under the patronage of St Joseph and St Dominic

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. . . Ps 136

FREEMASONRY, MODERNISM & MOHAMMEDANISM

The Interplay of Three Evils

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When, on 13th October, 1884, Pope Leo XIII was accorded a vision of the devastation which would befall the Church founded by God in the century to come, one can only wonder whether he was given insight into the means the Devil would use to work his harm.  We, who have lived through the age he foresaw and who now watch its approaching apotheosis, have seen these evils at work.  Like the devils that possessed the young man in the Gospel account[1] their name is legion : but among them there are three cardinal evils whose interaction has worked the chief of the harm  suffered, not only within Christ's Church but among the peoples of the world.

Mohammedanism
The first of these (taken chronologically) is the heresy of Mohammed.  So far are his teachings removed from those of the Catholic Church it may seem far-fetched to refer to Mohammedanism as a heresy.   Yet it retains the Catholic (and Judaic) truths that God is one, that He is all powerful and the Creator of the universe, even as it rejects elements essential to what God has revealed to man, that in the one God there are three persons, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit ; that God created the universe in love ; that (in that love) He sent His Son, the Word, Jesus Christ, to be born, to live and to die on earth to save man from the effects of his fallen nature.  Mohammedanism accepts the Resurrection of the body and the Day of Judgement.  It holds there is a heaven and a hell, though its understanding of these realities is crass and sensual.  It holds as essential the need for prayer, for fasting and for alms-giving.  But it distorts the true understanding of God's almighty power and joins with Judaism in rejecting the truth that only those who believe what Christ has taught and who acknowledge that He is the saviour of the world can merit heaven.  Moreover, Mohammedanism has in superabundance the arrogance common to all heresies, it is Gnostic.  Though his religion is based on nothing more than bland assertion, the Mohammedan has a higher knowledge than other men : he knows better than anyone else what God wants.

Freemasonry
The second evil is Freemasonry, one of the purulent fruit of the revolt initiated by Martin Luther and endorsed by Henry Tudor against the authority of Christ and His Church.  For more than four centuries it has worked, under the Devil's influence, to remove the influence of Catholicism from the lives of men and of nations and with remarkable success.  That the vast majority of its protocols are in place in governments and organisations throughout the world is demonstrable.   The following catch-cries or slogans, whose content men take as axiomatic of human rights, are each of them elements of the Masonic program : to wit, that—

• the teaching office and authority of the Church should be of no account in the civil state ;
• Church and state should be separate ;
• states should be constituted without any regard for the Church ;
• a regard for religion should be held as a matter of indifference ;
• all religions are alike and none should have precedence over another ;
• marriage belongs to the genus of commercial contracts and may be terminated as can they ;
• civil rulers of the state have power over the matrimonial bond ;
• in the education of youth in religion, nothing is to be taught as certain ;
• each one must be left free to follow the religion of his choice ;
• all power is held by the command, or permission, of the people.[2]

Modernism
The third, and perhaps the subtlest, of the three evils is the most recent to arise.  From a time towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Church began to be troubled by a movement deriving from certain Protestant thinkers and theologians engaged in biblical studies which subtly abandoned belief in the supernatural and the transcendent.[3]   It was fired by the subjectivism and materialism which in modern philosophy serve as surrogates for the realism that underlies the perennial philosophy grounded in the teachings of Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas.  From its provenance the heresy was accorded the title 'Modernism'.

Modernism diminishes the transcendent to the mundane, denying any reality incapable of being sensed and rejecting all assertion of the immaterial or the supernatural ; and so reduces religion to a species of feeling.  On September 8th, 1907, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, the longest encyclical issued to that time, Pius X condemned the heresy, describing it with justice as 'the synthesis of all heresies'.  Those who fell victim to its tenets quickly became agnostic and ended in atheism.[4]   Notwithstanding its suppression, the influence of the secular on priests and religious before and after the Second World War meant that the heresy survived among the cognoscenti, especially among certain theologians.

The death of Pius XII and the calling by his successor, John XXIII, of the Second Vatican Council provided Modernists and semi-Modernists with a vehicle with which to advance the heresy's tenets.  Its effects may be seen in the many ambivalent teachings uttered by that Council.   More convincing evidence of its influence was the large scale abandonment of vocations and loss of faith by priests and religious around the world that followed.  But the most telling effect was the devastation caused by the inability of the Church to provide essential education and formation in the faith to the young, and the spread of the Modernist virus among Catholic educators.  These  reduced Catholic schools to little better than seminaries of atheism.  This disaster has been compounded by the general insouciance of the Church's bishops over the perversion of their Catholic school systems.  Two generations of children have been lost to the faith.

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Commentary
In just a month covering Christmas, 2014, and the New Year, 2015, there have been slaughters of innocent people in Sydney, Australia, and in Paris, France, by Muslims.  Each was committed by invitees into the countries involved or their offspring who felt themselves entitled to commit atrocities against their fellow men in the name of their mindless religion.  These and similar episodes of violence involving the taking hostage of innocent men, women and children, and their forcible 'conversion' to the Muslim perversion have rendered abominable the news of the world for more than a decade.  How long, one wonders, will it take before the populace of the world comes to its senses over this pseudo-religion ?  In any sane society Mohammedans would be segregated from the rest of the populace and their activities proscribed, or else their religion outlawed for the common good.  Regrettably, men have long since forgotten what is meant by the common good, and how to live in a sane manner.

What may at first blush strike the impartial observer as astounding is that those who profess no belief in God, the world's atheists and their fellow travellers, fall over themselves to defend the right of people to follow this mindless religion.  The clue to this folly is to be found in the Masonic program set out above.  In exalting human liberty above its station, the Masons have dug a grave for their followers.  There is dramatic irony in France's recent suffering in the fact that the Masonic program first found expression in the French Revolution.  It ought to sober any right thinking American that America' s founding fathers adopted the same foolish program.

Notwithstanding the universality of acceptance of the Masonic protocols, there remained in the world one institution unaffected by its mindset, one institution which could be relied on to resist them among the people and nations over whom it had influence, namely, the Catholic Church.  But that resistance came to an end with the endorsement of certain of the Masonic protocols by a majority of the Church's bishops at the Second Vatican Council.  The crowning folly committed by these bishops was their last act, the passage of the Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, on 7th December, 1965.  No utterance more harmful to the faith and the Catholic faithful, or indeed to humanity, has been made by the Church's bishops in 2,000 years.

For let it be clearly understood : in this document the bishops abandoned the infallible teaching of the Catholic Church against the Masonic protocol of 'religious freedom'.[5]   Moreover, in doing so they denied in practice the claim of the Catholic Church that she and she alone of all the religions of the world was founded by God for the salvation of men.   It was no accident that Pope Paul should have addressed the United Nations General Assembly on 4th October 1965 in terms which reduced the Catholic Church to a position of subservience to that Masonically inspired institution.  Nor was it an accident that Pope Paul should, in the course of his euphoric address, have anticipated the abandonment of the Church's teaching against the Masonic doctrine of 'religious freedom' by the Council's bishops two months later.

Now, fifty years on, we are suffering the effects of those acts of papal and episcopal folly.  For where is the pope, where is the bishop, today who will condemn Mohammedanism as it deserves to be condemned ?  The initiative of each has been compromised by the false ecumenism taught at Vatican II.[6]   Where is the pope, where is the bishop, capable of exposing the Masonic error over human freedom, capable of even understanding the fundamental distinction between absolute and moral freedom.  The deliberate confusion of the issue undertaken by those who drafted the facile Declaration on Religious Freedom and its foolish endorsement by the Council bishops has served to dull the mind of every member of the clergy and episcopacy since.   There are mass demonstrations around the world over the Muslim violence : and to what do their members, without exception, blindly appeal ?  To freedom !  But freedom (in the sense of absolute freedom) is just what the mad Muslim murderer claims for himself !

It is not freedom that is the solution to the world's problems, but the supreme virtue, charity—the love of God and of one's neighbour—to which all other rights and virtues are subject, else they conduce to chaos.  And it is chaos the world is facing as a consequence of the interplay of the three evils we have detailed.  Only under charity can freedom can be seen in true and proper perspective distinguished, as Leo XIII did so majestically in June 1888, into its component parts.[7]

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Mohammedanism is a sort of mockery of Catholicism.  This may be seen in the way it inverts certain Catholic truths.  The use of images is natural to man ; the Church insists on their use to foster the religious behaviour of the faithful.  Mohammedanism, like the iconoclastic heretics of other ages, rejects the use of all images on the specious ground that it involves worship of the images.[8]   The Mohammedan idea of martyrdom inverts that of Christ Who said, “A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his fellow man”.  The Mohammedan thinks he can get to heaven by murdering those who will not conform to his religion's mad ideology.   In his rejection of the commandment not to murder the innocent the Mohammedan mocks God to His face as comprehensively as any Mason.[9]   Mohammedan ideas of heaven and of hell are but parodies of the realities revealed by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to mankind.

The Catholic Church has always instinctively understood that Mohammedanism is antithetic to the true faith established by Almighty God and harmful to society and the common good.  This knowledge moved the popes to mount crusades against the Muslim in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and rouse the Christian forces to repel various attempts to storm Europe.  The Catholic Church provided the ground and motive for success of the forces in the battles of Lepanto and Vienna.  The same influence moved the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula to labour for almost 1,000 years to remove the Muslims from their midst.  The Church remained fixed in her rejection of the possibility of co-existence with the Mohammedan, until the calling of the Second Vatican Council.[10]   In the meantime the lambent atheism of Freemasonry had infiltrated the minds of many of the citizens of Prussia, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy resulting in anti-Catholic legislation whose effect was to dismantle step by step the edifices which had prevented Muslim incursion.

Now, under the aegis of the false ecumenism promoted by the Council, the Church's protection for her peoples from Mohammedan depredation has been lost.  And the peoples of the world, exposed, are reaping the whirlwind of their rejection of the Church's protections.[11]

Violence and murder have characterised Mohammedanism from its inception thirteen centuries ago.  Its only sure means of converting 'believers' in the past has been violence and fear.  It is its only sure means of conversion today. Nothing has changed.  Even in the most benign of Mohammedan societies the seeds of violence remain ever present.  If men will not learn discipline through submission to rightful authority, they must needs learn it through suffering.  These are the reasons the world now suffers the Muslim plague.  The problem is not, as public figures, including popes and bishops contend, with individual members of the Mohammedan faith, with 'terrorists', THE PROBLEM IS WITH THE MOHAMMEDAN RELIGION. 

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Misled by his predecessors' ill-judged deference to Masonic protocols and the maintenance of  respect for their foolish actions, subverted by the facile claims of Modernism, and intimidated by a burgeoning Mohammedanism, the modern Catholic bishop is a poor successor of the Apostles and of the bishops who succeeded them.

Michael Baker
13th January, 2015—St Hilary, Bishop and Doctor of the Church