[Magdalen] Curse on Masons

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

The intriguing thing about Masonry is that any member of the RCC can join
if they wish. Masons may well have been good C of E boys to begin with (if
you are interested in the Masonry descended from British roots, most of
which are in the US), and as such, were loath to let anyone else in, I
suppose, in line with the times. Today, Masonry is open to all men.
However, it varies.  Each Grand lodge (every state has its own freestanding
grand lodge) has its own rules, and each governs itself differently. There
are general standards: a man must be of age of consent, freeborn, and
having no blemish on his character, which can be interpreted differently.

For instance, at the time I was active, a person in Pennsylvania could not
petition for membership if he had any physical deformity. However, this
person could cross over to a lodge in New York, explain his situation, and,
if otherwise found worthy, could be given the Three Degrees. He then went
back to Pennsylvania where he was fully accepted. While visiting a lodge
function in Dad's lodge, I got an enthusiastic handshake from a man who had
done precisely that, owing to a deformity in one of his hands.

And of course I am sure most of us know that for centuries,
African-Americans were not accepted because of a bizarre reading of the
"freeborn" thing.  This is obvious racism since African-Americans were
Masons in Colonial times. A very well known and honored man in colonial
times, an African-American and a Mason, was named Prince Hall, after whom
the African-American Masonic Lodges are named.  This exclusion hurt Masonry
badly, and while still a member I tried without success to get this simple
point across to folks, as we could see the lodges were dying all around us.
This foolish position was a large reason why I decided not to continue my
active membership.

Masons certainly did not accept members of the RCC in the past, and the RCC
did us the compliment of developing the Knights of Columbus.  If Masons
were under a curse, how ironic that the RCC would create a similar
organization for their own! The two organizations used to be at odds, and I
suppose in some areas that may still be the case, but in more recent times,
the two organizations have found reasons to work together on various
charitable projects. One of the geniuses of these organizations that were
successful was that they had charitable events to support, and they made
this support a kind of fun game.  which I understand is so close to the
Masons that some passwords are even the same in the rituals. I gained this
nugget of information from the Mason who raised me one day, talking about
an event he attended in which KofC and Masons attended, and the main
speaker, a KofC, told the group just that in so many words. My Dad was a
Shriner ( a higher level of Masonry that supports the Shriner Hospitals)
who was very enthused with a program developed by the bishop of Pittsburgh
entitled "Knights and Nobles." It had programs in which Masonic and KofC
folks met and worked together.  That just doesn't fit the image of a curse,
so far as I can discern.

When I was coming up through the chairs, the Grand Lodge of New York had
district deputy grand masters for ever district (approximately a county),
and the man in the office in those days was a dynamo of a fellow named
Larry Perretta, who was also a member in good standing in the RCC, and made
no boasts about it, but also no denials. It was not big news, actually.  We
had in Poughkeepsie a lodge (Obed Lodge) for men of the Jewish faith, which
has long since gone dark, since there is no desire to exclude Jews anymore.

It is interesting that Poughkeepsie was home at one time to Solomon Lodge
number One. It went dark during the Morgan Affair, in which a man who got
Masonic secrets and threatened to make them public was apparently murdered.
He disappeared and his body was never found, and this was a major item in
the Anti-masonic Party which thrived for a little while in the early to mid
nineteenth century.  The biggest curse on Masonry was arguably its own
membership who seem to have been willing to do almost anything to prevent
the rather mundane secrets of Masonry becoming public. And mundane they
certainly were and are.

You can gain a lot of information by googling such terms as "Morgan Affair"

I did not pick up on it at first, but I now think I understand where the
notion of the curse on Masons might come from. When the candidate goes
through the rituals of Masonry (there are basically three, but one can go
further if he has the time, money and boredom), he swears by oaths binding
himself to suffer horrible consequences if he should ever willingly reveal
any of the secrets of Masonry. These are the curses.
Most of the misinformation about Masons is spread by the uninformed
evangelicals. Indeed there is a cottage industry out there of folks who
write books "exposing" Masonry and many people make a modest living
traveling around the country giving talks in which these mis-truths are
presented as accurate information (your friend apparently has been taken in
by some of these charlatans. With what I've heard of Truro, I would not
expect it to be party to such nonsense, but at the same time, it doesn't
surprise me that some of the know-nothing folks will believe anything that
impugns the character of people of whom they are jealous [read: anyone who
has been even moderately successful in life]).

How does the RCC get into this? Well, the hatred toward the RCC among
evangelicals is legendary, of course, and if they are going after two
groups, it is not much of a reach to suggest that the curse we swore to in
our initiations would be conflated into the friction between Masons and the
RCC.
When I was growing up, the talk in the street (grain of salt and all
that...) was that members of the RCC could never be Masons because Masons
swear never to reveal the Fraternity's secrets, and a good Catholic must be
able to bare all in the confessional, so it follows (if you are good with
convoluted logic) that good Catholics can't be Masons.

Now this is ostensibly why RCC members can't be Masons. However, the RCC
had nothing against Masonry itself (They even created a copycat
organization just like the Masons), so they had no reason to curse the
Masons. Indeed it is extremely doubtful that the RCC ever cursed, period.
I could of course, be wrong, but if they ever did, these matters would be
in the very distant past, and Masonry as we know it is a very young
organization, just a bit older than the USA.

The notion of Masons having to keep deep horrible secrets is all nonsense,
of course, for the simple reason that the initiations were always explained
to the candidates to be symbolic only -- the importance of the teachings
was couched in ritual to get across the very importance of it. Nobody ever
carried out these actions. (Indeed, if you check into info on the Morgan
Affair, Mr. Morgan [Brother Morgan, actually] was threatening to go public
with Masonic ritual secrets, and for a long time, they did whatever they
could to talk him out of it. While it may well be that some lunatics took
their rituals a bit too seriously, the organization never took those oaths
seriously, and there's no indication any action was ever done to Morgan in
the way described (ick!!!) in the rituals.

However, what better way to smear two birds with one piece of excrement
than to claim that the RCC has put a curse on all Masons?  In my years in
The Craft, I never heard of such a curse.

For some authoritative info on this curse business:
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/masonic_curse.html

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 11:51 AM, Grace Cangialosi <gracecan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Knowing the vast amount of knowledge in this group, I've been meaning to
> pose a question put to me by a parishioner a few weeks ago.  this morning I
> googled it--and was horrified at what I found.
>
> The parishioner, a well-meaning and sincere man in his late 70's, is always
> very concerned about deliverance from evil spirits and that kind of
> thing--was  involved in that kind of ministry when he was a member of Truro
> Church in Fairfax, VA, some years ago.
>
> He wanted to know if I knew of anyone who would know how to banish the
> curse placed on Masons and their descendants by the Catholic Church. I was
> completely clueless, had never heard of that, said I didn't know of anyone
> offhand, and in any case, I doubted that the curse, which was apparently
> put in place generations ago, would still be in effect. But I did tell him
> I'd see what I could find out.
>
> Well, there are dozens of links to this topic, and some of it gives me the
> creeps. Indeed, the curse was to be generational, and descendants of Masons
> need to be prayed for, or, if necessary, pray certain prayers for
> deliverance themselves,  There are even prayers to pray for each of the
> "layers" of Masonry folks might have risen to.
>
> I think my parishioner was hoping there was a general prayer of deliverance
> that would remove the curse from everyone who had ever been a Mason, but I
> didn't find anything about that.  Frankly, I didn't read very far in any of
> the links.
>
> Anyway, now that I have had some of my questions answered, I'm still
> curious as to whether anyone here has had experience with this.
>
> I was so stunned at the time that I didn't think to ask about his specific
> concern--whether it was for a family member or himself.  I had the feeling
> it was more generic--he wants all the folks who might have been living
> under the curse to be delivered from it.  I suppose if it's personal, I
> could offer him those prayers and sit with him while he prays them...but
> the whole thing is just weird, IMO.
>
> --
> Grace Cangialosi
> Ruckersville, VA
>
> *We must cry out against injustice or by our silence consent to it.
> Dorothy Day*
>