roles in different places over the centuries, the Church has remained clear that those distinctions don’t change the underlying fundamentals of why Catholics are banned from joining.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting the different strands of Freemasonry which have emerged over the centuries, because those differences do explain different attitudes to masonry in different times and places.
In Catholic countries, like Spain and the states of the Italian peninsula, the lodges got very political, and were linked to violent revolutionary cells over the centuries. Because of that, Masonic societies were banned by both the Church and civil governments there.
Meanwhile, in the United States, despite professing a philosophy of equality among all men, American Freemasonry, even from before the Revolutionary War, banned Black men from joining, and lodges openly opposed the establishment of Catholic schools, the election of Catholics to public office, and in some cases jointly endorsed candidates and legislation with local branches of the Ku Klux Klan, including into the twentieth century.
As a result, Black Americans founded their own parallel Masonic lodges — descended not from white American lodges but from British lodges — which came to America with the British Army.
Black American Freemasonry — including the lodge that granted Joe Biden membership — is, for this reason, called “Prince Hall” masonry. Prince Hall wasn’t a place but a man, a free Black man living in Massachusetts who was refused membership of the local American lodges and instead was accepted into a lodge of British officers in the army then occupying Boston.
As a result, Prince Hall Lodge Freemasonry has long had a deep association with Black communities in many states, which likely explains President Biden’s visit to a lodge in South Carolina.
But as far as the Church is concerned, Prince Hall masonry has all of the same problems, from a philosophical, theological, and canonical perspective, as any other branch of Freemasonry.
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Did Biden ‘join’ the Freemasons?
The ban on Catholics joining the Freemasons is centuries old, and is recognized by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith as both a crime and a grave sin.
But there are some things we don’t know about Biden’s situation, even after the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of South Carolina has said that on Jan. 19 “at a private event, Master Mason membership with full honors were conferred upon” Joe Biden, who now has and the rank of “Master Mason.”
The lodge announcement says that membership was “conferred” on Biden by the lodge, not that he went through any actual Masonic liturgies. That might seem like a question of formalities, but it could actually make a big canonical difference.
For a start, it is not clear to what extent Biden accepted, formally or informally, membership of the lodge, or if it was merely presented to him as something they did for (and to) him. Pictures of the event show the president shaking hands and embracing the head of the lodge, but not receiving any certificate or physical representation of membership.
That matters, because the actual crime in canon law is not the status of being a member of a masonic lodge but the act of joining.
Simply put, if Biden didn’t actively do anything to join the Freemasons or accept his membership, it’s reasonable to conclude that he did not violate the relevant canon, which — in accord with canonical principles — must be interpreted strictly.
Of course, that doesn’t change the Vatican’s standing decree that any Catholic who is a member of a masonic lodge (even passively) is in a state of grave sin and barred from receiving Communion.
But, again, Biden would have to himself accept, even passively by not rejecting the designation, the conferred membership — the masons don’t have the power to make someone a member without consent, anymore than one person can marry another without their consent.
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But is he excommunicated?
One thing a lot of Catholics know, or think they know, is that a Catholic who becomes a Freemason is automatically excommunicated. And for a long while this was a pretty cut and dried issue — a latae sententae penalty of excommunication was attached to any Catholic who joined a masonic society up until the 1983 Code of Canon Law.
But the wording of the 1983 code dropped both the term “masonic” and the penalty of excommunication from the canon on joining forbidden societies.
While the 1983 CDF declaration signed by Ratzinger clarified that all masonic societies were covered by the new wording (and still gravely sinful) it did not explicitly provide a penalty of excommunication.
Instead, the code provides for the competent authority to impose a “just penalty” — and the CDF made the point of saying that it is “not within the competence of local ecclesiastical authorities to give a judgment on the nature of Masonic associations” — in other words, bishops don’t get to decide that this or that masonic lodge isn’t really bad.
However, some canonists argue that since the popes, the CDF, and the drafting committee for the Code of Canon Law have all been clear that Freemasonry is against the faith and doctrine of the Church, joining a lodge is actually a double crime of enrolling in a banned association, which is to be punished with a “just penalty,” and committing an act of heresy, which does have an automatic excommunication attached to it.
To those canonists (including me!), that seems especially true when masonic members go through the various formal masonic liturgies of initiation which, even at the lowest level, include the candidate affirming that he has “long been in darkness and now seeks to be brought to light” which only Freemasonry can provide, and embracing the “principle of Freemasonry that the natural eye cannot perceive of the mysteries of the Order until the heart has embraced the deep spiritual and mystic meanings of those sublime mysteries.”
But even when those rituals have been undergone, automatic penalties need to be declared by a competent authority in order for them to attain full legal effects. Since becoming a member of a secret society isn’t usually a public act, it’s hard for a bishop to impose or declare any kind of penalty.
Given those factors, even in Biden’s case the public announcement of his masonic membership raises a lot of questions about what, exactly, he did, or accepted.
And there is an even bigger complicating factor in Biden’s case: Who is the competent ecclesiastical authority to decide if he has “joined” the masons?
According to the announcement by the South Carolina lodge, Biden received his membership on Jan.19 — the last full day of his presidency.
As such, Biden was still in office and therefore outside of the jurisdiction of either the local bishop in South Carolina or the bishops of his official residences (Washington, DC, and Delaware) at the time.
Instead, canon law states that all cases involving the violation of ecclesiastical law involving “those who hold the highest civil office of a state” are reserved for the Roman Pontiff himself to judge.
In practice, the pope stably delegates cases involving heads of state (usually marriage annulments in recent centuries) to the Tribunal of the Roman Rota, but in any event, it seems vanishingly unlikely that Pope Francis will authorize an examination of the facts of Biden’s masonic membership — still less authorize the imposition of a penalty for one of his final days as president.
Of course, all of those canonical complications and considerations do not change the Vatican’s clear stance on the morality and grave sinfulness of a Catholic who is “enrolled” in a masonic lodge, however they do it: “they are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.”
But whether Biden actually accepted the masonic membership conferred upon him is a question that only he can answer, and only the pope can judge.
Joe Biden becoming a Mason was pretty low on my "probably gonna happen in 2025" ranking. It was somewhere behind "Jacobite heir to British throne deposes King Charles III" but ahead of "Mesozoic proto-sea turtle Archelon is rediscovered alive in the wild by Kanye West."
I doubt Biden is capable, in his diminished state, of comprehending what this all means