“Now, one of the things that we then have to keep in mind is what is it that they teach? There are three main points that is consistent in the Masonic Lodge belief.
The first most basic belief is what we usually call FOB BOMB. FOB BOM stands for ‘The Fatherhood of God, Brotherhood of Man’. So, FOB BOM. And that’s a good way to remember it. So the first belief is that ‘god’ is the father of everybody. The second belief is that all men are brothers. And the third belief is that of the immortality of the soul.
According to most masonic lodges, nobody can be a mason unless he believes in ‘God’. And they also must believe in the brotherhood of all men. But they also will accept people from any and all religions. You can have any religion that you want to believe in and you can follow any religion so that there are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Farsi the zero estrogens what they mean by that, Hindus, Buddhists, doesn’t matter. But they don’t want, in general, they don’t want atheists. Now some lodges do accept atheists but for the most part they don’t accept atheists because that goes against the most basic doctrine of the Fatherhood of God.
And then they also believe in the immortality of the soul and that the soul does have life after death and that every mason is going to be following this masonic work in order to get to the immortality of the soul and live it out to the best of their possibilities. So, that’s what you have going on there.
Now, what is the Catholic Church stance to all of this? Well, we believe in the Fatherhood of God, we don’t have a problem with that. We don’t have a real problem of looking upon all human beings as having a certain type of brotherhood. And we also believe in the immortality of the soul. So, does the Catholic Church have any problems with the Masonic Lodge? Absolutely yes. As a matter of fact, the Catholic Church has repeatedly made it clear from 1738, just 21 years after the first lodge was founded in England, Pope Clement XII and his successors Benedict the XIV, Pius VII, Leo XII, Gregory VII and Leo XIII have all made it very clear that no Catholic may join the Masonic Lodge under pain of excommunication and no Catholic can receive the sacraments if they have joined the Masonic Lodge and if a non-Catholic marries a Catholic woman, that he must declare that he’s a mason before that marriage can be done. And that no mason, because it is considered a foreign religion, it’s not a Christian religion.
This is a very serious sin. And there was a certain rumour that belonging to the Masonic Lodge was now permitted by the Catholic Church. That was absolutely false. The Vatican made it undeniably clear that no Catholic may receive the sacraments if he has joined the Masonic Lodge. And any Catholic who has done so, has to either publicly, if he’s publicly known to be a mason, he must publicly reject his masonic membership in order to come back to the sacraments. If he’s only privately and secretly known to be a mason, then he can secretly and privately renounce it but never go back to it and never be part of it again. Now this is the situation for the Masonic Lodge.
The question is ‘If the Catholic Church believes in the Fatherhood of God, and in the brotherhood of mAn, why is there a problem?’