Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked by Monsignor George F. Dillon was originally one of two lectures given by the author in Edinburgh, Scotland in October 1884.
Those two lectures, “The War of Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization” and “Spoliation of the Propaganda”, were published in 1885 under the title of the first lecture.
Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked is the first lecture that was subsequently condensed so as to be more suitable to be read. The text is organized into 23 short chapters, excluding the publisher’s foreword and the foreword/preface by Fr Denis Fahey.
The lectures were in response to Pope Leo XIII’s call in his encyclical “Humanum Genus”, written in 1884, to “instruct the people” regarding the dangers of freemasonry.
As such, the text is plainly written and easily accessible. It is also highly generalized and brief but the author does provide a few specific examples. In short, freemasonry feigns respect for religion, including Christianity, and in turn promotes religious and moral indifference, ultimately aiming to usher in so-called atheism. The more overt means include (socialist/communist) revolutions.
Those who are familiar with the subject will unlikely find the text containing anything fundamentally new. Below are some key points and excerpts, not intended to be a summary.
● The author describes the aim of freemasonry in simple terms.
The one aim of this directory is to uproot Christianity, and the Christian social order as well as the Church from the world—in fact, to eradicate the name of Christ and the very Christian idea from the minds and the hearts of men. This it is determined to do by every means, but especially by fraud and force; that is by first using wiles and deceit until the Atheistic conspiracy grows strong enough for measures as violent and remorseless in all countries as it exercised in one country during the first French Revolution.
● In other words, freemasonry aims to take down the Church and replace existing civil authority with an atheistic and socialist/communist authority.
● Atheism and liberalism were widespread in the 1700s, partly due to the protestant reformation which had progressed for two centuries, its principle of “private judgment” leading to liberalist and progressivist thought.
● Voltaire (b. 1694 – d. 1778) promoted atheism and liberalism and attacked Catholicism (and the Jesuits) via his writings. Although he had a Catholic upbringing and was Jesuit-educated, he turned traitor and became an atheist and freemason.
He sketched out for them the whole mode of procedure against the Church. His policy as revealed by the correspondence of Frederick II, and others with him, was not to commence an immediate persecution, but first to suppress the Jesuits and all Religious orders, and to secularize their goods; then to deprive the Pope of temporal authority, and the Church of property and state recognition. Primary and higher-class education of a lay and Infidel character was to be established, the principle of divorce affirmed, and respect for ecclesiastics lessened and destroyed. Lastly, when the whole body of the Church should be sufficiently weakened and Infidelity strong enough, the final blow was to be dealt by the sword of open, relentless persecution. A reign of terror was to spread over the whole earth, and to continue while a Christian should be found obstinate enough to adhere to Christianity. This, of course, was to be followed by a Universal Brotherhood without marriage, family, property, God, or law, in which all men would reach that level of social degradation aimed at by the disciples of Saint Simon, and carried into practice whenever possible, as attempted by the French Commune.
● Protestant denominations were not exempt from attacks as Voltaire was happy to play protestants and catholics against each other. He was also a known hypocrite, happy to go to communion to get a pension from the king. He seemed no different at death:
When he broke a blood vessel on one occasion, he begged his assistants to hurry for the priest. He confessed, signed with his hand a profession of faith, asked pardon of God and the Church for his offences, and ordered that his retraction should be printed in the public newspapers; but, recovering, he commenced his war upon God anew, and died refusing all spiritual aid, and crying out in the fury of despair and agony, “I am abandoned by God and man.” Dr. Fruchen, who witnessed the awful spectacle of his death, said to his friends, “Would that all who had been seduced by the writings of Voltaire had been witness of his death, it would be impossible to hold out, in the face of such an awful spectacle.” But that spectacle was forgotten, and consequently, before ten years passed, the world saw the effects of his works.
● Freemasonry as a guild understandably resorted to some degree of secrecy to protect its trade and members. However, there is documented evidence, if authentic, suggesting that during the 1400s and 1500s freemasonry was infiltrated by those who had anti-Christian aims.
● As for its anti-Christian origins, the author mentions the Sozini family as one possibility based on the research of Mgr Segur, Bishop of Grenoble. According to Segur, freemasonry “was first elaborated by Faustus Socinus, the nephew of the too celebrated Laelius Socinus, the heresiarch and founder of the sect of Unitarians … Laelius had assisted at a conference of Heretics at Vicenza in 1547, in which the destruction of Christianity was resolved upon…”
● Adam Weishaupt (b. 1748 – d. 1830), another Jesuit-educated man who betrayed Catholicism, founded Illuminism. Weishaupt basically took over freemasonry and organized it as a more effective force, in effect having a secret society within a secret society.
● Weishaupt’s tactic was to take a gradual approach. He watered down principles by fomenting indifference and pluralism.
Weishaupt’s view, then, was first to entice men into Masonry—into the lowest degree. A great gain for evil was thus at once obtained. But a man, though in Masonry, may not be willing to become an Atheist and a Socialist, for some time at least. … But Masonry was a capital system to wean a man gradually away from all these things. It did not at once deny the existence of God, nor at once attack the Christian Dispensation. It commenced by giving the Christian idea of God, an easy, and, under semblance of respect, an almost imperceptible shake. It swore by the name of God in all its oaths. It called him, however, not a Creator, only an architect—the great Architect of the universe. It carefully avoided all mention of Christ, of the Adorable Trinity, of the Unity of the Faith, or of any faith. It protested a respect for the convictions of every man, for the idolatrous Parsee, for the Mahommedan, for the Heretic, the Schismatic, the Catholic.
● In 1781, Weishaupt convened a council held in Wilhelmsbad in which deputies of freemasonic lodges from all over Europe and the USA attended. Notable figures involved included the Duke of Brunswick and Baron Knigge.
It was through this system that Weishaupt obtained the adoption of illuminated Masonry at the convent of Wilhelmsbad. Through the machinations of Knigge he obtained from the delegates there assembled the approval of his plan that the ultimate end of Freemasonry and all secret plotting should be—1°, Pantheism—a form of Atheism which flatters Masonic pride. 2°, Communism of goods, women, and general concerns. 3°, That the means to arrive at these ends should be the destruction of the Church, and of all forms of Christianity; the obliteration of every kind of supernatural belief; and, finally, the removal of all existing human governments to make way for a universal republic in which the Utopian ideas of complete liberty from existing social, moral, and religious restraint, absolute equality, and social fraternity, should reign.
● The author also mentions that “the leaders of the French Revolution, and notably most of those who lived through it, and profited by it, were deputy Masons sent from various lodges in France to the Convent of Wilhelmsbad”.
● Cagliostrom, real name Balsamo, was sent by Weishaupt to establish lodges all over Europe. He also founded the Egyptian rite. The Inquisition in Rome found out about his connection to the Illuminati and he died in prison in 1795.
● The Bavarian government came across the Illuminati’s plan for revolution but the governments of Europe mostly did not act on this. The Illuminati proceeded with their plans for the French Revolution.
● Napoleon Bonaparte was a freemason who carried out the freemasonic plans. With the support of the network and resources freemasonry had, he generally succeeded. However, when perceived as a threat to their power and plans, they betrayed him by, amongst other things, urging him to invade Russia.
● Even before then, freemasonry had infiltrated the governments of Europe at the highest levels, which continued after the removal of Napoleon. Freemasonry, of course, was [and still is] not merely one organization but consists of different lodges/factions. The Italian Carbonari was one with the Alta Vendita its highest lodge.
● The author reproduces The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita by someone with the pseudonym Piccolo Tigre who, according to the author, was a Jew. The famous text outlines a plan to inject modernist and liberalist ideas into the Church’s institutions, such as seminaries. A direct attack by trying to get a freemason to the papacy is difficult if not impossible but brainwashing an entire generation to accept modernist and liberalist ideas may one day lead to someone suitable to their cause being elevated to the position.
● Corruption of the masses rather than assassination is the tactic, to “isolate a man from his family, to cause him to lose his morals”.
When you shall have insinuated into a few souls disgust for family and for religion (the one nearly always follows in the wake of the other), let fall some words which will provoke the desire of being affiliated to the nearest lodge.
● As for women specifically:
…since we cannot suppress woman, let us corrupt her with the Church, corruptio optimi pessima. [the corruption of the best is the worst]
● Citing Eckert, secret societies are generally divided into two parties: the intellectual party and the war party. The former is to plot and the latter recruits, incites insurrection and fights. “The members of the war party are always members of the intellectual party, but not vice versa.”
● The author claims that Lord Palmerston was the “Grand Patriarch of the Illuminati” during the greater part of his career. Changes in legislation that impeded or distracted the population from good morals and religious obligations were made, such as regarding divorce, trading on Sundays, prostitution, display of religious symbols, chaplains in the military and, particularly in Palmerston’s time, religious education in schools. This is not merely in England but, at different times, throughout Europe as well as Australia.
● Whilst freemasonry feigned respect for religion, it hypocritically kept secrets from its own members by their system of degrees and imposed the penalty of death for anyone betraying their secrets or some act of disobedience.
● The author reproduces some initiation rites. The excerpt below is one example. One can see the conveniently vague feigned respect for Christianity, the watering down of objective morals, and the idea of God reduced to pantheism.
“By the Bible, you are to understand that it is the only law you ought to follow. It is that which Adam received at his creation, and which the Almighty engraved in his heart. This law is called natural law, and shows positively that there is but one God, and to adore only him without any sub-division or interpolation. The Compass gives you the faculty of judging for yourself, that whatever God has created is well, and he is the sovereign author of everything. Existing in himself, nothing is either good or evil, because we understand by this expression an action done which is excellent in itself, is relative, and submits to the human understanding, judging to know the value and price of such action, and that God, with whom everything is possible, communicates nothing of his will but such as his great goodness pleases; and everything in the universe is governed as he has decreed it with justice, being able to compare it with the attributes of the Divinity. I equally say, that in himself there is no evil, because he has made everything with exactness, and that everything exists according to his will; consequently, as it ought to be. The distance between good and evil, with the Divinity, cannot be more justly and clearly compared than by a circle formed with a compass: from the points being reunited there is formed an entire circumference; and when any point in particular equally approaches or equally separates from its point, it is only a faint resemblance of the distance between good and evil, which we compare by the points of a compass, forming a circle, which circle, when completed, is God!”
Be sure to subscribe to our mailing list so you get each new Opinyun that comes out!
