“Now, first of all, the most basic problem is that when the Masonic Lodge talks about FOG BOM, Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man, they do it on the basis of a naturalistic religion. The Masonic Lodge buys into the ideas of the 18th century Enlightement. In the 18th century, the Enlightenment, wanted to make human reason the norm of all reality and all truth. And nature is the book of Revelation. In the 18th century, it was typical that people would believe in God, there were some atheists but not too many, but they believed in the god of nature and they believed in a law of nature that you can discover just by the use of your reason. And you can discover everything you need to know about god by reason. That is what they mean by a naturalistic religion, a religion of nature. So this is going to be one of the problems because then if your religion is based on what you can find by reason and by nature, then you do not need revelation.
And at that point that Masonic Lodge necessarily teaches that the Christian Doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that God is your father but God is also of the Son and the Holy Spirit, these become negotiable as far as the Masonic Lodge is concerned. You do not have to believe in the trinity to be a mason. If you’re a Muslim, that’s fine with them. If you’re a Buddhist, who is basically agnostic, cause the core of Buddhism is agnosticism, they don’t say that there is a God, they don’t say that there isn’t. Buddha didn’t know. That wasn’t his concern. So you can be a Buddhist or you can be a Hindu, who is a pantheist, believing in many, many gods. Any one of those is equally acceptable so long as you take the naturalistic approach to the Fatherhood of God that is key to the Masonic Lodge in order to be a member of it.
And this is something that no Catholic can afford to do. You cannot treat the Blessed Trinity as negotiable. It is not. Our salvation depends on God being a God of love. Without the Trinity, you don’t have a God of love because who would be doing the loving? Who would be loved? Who would be the love itself? The Trinity is necessary for God to be love, because it has to be someone who from all eternity is loved and is loving. And that wonder of the Blessed Trinity reveals that, plus, the incarnation of Christ would be negotiable to a mason. They don’t need to believe that Christ became man. And they don’t need to believe that it’s God who took on flesh. That Jesus Christ is not just a moral teacher and this was one of the problems that the Masonic Lodge falls into. It tries to treat Jesus as a great teacher which He is. We don’t deny that He is a great teacher. But His teaching authority does not come because He simply was able to read what it says in nature. It’s rather that He is God made flesh and His authority is the authority of God himself. And that we accept His teaching and the authority of His gospel because of the incarnation of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary.”
