Does the Vatican regard Freemasonry as a big deal, or not?
After years of insisting Masonry is fundamentally opposed to the Church, the Vatican has apparently appointed a Mason to a pontifical committee.
In the last two weeks, prominent Italian bishops, including the pope’s own cardinal vicar for Rome, made dramatic interventions to prevent church funerals scheduled for men discovered to be Freemasons.
In the same span of time, the Holy See announced the appointment of a prominent Italian academic to a pontifical committee who, it has since been reported, is also a Freemason.
Umberto Longo, a prominent academic and Director of the Italian Historical Institute for the Middle Ages in Rome, was named to the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences on August 13. It was subsequently reported by the website InfoVaticana that publicly available documents bill Longo as a frequent attendee at Masonic conferences and recognize him as a relatively senior member of an especially anti-Catholic strand of Freemasonry.
It is, as yet, unclear what the Vatican’s response will be to the Longo affair, though he is by no means the first appointee to a papal committee to be affiliated with positions or organizations condemned by the Church. It seems possible that the Vatican could move swiftly to cancel Longo’s appointment, and equally possible to see an official shrug-off to his Masonic connections while citing his non-religious role and particular academic prominence and expertise.
But how the Vatican does react will be taken as an especially instructive lesson-by-example in the broader context of the Church’s opposition to Freemasonry — after bishops’ conferences around the world have issued a string of statements and clarifications underlining the Church’s centuries-old opposition to Freemasonry, and with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith calling for “coordinated strategies” to prevent ambiguity or misunderstandings among the faithful.
In short, the appointment raises a simple question: Does the Vatican regard Freemasonry as a big deal, or not?
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Longo’s Vatican appointment and reported Freemasonry represent just the latest in a long line of controversial papal appointees to pontifical committees and commissions. Previous nominees, stretching back across several pontificates, have included those with openly dissenting — even strongly opposing — views on a range of Church teachings, including on key moral issues like the sanctity of life.
Often, these cases have been shrugged off by Vatican officials, who have argued, as the Pontifical Academy for Life did in the case of a pro-abortion economist in 2022, that the nomination was for a specific area of work and expertise, unrelated to the nominee’s points of difference with Catholic doctrine.
Hearing experts’ opinions, sometimes even or especially critical ones, is often argued as essential to the best functioning of pontifical committees and think tanks.
In Lungo’s case, it seems likely that some at least will take this same line in response to his apparent Freemasonry. But for the Vatican, the case is — or should be — much more acute, since it involves the wholesale moral condemnation by the Church of a legal category of persons.
Legally speaking, it isn’t that the Church condemns Freemasonry as holding different views or teachings to the Church, as for example another religious confession might. Rather, the Church has, since the 1700s, legally proscribed Freemasonry as an organization which, of its very nature, opposes the Church itself.
While statements from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith have consistently made clear that a Catholic who joins the Freemasons is in a state of grave sin and prohibited, inter alia, from receiving Communion, the Code of Canon Law treats Freemasonry as a “society which plots against the Church.”
In his 1890 apostolic letter to the Church in Italy, Dall’alto dell’Apostolico Seggio, Leo XIII described the plot of Freemasonry as “possessed by the spirit of Satan, whose instrument they are, they burn like him with a deadly and implacable hatred of Jesus Christ and of His work; and they endeavor by every means to overthrow and fetter it.”
Leo went on to enumerate a specifically political agenda of Freemasonry, which he said included the gradual exclusion of the Church from schools and hospitals and eventually the entirety of institutional public life.
During the 1980 meeting of the commission to draft the penal section of the new Code of Canon Law, it was made clear by the cardinal participants, especially the then CDF’s prefect, Cardinal Franjo Šeper, that if Freemasonry appeared to be less active in plotting against the Church in the modern era, it was only because it had widely achieved most of its agenda.
“Today perhaps it does not plot as much because they have already plotted enough and have nothing left to plot for,” Šeper observed, “everything that has happened in Italy at this time regarding civil marriage, divorce, abortion, and other matters are Masonic fruits, and not only in Italy but also in other nations.”
As such, inviting a Freemason to take up membership of a pontifical committee will strike canonists versed in the Church’s legal position as analogous to asking Kim Jong Un to sit on a committee for nuclear disarmament.
The matter is made even more acute, from a legal standpoint, in that Longo is reportedly a member of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Despite its name, this is an American iteration of Freemasonry more than usually explicit and virulent in its anti-Catholicism — having worked openly to oppose Catholic political candidates and to outlaw Catholic schools.
The Scottish Rite also has deep links to the legacy of the Confederate South, with several Civil War generals who were Scottish Rite Freemasons going on to found the Ku Klux Klan, an organization with which it openly partnered in endorsing anti-Catholic politicians and policies in the early twentieth century.
In one of the higher degrees of initiation, the Mason is presented with a skull wearing a papal tiara and told it “represents the tiara of the cruel and cowardly pontiff” and “is therefore the crown of an imposter.” At one point in the ritual, a senior Mason stabs the skull with a dagger, while the candidate yells “Down with imposter, down with crime,” before stamping on it. In the Scottish Rite’s official text “Morals and Dogma,” written by Albert Pike, a senior Freemason, Confederate general, and prominent member of the KKK, it is stated bluntly that Freemasonry “was at its very origin devoted to the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome.”
If Freemasonry had largely fallen off the Church’s radar over the last half century, Longo’s reported membership could, perhaps, be waived away as an historical rather than live issue, but on the contrary, the Vatican has been especially active in recent years in underscoring its absolute condemnation of Freemasonry and the unacceptability of any overlap with the Church.
Apart from the interventions earlier this month by senior Italian bishops to prohibit Catholic funerals for Freemasons, several bishops’ conferences have, in direct consultation with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued unambiguous denunciations of Freemasonry as antithetical to the faith — most notably the bishops of the Nordic countries and the Philippines.
As such, Longo’s appointment and what, if any, response the Vatican makes to the reports of his Masonic membership will be keenly watched not just by canon lawyers but by bishops around the world.
If the upshot is that a Freemason can be treated as a useful collaborator with the Church at the level of a pontifical committee, it will be seen by many as a practical abdication of the entire canonical treatment of Freemasonry, and years of collaborative work by the DDF with bishops around the world.
Thanks for making this clear Ed