MILAN (LifeSiteNews) — Leading Catholic prelates and a scandal-plagued Vatican cardinal took part in a conference on Freemasonry and the Catholic Church today, held in conjunction with the leading Freemasonic lodge of Italy.
Announced some days ago by the Grand Orient of Italy – the nation’s leading Freemasonic lodge – a conference is taking place in Milan, February 16. Organized by the Socio-Religious Research and Information Group (GRIS), the conference “Catholic Church and Masonry” is headlined by Stefano Bisi, who serves as the Grand Master of the Grand Orient, along with notable members of the Catholic hierarchy:
- The scandal-plagued Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, emeritus prefect of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.
- Milan’s Cardinal Archbishop Mario Delpini.
- Bisho Antonio Stagliano, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Theology.
Archbishop Delpini delivered the opening address, while Coccopalmerio gave closing remarks. Grand Master Bisi’s talk was titled “Freemasonry between Ratzinger and Bergoglio.”
Meanwhile, Giuseppe Ferrari, who leads the Observatory on Religious Pluralism, will speak on “what dialogue is possible between Catholics and Masons.”
The Grand Orient described the event as “historic,” and one “in which the centuries-old and complex relationship between the Catholic Church and Freemasonry will be addressed.”
The one-day colloquium was further billed as “an important moment of dialogue that will allow religious and Freemasons to freely confront each other on the reconcilability and irreconcilability of Masonic values with Catholic ones.”
Coccopalmerio’s presence is, in one sense, no more surprising than that of his fellow Catholic clerics given that he is the former Archbishop of Milan and the former head of the Council for Legislative Texts, a Vatican body which would be involved in the publication of any official texts especially those relating to the Church’s law.
But his name is most well known amongst followers of Church news for his attendance at the infamous cocaine-fueled homosexual orgy at the Vatican in 2017. As LifeSite’s Dr. Maike Hickson reported, Vatican sources stated that Coccopalmerio “was presiding” over the event, and that when the Vatican police disrupted the party, “they instructed him to absent himself before they started making arrests.”
READ: Source: Vatican cardinal was at drug-fueled homosexual party, and Pope knows it
Grand Master Bisi told Italian media that the February 16 conference was an attempt to find “common values,” and restart a relationship with the Church. In doing so, he cited a 2016 article by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi – then president of the Pontifical Council for Culture – published in the Vatican’s daily paper L’Osservatore Romano, in which he acknowledged an “un‐compatibility between Freemasonry and Catholicism,” but added that such did not “prevent the dialogue” between the two.
Father Zbigniew Suchecki, a professor at the Pontifical Theological Faculty of St. Bonaventure and an expert on Masonry, will address the event, examining the Church’s stance and teaching regarding membership of the Freemasons. His role in rounding out the conference is interesting given his public interventions consistently noting the incompatibility of Catholicism with Freemasonry.
Speaking to the New Daily Compass as recently as 2022, Suchecki briefly outlined the Church’s unchanging teaching regarding the impossibility for Catholics to become Freemasons.
The Catholic Church has consistently and firmly forbidden Catholics from joining the Freemasons, which was re-stated by the Vatican in recent weeks. Pope Clement XII’s 1739 papal bull, In Eminenti, judged Freemasonry so serious a matter, and membership in it so dangerous, that he imposed an automatic excommunication, latae sententiae, on any Catholic who joined the freemasons.
READ: A saint who fought the Freemasons has the battle plan against today’s dictatorship
Subsequently, Pope Leo XIII wrote in Humanum Genus that Freemasons have as “their ultimate purpose…the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere naturalism.”
In the CDF’s 1981 Declaration Concerning Status of Catholics Becoming Freemasons, the Vatican reaffirmed the prior teaching on this prohibition, based on renewed questions on the topic, noting that the excommunication and all penalties remained in place for Catholics looking to become Masons.
Subsequent texts a few years later – the Declaration on Masonic Associations and Irreconcilability of Christian Faith and Freemasonry – re-iterated the Church’s position, noting the “irreconcilability between the principles of Freemasonry and the Catholic faith.”
Pope Francis and the current CDF prefect Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández reaffirmed the Church’s teaching regarding Freemasons via a November 15 document.
But despite this, Francis received praise from Freemasons for his stance on “fraternity” – which was one of the topics highlighted in 2016 by Cardinal Ravasi as an area of mutual discussion between Catholics and Masons.
Indeed, when the Archbishop of Chieti-Vasto outlined the Catholic prohibition on joining the Freemasons, the local lodge quoted from Pope Francis’ Fratelli Tutti and said they would appeal to the Pope for support.
READ: Freemasons appeal to Pope for support after bishop repeats Church’s condemnation
Fratelli Tutti promotes a “Universal Brotherhood” and also links back to his controversial 2019 Abu Dhabi document on Human Fraternity, both of which are widely criticized texts amongst Catholic circles. A prominently vocal German priest also described Fratelli Tutti as being interwoven with “Masonic” ideology. Francis’s push for religions to be on an equal footing, Father Frank Unterhalt noted was a key element of Masonic goals.
Indeed, following Fratelli Tutti’s publication, it was welcomed by the Masonic Lodge of Spain, who stated it was “the latest encyclical” of Pope Francis in which he “embraces the Universal Fraternity, the great principle of Modern Freemasonry.”
“Pope Francis’ last encyclical shows how far the current Catholic Church is from its former positions,” wrote the Lodge.