Copyright © 2016 Billy Burns. All rights reserved.
Masonic Invisible Empire

POPE LEO XIII's WAR ON FREEMASONRY

Let Justice Be Done Though The Heavens Fall

Carpineto, a small town in the province of Rome was the birthplace of the 258th Roman Pontiff, the great Pope Leo X111.  Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci, the son of Count Pecci, was born in 1810, the year after Boston's Albert Pike.  After taking his holy orders, Gioacchino Pecci became apostolic delegate in succession at Benevento, Perugia.  He was Archbishop of Perugia in 1846; Cardinal in 1853; Camerlingo in 1857 (i.e., the Cardinal in charge of the financial and judicial interests of the Papacy); and finally Pope in 1878 on the death of Pius IX.

After his successful career as a Papal diplomat, he established good relations between the Papacy and European powers, the USA and Japan.  He encouraged foreign missions and emphasised the duty of the church in matters of social justice.  His encyclical of 1891, Rerum Novarum, emphasised employers' moral duties towards their workers.

By the mid decades of the 19th century, Freemasonry was at the high of a war to destroy the Catholic Church in Europe; simultaneously with its agitation to overthrow the civil authorities in every nation in Europe save Britain's - which ran Freemasonry.  This was all happening while the lower classes of Blue Masonry were obliged "to look up with reverence and submit with cheerfulness to all lawfully constituted authority, whether of civil or Masonic regulation".

Even stark hypocrisy can reveal profundities.  Civil authority, it seems, must be revered, but only until such times as the Supreme Council says it does not suit them; that it conflicts with their own geopolitical interests.

In August 1850, while Gioacchino Pecci was still Archbishop of Perugia, Giuseppe Mazzini was quoted in the London Globe as saying: "The abolition of the temporal power [of the Papacy] manifestly carries along with it the emancipation of the human mind from the spiritual power."

A year later (1851), the British Prime Minister, Lord John Russell revived the law against the Catholic religion by introducing into parliament his "Ecclesiastical Titles Bill".  Russell's law made it high treason for a Catholic to receive correspondence from the Pope.  Albert Pike's American critic, Peter Farrell, wrote: "That Bill too clearly demonstrated the cordial sympathy, feeling and sentiment existing between Capt. A Pike in his Apology [for Proscription of Catholics and Foreigners] and Lord John Russell in his Durham letter, for the persecution and proscription of millions of Catholics, both here and on the other side of the Atlantic. ..."

The statements in the last two paragraphs were simply the highlights of an international programme to destroy the Catholic Church.  The Central Lodge of the Mazzini-led Carbonari in Italy avowed as its open aim: "Our final purpose is that of Voltaire and the French Revolution - the total annihilation of Catholicism and of the Christian idea itself."

Such examples of Freemasonry's evil influence in the world today make it essential to examine Pope Leo XIII's combat against Freemasonry during his entire 25 years Papacy and compare certain aspects of it with his predecessor, Pius IX.

Pius IX recognised the menace of Freemasonry and attacked it twenty times.  In fact, Giuseppe Mazzini succeeded in creating his Roman republic after the 1848 revolution, forcing Pope Pius IX to flee.  This revolution did not enjoy lasting success and Mazzini himself was forced into exile in 1849, returning to London, where he had been based for eleven years prior to the revolution.  But in 1863, Pope Pius IX, hoping to obtain protection from Masonic revolutionists, or at least not to be regarded as a target, received a diplomatic delegation from the American Confederacy - the institution created by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.  On the other hand, Pius's successor, Leo XIII, no matter how isolated he felt, never compromised or acted against his view that Freemasonry was the cause of the world's many civil wars.

The Scottish Rite Freemasons attempted to destroy Christian civilisation, which is based on the idea that man is created imago viva Dei (in the living image of God) by virtue of his creative power of reason, the power to discover and comprehend God's laws.  This attempt was made with a public campaign for "Indifferentism", the notion that one set of axiomatic beliefs are as good as any other, or that all religions have the same validity.

In Germany, in May 1873, Emperor William and Chancellor Bismarck, legally enforced Freemasonic influences by enacting the Falk Laws, launching the Kulturkampf, or war against the Catholic Church.  These anti-Catholic laws set up a structure similar to that which was imposed by Communist countries in the 20th century.

The selection of all priests and bishops had to be approved by the state, breaching the unity of the Catholic Church while creating schismatic national churches.  This breach included the seizure of Church property, denying the Church the financial means to exist independently of the state; the substitution of Church support for clergy with meagre state stipend for state-approved priests; the closure of seminaries; and the removal of military exemption for the clergy - leaving one in ten Catholics in Prussia without a parish priest.  All religious orders, except those working in hospitals, were expelled, and Archbishop Ledochowski of Posen, along with others, were imprisoned.

The 19th-century press called this attack on Christian civilisation and values: "the side of progress", "the modern civilisation", and "nationalism".  However, the "Adepts", or top-level Masons, knew that the real doctrine of Freemasonry was not Indifferentism against what Albert Pike called the "despotism of Christianity", but rather the worship of Lucifer - the originator of the precept, "Do as thou wilt."  This is but one of his Luciferian quotes: "Thus, the doctrine of Satanism is a heresy, and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adonay, the God of Darkness and Evil."

So beware all ye Masons of the basic, lower ranks and consider what Freemasonry is truly all about.

Masonry's revenge for the "persecution" of Lucifer by Christ and his Church was at its height when, on 7 February 1878, following the death of Pope Pius IX, Cardinal Gioacchino Pecci, ex-Archbishop of Perugia, was elected to become Pope Leo XIII.  By 20 February he had opened negotiations with the German Government  aimed at ending the Kulturkampf.  He then relentlessly attacked Freemasonry directly failing not to savage its weak flanks.  Two months after becoming Pope, he joined battle with the Freemasons in his first encyclical, "Inscrutabili", issued at Easter 1878 to all bishops of the world, attacking slavery, a cause dear to the philosophy and finances of international Freemasonry.  Leo wrote: "Now who will deny that it is the Church, which ... did away with the miseries of slavery and lifted up mankind once more to its sublime dignity?"

Leo also attacked in the following terms: the evils of society generated through Freemasonry:

"There is a widespread subversion of the cardinal truths on which the very foundations of human society repose.  There is a wicked disposition of men's minds which is impatient of all lawful power.  There is a perpetual foment of dissension begetting internal strife, cruel and bloody wars.  There is contempt of the laws of morality and justice, an insatiable yearning for the transitory goods of earth. ... Assuredly, that is not to be deemed the perfection of civilised life which boldly contemns all lawful power; nor is it that to be esteemed liberty whose wretched progress is marked by the unrepressed propagation of error, by the impunity allowed to guilt and crime, and by the oppression which weighs on good citizens of every rank ... for sin maketh nations miserable. ...  As Augustine was wont to say, 'the doctrine of Christ is a mighty safeguard to the state when it finds obedient observance'."

The truth of the matter is that states are violent institutions.  Nobody, anywhere, should be proud of his government.  Generally, much of the world's populations recognise that the organised institutions of government do not reflect their interests, concerns and needs.  Leading churchmen should have a leading role in determining nations' crucial policies because politicians on their own cannot be trusted.  There is a vacuum in politics that needs filled with people bringing "right reason" to bear on decisions that affect all our futures.  And we cannot, and must not, ever identify our feudal superiors as symbols of our national identity, because then we give them the mandate to carry out the diabolic free-trade policies of "do as thou wilt" in our name.

In December 1878, Leo's second encyclical, "Quod Apostolici Muneris", indicated how Freemasonry can combine various sections of society to largely become the controlling world order:

"We are speaking of that class of men who, under various strange names, are known as Socialists, Communists or Nihilists, and who, spread over the globe and linked together in a criminal conspiracy, no longer seek the friendly shelter of their secret conventicles, but come forth boldly into the daylight and seek to carry out their long-cherished purposes of subverting civil society to its foundations. ..."

In Prussia, France, Switzerland and Belgium, the Masonic programme was in place.  Territories from which the Catholic Church drew its revenues were seized; priests were forced into the military; religious orders were expelled; papal bank accounts, composed of contributions from Catholics all over the world, were seized; Catholic teaching of youth was replaced by Masonic instruction; and the security of the Pope himself was in such doubt that upon his election on 7 February 1878, Leo declared he must remain "a prisoner in the Vatican".  He never left it during his entire 25-year Papacy.

In actual fact, Pius IX had not left the Vatican since 1870, of the last 8 years of his 32-year Papacy, and the next time a Pope was to venture outside the Vatican was 25 July 1929 when Pius XI left St Peter's Square for the first time after 7 years as Pope.  Such was the instability of governments and the danger to heads of state over the preceding 59 years plus - created by leading Freemasons.

In 1880, the Freemasonic governments of Paul Bert and Jules Ferry in France issued a decree to seize Church property, expel the religious orders, remove the military exemption for the clergy, and withdraw all Christian teaching from youth education, replacing Catholic education with Masonic worship, not unlike what happened seven years earlier in Germany or a century beforehand at the time of the French Revolution.  Albert Pike referred to these measures as "Light"; that is, in his book, the worship of Lucifer.  Some 500 magistrates in France resigned in preference to carrying out the law.

The actions of the French Freemasons were aimed to destroy the global potential of the Catholic Church.  Yet France had contributed more money and manpower to missionary activity than every other nation combined.  And the French had founded the Society for the Propagation of Faith in 1822.

In Italy, Adriano Lemmi was the head of Freemasonry, (Giuseppe Mazzini had died 1872, seven years after the death of Lord Palmerston, the Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England).  Lemmi did not hide his worship of Satan.  Masonry's publication, "Revista Della Massioneria Italiana", (Review of Italian Masonry), issue of March 1883 to March 1884, contained this declaration:

"'Vexilla Regis Prodeunt Inferni,' the Pope has said.  Indeed, yes!  'The Standards of the King of the Inferno advance,' and there is not one conscious man who loves liberty, there is not one who will fail to enlist under those standards, under those flags of Freemasonry, which symbolise the living forces of humanity and intelligence, in opposition to those inert forces of humanity brutified by superstition."

Adriano Lemmi's biographer, Margiotta, reports that Lemmi and Scottish Rite Grand Master, Albert Pike, fought over whether Freemasons should worship Satan (Lemmi's position) or Lucifer (as urged by Pike).  Margiotta reports that Pike's Scottish Rite poured in money to fund the campaign to destroy the Church in Italy.

Writing to Adriano Lemmi on 5 December 1880 concerning the Masonic Congress of Milan, Pike instructed: "It is necessary to ruin in a short time the clerical influence in Italy.  The laws against the religious congregations are not observed there. ... Make people protest by means of the lodges."  The forces of Freemasonry in Italy waged war to strip the Papacy of its temporal power, which was the territories given to the Catholic Church by France's Charles Martel and his son, Charlemagne, two of the "Pepin" rulers.  From the middle of the 18th century this became known as the "donation of Pepin", which was the foundation of the temporal power of the Papacy.

In June 1881, Leo published his third encyclical on statecraft, "Diuturnum", on the origin of civil power.  Kaiser William I of Germany read it while recuperating from wounds inflicted in an assassination attempt and eased the application of some of the Falk Laws.

Two weeks earlier, an attempt had been made to assassinate US President James A Garfield; and Russia remained paralysed after the assassination a few months before of Tsar Alexander II.

The timeliness of Leo's "Diuturnum" could not have been missed by other Protestant heads of state who read it:

"The long and fierce war undertaken against the divine authority of the Church has come to the issue towards which it tended: It has placed in jeopardy the very existence of human society, the existence in particular of the supreme civil authority on which the public safety chiefly depends. ... Indeed, very many men of more recent times, walking in the footsteps of those in a former age assumed to themselves the name of philosophers, [and] say that all power comes from the people; so that those who exercise it in the State do so not as their own but as delegated to them by the people, and that, by this rule, it can be revoked by the will of the very people by whom it was delegated.  But from these [principles], Catholics dissent, [Catholics] who affirm that the right to rule comes from God, as a natural and necessary principle."

Men delegated the power to rule have no mandate unless they apply the laws of God.

On 20 April 1884, Leo released his major attack on Freemasonry to all Catholic Bishops, entitled, "Humanum Genus", which  stated:

"The race of man, after its miserable fall from God is separated into two diverse and opposite parts ... one is the kingdom of God on earth, namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ ... The other is the kingdom of Satan.  At every period of time each has been in conflict with the other, with a multiplicity of weapons and warfare, although not always with equal ardour and assault.  At this period, however, the partisans of evil seemed to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by the strongly organised and widespread association called the Freemasons.  No longer making any secret of their purposes, they are boldly rising up against God Himself.  They are planning the destruction of the holy Church publicly and openly and this with the set purpose of utterly despoiling the nations of Christendom. ...

"The Roman Pontiffs, our predecessors ... were prompt in detecting the presence and the purpose of this capital enemy.  Immediately, it sprang into the light instead of hiding as a dark conspiracy. ... The first warning of the danger was given by Clement XII in the year 1738, and the Constitution was confirmed  and renewed by Benedict XIV.  Pius VII followed the same path, and Leo XII, by his Apostolic Constitution, 'Quo graviora', put together the acts and decrees of former pontiffs on this subject, and ratified and confirmed them forever.  In the same sense, spoke Pius VIII, Gregory XVI, and many times over Pius IX.

"The sect of Freemasons grew with such rapidity beyond conception in the course of a century and a half, until it came able, by means of fraud or of audacity, to gain such entrance into every rank of the State as to seem to be almost its ruling power. ...Such a condition has been reached that henceforth there will be grave reason to fear, not indeed for the Church - for her foundation is much too firm to be overturned by the effort of men - but for those States in which prevails the power, either of the sect of which we are speaking or for other sects not dissimilar which lend themselves to it as disciples and subordinates."

Judging by Leo's awareness of the grave threat from Freemasonry, it is regrettable he was not around when the Masonic "Propaganda Due", better known as "P-2", infiltrated the Vatican.  No doubt he would have discovered where the monkey slept around headquarters.  The secret Propaganda Lodge, which ruled Italy for many decades, was a creation of Giuseppe Mazzini.

The P-2 Lodge was established on the Mazzini model by the Anglo-Americans after World War II.  In cooperation with communist secret services, the Scottish Rite P-2 ran terrorism against the nation of Italy.  (Incidentally, it is a misconception that the Scottish Rite began in Scotland.LINK)  Italian police trying to penetrate the Masonic control of criminal terrorism ran up against the covert "Albert Pike Lodge" in Calabria.  Even though P-2 is now supposedly officially outlawed of amity with the Grand Lodges, it is still spearheading the crusade to scandalise, dismember, and subjugate Italy.

In "Humanum Genus", on the practices of Freemasonry, Pope Leo XIII wrote:

"The Freemasons, like the Manichees of old, strive, as far as possible, to conceal themselves, and to admit no witness but their own members. ... Moreover, to be enrolled, it is necessary that the candidates promise and understand to be henceforth strictly obedient to their leaders and masters with the utmost submission and fidelity, and to be in readiness to do their bidding upon the slightest expression of their will; or, if disobedient, to submit to the direst penalties and death itself."

"Freemasons," says Leo, "endeavour to bring about this result - namely, that the office and authority of the Church may become of no account in the civil state; and for this same reason they declare to the people and contend that Church and state ought to be altogether disunited. ... And, in truth, the teaching of morality, which alone finds favour with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call 'civil', and 'independent', and 'free', namely, that which does not contain any religious belief ... .

"For the fear of God and the reverence for divine laws being taken away, the authority of rulers despised, sedition permitted and approved, the popular passions urged on to lawlessness, with no restraint save that of punishment, a change and overthrow of all things will necessarily follow.  Yes, this change and overthrow is deliberately planned and put forward by many associations of Communists and Socialists; and to their undertakings the sect of Freemasons is not hostile, but greatly favours their designs, and holds in common with them their chief opinions. ...  Ingratiating themselves with rulers under a pretence of friendship, the Freemasons have endeavoured to make them their allies and powerful helpers for the destruction of the Christian name; and that they might more strongly urge the on, the have, with determined calumny, accused the Church of invidiously contending with rulers in matters that affect their authority and power. ... They have begun to exercise great weight in the government of States, but nevertheless they are prepared to shake the foundations of empires, to harass the rulers of the State, to accuse, and to cast them out, as often as they appear to govern otherwise than they themselves could have wished."

With Masonry's capability to take the helm of associations of Fascists, Communists, Socialists, Nihilists, Capitalists, or any other group or organisation, it is easy to see how this cancerous force could be used at any time to impart activity injurious to any chosen Church or State; or, alternatively, could be put in place as a dormant self-destruct button, waiting to be activated to remove credibility from any chosen person, association, group, organisation or even nation, so that any authority might be dismantled at any suitable moment.

Freemasonry is able to function as a Trojan horse inside any society or section of society it chooses.  Which is why people in associations, political or otherwise, should look for guidance from right reason, natural law or divine law, and always be on their guards to ward off the evil influences of the invisible empire, standing firm in readiness to distinguish between sense and the rhetoric of false concepts, otherwise known as common ignorance.

Despite demurs from Britain and elsewhere, Albert Pike, the world leader of the Scottish Rite, boasted in his October 1884 public reply to Leo's Humanum Genus, that all international Freemasonry seeks to destroy the Catholic Church.  He vehemently attacked Leo's 1884 encyclical in the following terms:

"If, in other countries, Freemasonry has lost sight of the Ancient Landmarks, even tolerating communism and atheism, it is better to endure ten years of these evils than it would be to live a week under the devilish tyranny of the Inquisition and of the black soldiery of Loyola [referring to the Jesuit missionaries, founded by St Ignatius Loyola in 1534]. ... It is not when the powers of the Papacy are concentrated to crush the Freemasonry of the Latin kingdoms and Republics of the world, that the Masons of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in the United States will, from any motive whatever, proclaim that they have no sympathy with the Masons of the continent of Europe, or with those of Mexico or of the South American Republics."

This attack on Leo's Humanum Genus, his 1884 anti-Masonic encyclical, is still advertised and sold by the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite today.

In June 1881, as mentioned earlier, Pope Leo XIII had published his third encyclical on statecraft, "Diuturnum", which included the origin of civil power, and which was read by Emperor William I of Prussia.  The Prussian Government began to reconsider whether the Catholic Church was indeed the enemy of civil authority and,  in the same year, eased their application of some of the Falk Laws.  Then in 1885, the entire world was shocked when German Chancellor, Bismarck, personally requested that Pope Leo mediates a dispute between Germany and Catholic Spain over the Caroline Islands while some of the Falk Laws were still in force.  By 1886, Prussia finally repealed them all.

Perhaps the two assassination attempts on William I in 1878 induced him to re-examine the integrity of the people who endorsed the Falk Laws in the first place.  Pius IX had been unable to influence Bismarck to repeal them in the period between 1873-78.  After the death of Pius IX on 7 February 1878, and, in the negotiations with his successor Leo XIII, the implications of the Falk Laws were attenuated.

It would be worth bearing in mind, however, that an attempt had been made to assassinate Pope Pius IX's minister, Rossi, and that the threat endured, borne out by subsequent attempts to assassinate virtually every European head of state by the late 19th century, including Alexander II of Russia, Ferdinand II of Naples, and German Emperor William I.

On 9 March 1886, the "Riforma" of Rome, the organ of the Masonic revolutionaries, demanded the destruction of the Catholic Church in Italy:

"To array the inferior clergy against their superiors; to take away in every parish, village and hamlet the influence and authority of the priest, and transfer them to the athiestical schoolmaster and schoolmistress; to take the complete control of ecclesiastical revenues of every kind so that no parish priest, no clerical functionary shall receive a penny save from the hand of the government."

On 5 May 1888, Leo addressed an encyclical on slavery, "In Plurimus", to the bishops of Brazil.  The day chosen was the saint's day of Pius V, who with the Christian victory of Lepanto over the Muslims in 1571, had saved Christianity from servitude.  Celebrating his own anniversary of becoming a priest at this time, Leo, according to his biographer, Monsignor Bernard O'Reilly, was thrilled to receive several "freedmen" from the vast empire of Brazil, the first fruits of the announcement that slavery would be repealed there.

Leo's encyclical declared:

"We hold towards the entire human race the place of Christ, who ... publicly [declared] that He had come down to dwell among us in order to preach deliverance to the captives; to free from the worst of all yokes, that of sin, the entire human race.

"... Now, among the many kinds of human wretchedness, we have deeply to deplore the existence of Slavery, to which for so many years a large portion of the human family is subject, plunged in misery and abjection, in manifest opposition to what God and nature intended from the beginning.  for the Sovereign Creator of all things had decreed that mans shall exercise a leadership over the beasts of the field, the fishes in the waters, and the birds of the air, but not that he should dominate over his own fellowmen.  As St Augustine says, god created a rational being to the Divine likeness, and would have made man lord over only the irrational creation, not that man should exercise dominance over men, but over the brute beast."

Until the birth of Christ, the majority on men of the most civilised peoples was composed of slaves.  After Christ the Deliverer was born, the fate of slavery was sealed  and the triumph of Christian liberty and equality was to be the work of the Church.  In the first century, Christians, if they failed to free their fellowmen from bondage, they exchanged places with them.  Later, the Church encouraged the freeing of slaves by utilising churches to draw up documents urging the freeing of slaves on Sundays.

Addressing himself to slavery in Africa, Pope Leo XIII wrote:

"The shameful traffic of man in man has indeed disappeared from the seas, but it has carried on by land with exceeding cruelty. ... Would to God that all those who are place over others in power and authority ... everywhere unite their efforts ... to repress, prohibit and extinguish this slave-trade ... ."

Leo authored four encyclical letters to mobilise Catholic Bishops around the world to attack Freemasonry, naming it as the force of the anti-Christ that seeks to destroy Christianity.  The four letters were: Humanum Genus, as already touched upon, "Dall' Alto Dell' Apostolico Seggio", "Inimica Vis", and "Custodi di Quella Fede".  The Pope understood that the secret societies, the sects, during those years, were incubating the doctrines of fascism, communism and socialism, and manipulating their supporters, which would destroy Christian civilisation and lead to war if not effectively opposed.  The 20th century was later to prove him right.  People are intentionally kept at war with each other while an oligarchy rules over the disorder.  Just the controlled utterances of certain key people are all it takes to turn nations into realms of self-righteous crusading warmongers.

In addition to direct attacks on Freemasonry, Pope Leo XIII wrote encyclicals on the source of authority for States: "Inscrutabili", "Diuturnum", Immortale Dei", and "Libertas".

In "Libertas", on the nature of human liberty, Leo set forth the principle that all authority comes from God, not from the people  - as Voltaire, Rousseau and John Locke had claimed.  Therefore, when temporal authority and its laws violate God's law, as mentioned hereinbefore, "such an unjust law is no longer law, but a species of violence," as affirmed by Leo when quoting Thomas Aquinas in his encyclical, "Rerum Novarum".

"Rerum Novarum", which is the Catholic Church's foundation social doctrine, was published on 15 May 1891.  Leo shows his concern for the conditions of workers and the lack of applying Christian principles to relations between capital and labour.  Against the despair of the masses, a despair that fuelled socialist an communist insurrections, Leo insisted that the state had the duty to intervene between capital and labour to ensure people received a just wage that could support a family on a man's earnings alone, and to force those who owned the means of production to use it to work towards the common good.  In those days, just as it is today, governments acted on behalf of financial investors, not on behalf of the people.

Leo also insisted that, despite their lack of state support, Christian educational institutions had to be superior to Freemasonic ones.  While serving as papal nuncio to Belgium for Pope Pius IX in 1843, the future Pope Leo had seen first-hand that Freemasonry, masked as "liberalism", dominated the publicly supported  University of Brussels.  Yet Belgium had separated from Protestant Holland in 1830 for the purpose of obtaining religious liberty for Catholics.  Mobilising private resources, Leo helped to make Belgium's University of Louvain a superior educational institution.

And he practiced as well as he preached about the principles of Christian economy.  During his 30 years as Archbishop of Perugia, before becoming Pope, he organised banks (Monti di Pieta) to lend money at zero interest rates to workers and farmers who lacked the savings to start businesses.  Today, we have international financial elitists looting Third World countries through the foreign debt mechanism, holding their victims to eternal bondage.  These diabolic lenders seem committed to the extermination of the Christian faith and conscience.  Exploitation has long been a powerful weapon for distracting people's attention from their faith and forcing them to concentrate on more godless aspects of life.  Like the manner in which, for example, the welfare system is vastly underfunded, and the manner in which their feudal superiors treat religion as of no consequence in their insatiable lust for Mammon.

The work of Thomas Aquinas had been revived by Leo, motivating its necessity in one of his earlier encyclicals, "Aeterni Patris", on the restoration of Christian philosophy.  To the false philosophy of the time, he held that Christian philosophy must counterpose a method of arriving at the truth by rising above knowledge of the senses.  Aquinas, in the tradition of Augustine and other early Church Fathers, showed that human reason is an aid to faith rather than antagonistic to it.

Seeking to give the clergy and others the greatest weapons to fight Freemasonry, Leo established in every nation pontifical universities, such as the Catholic University of America, which would be uniquely qualified to award the highest theological degrees.  He endeavoured to give improved education at every level based on the student trying to re-experience the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and other Church Fathers, rather than through the glosses of some would-be lecturers; "commentators" by any other name.  That philosophy, I suppose, is a form of learning how to learn, as opposed to learning how to be a parrot.

We all know how the people who hold the reins of power can present highly controversial views as facts through curricula and the media and arrange the presentation of potentially embarrassing stories in a highly effective way to basically get all their own way without a challenge.  To rise to the challenge, every student, of life or anything else, ought to demand reasoned answers to every question.

It was Pope Leo XIII who opened for the first time the extraordinary treasures of the Vatican Library to scholars.  The Vatican Library was the creation of the Renaissance Papacy, which saw knowledge as the product of man's God-given divine spark of reason, whose use uplifted man through participation in the mind of God.

Leo called on all bishops and priests, as he would do in all his subsequent encyclicals about the cultic invisible empire, to mobilise, "to tear the mask from Freemasonry through sermons, pastoral letters, and by forming myriad associations that would counter each and every Masonic organisation.  The laity must also be mobilised, Leo told the bishops and guilds of workmen - or unions.

In "Dall' Alto Dell' Apostolico Seggio" (From the Height of the Apostolic Throne), on Freemasonry in Italy, written to the bishops the clergy, and the people of Italy on 15 October 1890, Leo attacks the Masonic programme of separating God's laws from human law, through secularism and official atheism, while suffusing the State with Masonic influence.  (The same ploy as is used in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere today.)  In this encyclical, Leo prophetically notes:

"The chief instrument employed by our enemies is the press, which in great part receives from them its inspiration and support.  It is important that Catholics should oppose the evil press by a press that is good. ..."

In "Inimica Vis" (The Enemy of Power), issued against Freemasonry on 8 December 1892, Leo warns the Bishops:

"It is not sufficient merely to be aware of the wiles of this vile sect: We must also war against it. ... Therefore, it is your task to inflame souls by persuasion, exhortation and example, to nourish in our clergy and our people a zeal for religion and salvation which is active, resolute and intrepid."

In his encyclical, "Custodi di Quella Fede", on the same date, directed to the Italian people, Leo warns against those "who hide under the mask of universal tolerance, respect for all religions, and the craving to reconcile Christ with Belial [the devil]".  Leo also warns:

"Talkative philanthropy which is opposed to Christian charity with such pomp is often the passport for Masonic business."

Freemasons generally peddle the myth that Masonry is a benevolent society, but they "divert the discourse" when it is pointed out that even their external donations are kept in-house for Masonic business purposes.  Money sent to alleviate distress caused by earthquakes in the likes of San Salvador, Ecuador and Cuba were sent those countries' Grand Lodges.  High-level Masons in Third World lodges and elsewhere receive bribes in exchange for using their influence to encourage their fellow countrymen to favour the "foreign" business deals of the landed Brothers in this country.  These bribes are marked down on the balance sheet as charitable causes.

It emerges that even donations to non-Masonic charities in recent years have had strong Masonic connections, such as Masonic presidents in hospices, and the like.  This talkatively pompous philanthropy, therefore, is indeed opposed to Christian charity and is indeed just a passport for Masonic business, exactly as Pope Leo XIII warned us against more than 100 years ago.  On the other side of this charitable coin, another parody turns up.  The Masonic insider-trading of a commercial company or even a nation can be subverted, detrimental to its survival.

In a call to battle, Leo says:

"May this struggle between good and evil extend to everything, and may good prevail.  Masonry holds frequent meetings to plan new ways to combat the Church, and you should hold them frequently to agree on the best means and order of defence.  It multiplies its lodges so that you should multiply Catholic clubs and parochial groups, promote charitable associations and prayer organisations."

In "Spesse Volte", on the suppression of Catholic institutions in Italy, issued on 5 August 1898, Pope Leo protests over the closing institutions and journals, convents and monasteries, the imposition of military service on the clergy; as well as the seizure of the property and the bank accounts of The Propaganda, the internationally supported entity for training missionaries.  All these measures were designed to shut down Catholic missions worldwide.

"Propaganda" is not to be confused with Italy's aforementioned Masonic Propaganda Due.  It would surprise no one, however, if P-2 had the world-renowned missionaries in mind when the name was chosen, to give them some form of respectability.

In 1899, Leo harshly criticised the American Catholic hierarchy's ill-considered tendency to accommodate a secular society - shaped by such as Albert Pike's Freemasons - as "American exceptionalism".  A Catholic priest, Peter Rosen, in his 1902 book, "The Catholic Church and Secret Societies", wrote: "The so-called Secret Society question is the most serious problem facing the Catholic Church in the United States today."

Perhaps he should have added that Freemasonry is the most serious problem facing Christianity, religion in general, and indeed democracy, not only in America but worldwide because its adeptness at "insider-trading" dismantles democracy to the foundations while leaving a façade of democracy.

Unfortunately, the belief of sectarian elements of Protestantism, who are easily manipulated by Freemasons, is that if they attack the Catholic Church it will somehow benefit them.  They should take a leaf out the book of the greatest Protestant of his age, Baron Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) who put things into better perspective.  He correctly viewed Catholicism as the oldest, most highly organised centre of Christianity, an institution that was clearly essential to the progress of the entire human race, not just wanting individuals.

Leibniz proposed that the Papacy he charged with keeping the peace of Europe, and bringing temporal powers under the rule of Christian morality:

"My idea," said Leibniz, "would be to establish, aye, even in Rome, a tribunal [to preside over controversies between sovereigns], and to make the Pope its president, as he really, in former ages, figured as judge between Christian princes.  But ecclesiastics ought to, at the same time, resume their ancient authority, and an interdict or an excommunication should make kings and kingdoms tremble, as in the days of Nicholas I or Gregory VII. ..."

Leibniz wished to set up the moral authority of Christendom as a bulwark against temporal disaster.

"The New Age", the monthly magazine of the Scottish Rite in the United States, has for decades attacked the Catholic Church and the Pope as "the enemy and curse of humanity".  In February 1957, the editorial of The New Age questions the moral right of Roman Catholics to serve on school boards or teach in the US public schools.  The New Age's March 1957 issue demands the Masonic programme of "separation of Church and State".  It also questions whether the nomination of now-retired US Supreme Court Justice, William Brennan, should be approved because of "[the] apparent demand for blind obedience to papal doctrine".

Naturally, every priest who might go astray can count on his story being told in The New Age.

The Scottish Rite's policy was to force every American child - except black American children - to attend public schools run according to Masonic principles.  The Freemasons and the resurrected Ku Klux Klan, placed referenda on the ballot to abolish all private and parochial schools in Oregon, California and Michigan.  The referendum was defeated in Michigan and California, and, in the case of Oregon, was overturned by the US Supreme Court in 1922.

In the 1970s the German Catholic Church held a six-year dialogue with the Masons on the issue of compatibility or incompatibility with Catholicism and Freemasonry and concluded with a declaration of incompatability.

Yet today, CELAM, the Catholic Bishops Conference of Ibero-America, has formed a commission on "ecumenicism" with the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) of B'nai B'rith, a Masonic lodge.  In 1987, the ADL and CELAM jointly sponsored an economics conference in Cartagena, Colombia, featuring Michael Novak, the leading "Catholic" exponent of the free-market "do-as-thou-wilt" school of economics.  Michael Novak, who appeared at Catholic conferences throughout the USA, was an unabashed proponent of the rights of the financial imperialist - those attacked by Leo XIII and by some 20th-century Popes who have followed the teaching of "Rerum Novarum".

B'nai B'rith was founded by the Scottish Rite, Southern Jurisdiction in 1843 as the Masonic lodge for the minority of pro-slavery Jews in the US.  The ADL was founded in 1913 as B'nai B'rith's public relations arm by the Confederate spy, Simon Wolf, the man who met Abraham Lincoln's alleged assassin, fellow Confederate, John Wilkes Booth, shortly before Lincoln was shot.

In the United States, ecumenical dialogue was used to insert the ADL into the policy deliberations of Catholic bishops on sensitive areas such as Bosnia.  The ADL - a Freemasonic grouping - represented Jews at the "Day of Prayer", an event Pope John Paul II convened in 1992 in Assisi, Italy.

The ADL has championed and financed every effort to ban religion from public life in the United States.  Its leadership was under criminal investigation (1994) for spying on US citizens and organisations fighting for economic justice.

Pope Leo XIII spelt out clearly the dangers of Freemasonry in society.  It is now up to every individual to be wary of it and confront it as boldly as he did.

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Pope Leo XIII

 

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