The Heresy of Freemasons

Freemasonry is, I suppose, what it set out to be: the glorification of the construction of unthinking, unmoving walls. But Robert Frost reminds us that something there is, something original and free within man, that doesn't love a wall. 

The walls of the freemasons limit reason by excluding Revelation; they limit marriage by denying its life-giving Sacrament; and they forbid for a free society the source of its freedom, the Church's saving truth.

As to their reported deviousness, freemasonry is like the long-nosed child catcher of Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, who roams the world offering lollipops, ice cream, and candy on the condition that you gleefully run into his disguised cage. Freemasonry is a cunning vehicle of anti-Church sentiment, and in their way, a sweet relic of the blunter parts of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and America's Founding Fathers.

We are called to condemn this heresy. The captains of the Church, for their part, have been too long steadfast in pointing out this submerged mine for it not to have been removed. It is not so much that the masons continue to be (as I notice their influence) an active force of heresy. Rather, they contribute to the climate: this pressing stagnation, which in the manner of a fog, assails the Body of Christ.

There is something very foul about the way freemasons disguise their rejection of all churches by their indifferent acceptance of every last one of them. The heresy of freemasons begins with a false ecumenism which denies religious truth. At its best, Freemasonry is a heresy in the way G. K. Chesterton describes them:
 
They sometimes even look very true; they sometimes even are very true, in the limited sense of a truth that is less than the Truth ... For a heresy is not often a mere lie; as Thomas More himself said, 'Never was there a heretic that spoke all false.' A heresy is a truth that hides all the other truths.
 
The world, like truth, is too wide and beautiful a place for us to glorify walls and wall-builders.