On February 11, 1988, a group of high-ranking Freemasons gathered in the Oval Office of the White House. They were assembled to honor and to be honored by President Ronald Reagan. First, Mr. Reagan received a certificate of honor from the Grand Lodge of Washington, D.C., then was made an Honorary Scottish Rite Mason. The third honor was the highest, as Mr. Voris King, imperial potentate of the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, named the President of the United States an honorary member of the Imperial Council of the Shrine.
The Shrine, the most visible aspect of Freemasonry in the United States, had come a long way. Just a generation ago Shriners’ conventions had caused alarm and concern; editorials were written against grown men who apparently felt that it was hilariously funny to drop a bag of water from a hotel window onto the head of an unsuspecting pedestrian below. Shriner-time was party-time.
Then some wise men found a way to harness and redirect that exuberant energy, with great success. The focus was children, and the result was a network of twenty-two Shrine Hospitals for Crippled Children, including nineteen orthopedic hospitals and three burn centers. Research plays an important role as well: Twenty years ago a child whose body was 30 percent covered with first-degree burns would most certainly die, whereas today a child with twice that coverage will survive, thanks to Shrine-funded research. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these hospitals is that they have no patient billing department. No child waits for treatment while its parents establish their ability to pay or document their insurance coverage, because there is no charge, ever. And when the Shrine Circus comes to town to raise money for those hospitals, seats are set aside for children from local orphanages and broken homes—and the gift does not stop there. Individual Shriners pick up the children and return them after the show. At the circus they dip into their own pockets to make certain that their wide-eyed charges have all the cotton candy, popcorn, and lemonade they can hold. And that Shrine clown helping to make their visit extra memorable may be your neighborhood banker. Taken altogether, the shift in Shrine direction and purpose to the achievement of unassailable good works is an outstanding example of the effectiveness of leadership and the inherent willingness of men to exert themselves physically and financially for a cause they can believe in.
That being the case, one might ask why this book has not directed more attention to the better-known side degrees of Masonry, such as Scottish Rite and York Rite Masonry. The answer is simply that the origin and organization of those Masonic systems are well known and contain no forgotten mysteries. The real mysteries lie only at the heart of the original “Craft” or “Blue Lodge” Masonry of the Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason, the truly secret society whose origins and purposes appeared to have been lost forever in the passage of time and the vagaries of whispered verbal transmission.
That atmosphere of mystery carries over into the public view, as any “secret” society arouses the curiosity, enmity, and envy of those who are not in it, and even more so if they are not even eligible. One price that such societies pay is that, in the absence of knowledge of their workings, the society as a whole must bear the stigma of acts of individual members. The “Molly Maguires,” for instance, who terrorized the Pennsylvania coal fields by burning down the houses and cutting the ears and noses off the mine superintendents who fired their drunken brothers, were all members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and it took the Hibernians a time to convince the world that the mutilations were not officially sanctioned. Similarly, Masonry has reeled under attacks upon the order brought on by the acts of individual members, such as the alleged murder of Captain William Morgan. Another such event involved what was then the whole Mormon population of the country.
Not far from Morgan’s home in Batavia, New York, was the town of Manchester, the home of a young man named Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon church. Smith based his new church on instructions and two golden plates that he said had been given to him by the angel Moroni just a little more than a year after Morgan’s disappearance. He started at Palmyra, New York, but was driven out and moved his congregation to Ohio, where he was driven out again and finally settled at Nauvoo, Illinois. The town mushroomed in size and Freemasonry grew right along with it, with many Mormons swelling the Masonic ranks. Alphonse Cerza, a Masonic historian, reported that by 1843 there were five Mormon Masonic lodges at Nauvoo, all of which were suspended by the Grand Lodge for irregularities in their conduct. The Mormon lodges ignored the suspensions, adding to the tension already mounting between Mormons and local Christians—including non-Mormon Freemasons—on the subject of polygamy.
What happened next is disputed. The anti-Mormon local population erupted one night into a rage that saw mobs shooting and beating, burning down Mormon houses and barns, triggering a chain of events that led to the murder of Joseph Smith. His successor, Brigham Young, condemned the local Freemasons for the attack, branding them the agents of Satan. He decreed that any Mormon who refused to abandon Masonry, or chose to become a Mason, was subject to summary excommunication from the Mormon church. The Masons, on the other hand, claimed that the Freemasons of Nauvoo had nothing to do with the savage attacks. For their part, the Mormons decided to leave the United States altogether, heading west until they reached the Mexican territory of Utah. The Masons ultimately decided that Mormonism was incompatible with the principles of Freemasonry, and for many years no Mormon could become a Freemanson; but in 1984 the Grand Lodge of Utah made peace with the Mormons and today many Mormons are Freemasons.
A few years later, during the War Between the States, Masonic officers and men found themselves facing their Masonic brothers on the other side. There are many Civil War legends of help rendered in response to Masonic signs of distress, but the most significant event happened just after the war was over. Angered by the erosion of their way of life and the enforced growing political power of men who had been their slaves until the war was lost, a group of Southerners decided to fight back by means of a secret society. Many of them were Freemasons, who drew upon their knowledge of Masonic rites to develop a ritualistic infrastructure for the society that was to save the South through the maintenance of white supremacy. They adopted the circle of the lodge as their formal meeting arrangement for members, named their society for it, and demonstrated their educational level by using the Greek word for “circle,” which is kuklos. The pronunciation and spelling quickly became Ku Klux, and they styled themselves as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, as terms of chivalry were introduced into the ritual. The single All-Seeing Eye of Masonry became the Grand Cyclops. There were hand signals, secret passwords, secret handgrips and recognition signals, even a sacred oath, all adapted from Masonic experience. Some Klansmen even boasted of official connections between the Klan and Freemasonry.
A society that had begun as the Southerners’ only recourse against the postwar invasion of the South quickly degenerated into something else. Violence took hold, with beatings, lynchings, and even torture, so it was decided by the leadership that the Klan should be disbanded. In 1869 the Grand Master and former Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest issued his only General Order, which was for all Klans to disband and disperse. It was too late. The general’s order was ignored by many who still smarted under the humiliation of defeat in the war, and what they felt was the even greater humiliation of its aftermath. As the violence grew, and the target for Klan hatred widened in scope from blacks to Jews, to Catholics, to all foreign-born, the talk of the Masonic connection continued. Finally, state Masonic Grand Lodges in both North and South felt called upon to declare publicly their total rejection of the philosophy, the motives, and the actions of the Ku Klux Klan.
Nevertheless, a shadow had been cast on Freemasonry in the minds of many, and it was not helped by the attitude of many Masons toward the black community. True, there is a very light sprinkling of blacks in Masonry, but the number is just a fraction of a fraction of one percent of total membership. One Mason explained to me that this was because the Old Charges of Masonry state that no man could become Mason who was not “a free man born of a free mother,” and all American blacks are directly descended from slaves. He had no response to the point that the Old Charges do not say that a Mason must be a free man born of a free great-great-grandmother.
An older shadow on Masonic racial attitudes is an influential but almost unknown network of Masonic lodges that is very much a part of the black establishment across the United States but remains unrecognized by white Masons. It is known as Prince Hall Masonry, after its founder, a free black who appears to have served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War. Before that conflict, he and fourteen other blacks had been made Freemasons by a traveling military lodge, No. 441, of the British 38th Regiment of Foot, stationed at Boston. When the regiment pulled out of the area, the lodge left its resident black brothers with a permit which allowed them to hold meetings, but not to take in initiates or to award degrees.
The war made certain that the British military lodge would not return to Boston, so Prince Hall subsequently made application to the Grand Lodge of England, which issued a warrant on September 29, 1784, for African Lodge No. 459. Although very much an official Masonic lodge, No. 459 was not recognized by white Masonry in the United States. It finally responded to the exclusion by beginning to issue charters to lodges in other black communities, and even warranted traveling military lodges that existed within black military units in the Civil War, and later in both world wars. Prince Hall Masonry gradually spread across the country and expanded into side degrees, in much the same manner as white Masonry. It eventually became one of the most influential yet least known pillars of the black community, especially in the South, with over a quarter of a million members.
From time to time discussions do come up in Masonic conferences about giving full recognition to the Prince Hall lodges, but those in favor have never been able to muster up a majority for affirmation. Masons declare that they are not racist, but it is difficult to wrap one’s mind around the concept of a limited universal brotherhood.
Another barrier to “universal” brotherhood has been the relationship between Masons and Catholic societies and the Catholic church, although this has changed much in recent years, especially since the Second Vatican Council. No longer do clerics so strongly implement the instructions of Pope Leo XIII in Humanum Genus to “insist that parents and spiritual directors in teaching the catechism may never cease to admonish appropriately children and pupils of the wicked nature of these sects [the Freemasons],” and the children were so taught. One Catholic attorney told me that in his parochial elementary school, in the 1950s, the sisters lectured against Freemasonry in the classroom. In his case, there was a Masonic temple only two blocks away, and pupils who had to pass that way to and from school were told to avert their eyes as they passed by, to avoid looking at the house of the anti-Christ. (In fairness, it was not all one-sided. Twenty years earlier my Presbyterian mother had pointed out to me, then a child of seven or eight, that Catholic churches and monasteries were so often built on hilltops because the grounds were to be used as artillery positions when the Catholics would attempt to take over the country.)
Leo XIII also recommended that societies be formed to give the “working man” an alternative to Freemasonry. He urged that they be “invited to good societies that they may not be dragged into bad ones” and expressed his approval that such societies were already being formed. He may have had in mind the fact that just two years before, at Hartford, Connecticut, Father Michael J. McGiveny had formed a society of Catholic men of Irish descent that took the name “Knights of Columbus.” A fraternal organization, complete with secret meetings, passwords, and degrees, the society was founded to meet the needs of Irish Catholics who found themselves in virtual ethnic ghettos surrounded by a sea of anti-Catholic Protestants and, as they openly stated, to provide a Catholic alternative to Freemasonry. The concept took hold, and today it is estimated that there are over 1.3 million Knights of Columbus in the United States, with additional members in Mexico, Canada, and the Philippines.
Both fraternal societies grew during the early years of this century. The Masons and the Knights of Columbus never came to blows, but they attacked each other constantly in every other way. The conflict between them became most dramatic in Mexico, in what the Knights of Columbus refer to as their “Mexican Campaign” against the “communists,” as they called the anti-church ruling party of the country. The revolutionary victories in Mexico had deprived the Catholic church of extensive properties and most of the traditional church privileges. Religious orders were outlawed and elementary school teaching was forbidden to clerics and religious. There had been a complete separation of church and state and priests were not permitted to vote, being regarded as citizens of a foreign state, with their primary loyalty owed to the Vatican.
By 1925 there were thousands of Knights of Columbus in Mexico, determined to fight the anti-Catholic laws and to return Mexico to Rome. They even tried to run religious schools but were suppressed. Finally, many of the Knights joined with other Catholic laymen to form the Liga Nacional, the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty. The league in turn formed the nucleus of an armed rebellion against the government. The rebels dedicated their allegiance to Cristo Rey, Christ the King, for which they were referred to as the Cristeros. Mexican Freemasons fought in the government ranks, while many Mexican Knights took to the field of battle as Cristeros. Back in the United States, funds and support were gathered for the two sides by Masons and Knights alike. The rebellion raged from 1926 to 1929, and ultimate brutal treatment for the defeated Cristeros was guaranteed by their use of assassination as a weapon for attempted victory. In 1927 two members of the Liga Nacional, one a Jesuit priest, were executed without trials for the attempted murder of President Alvaro Obregón, who did not escape the assassins’ bullets when another attempt was made the following year. As the rebellion was put down, the Cristero prisoners were summarily shot.
The threshold of the Great Depression in America saw a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, which many of the Knights of Columbus tied to Freemasonry. Mutual antagonism threatened to produce more violence, but already cracks were beginning to appear in the great religious wall that separated the Knights and the Masons, based on their common ground of American nationalism. The Knights had set up service organizations in Europe during World War I, by which time they had already instituted a fourth degree based on patriotism. After the war they decided to donate an equestrian statue of Lafayette to the city of Metz in France, as a symbol of gratitude and brotherhood, and were immediately attacked by some of their fellow Catholics. Their critics declared that Lafayette had been a Freemason and therefore should not be honored by any loyal Catholic. The strongest and most vociferous condemnation of the project came from the societies of German-American Catholics, some of whom accused the Knights of trying to create a “Freemason saint.” The Knights had to make a decision. They concluded that while they were loyal Catholics, they were also loyal Americans. They could not embrace a policy that rejected contributions to American history by Freemasons, since this would mean eliminating George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and dozens more. The tribute went forward and the bronze statue was dedicated to the memory of the aristocratic French Mason on August 6, 1920. After the ceremony, a delegation of Knights went to Rome for an audience with Pope Benedict XV, who put the conflict to rest with the comment that complete devotion to one’s country is not incompatible with Catholic ideals.
It would be foolish to maintain that animosity no longer exists between the Freemasons and Catholic fraternal societies such as the Catholic Order of Foresters, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Knights of Columbus, but there certainly has been a marked improvement in recent years. In 1967 high officials of both Craft and Scottish Rite Masonry actually sat down at the table with major leaders of the Knights of Columbus to discuss their common goals of morality, patriotism, and law and order. Actually, they had more in common than that. Both orders had been severely criticized for the juvenile physical “hazing” that often found its way into initiation ceremonies, and both had been accused of job preferment and political influence. Having read Stephen Knight’s condemnations of preferment in Freemasonry, I was interested to see that Christopher J. Kauffman, in his officially recognized Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, wrote: “There were of course, also those men who joined the Order primarily for economic and political reasons. However, because these reasons are common motives for membership in any fraternal organization, they are not unique traits of the Knights of Columbus.”
As fraternal societies are learning to live with each other, they are also having to live with the fact of declining membership. Freemasonry is still the largest fraternal order in the United States, and in the world, but recruitment has fallen away in the past few years and many members have simply dropped out. Unavoidably, as times change the needs of men also change. During the great periods of expansion, as the English-speaking people moved out around the globe, Freemasonry had provided important social services. Whether being transferred to Hong Kong, seeking employment at a South African mine, or debarking at San Francisco during the great gold rush, the solitary Freemason did not have to remain lost and lonely for more than the day or two it took to make contact with local Masonic brothers, who guided him, helped him if he had trouble, and put in a good word for him in the right places. And his Masonic membership also ensured his social status.
How important that could be was dramatically illustrated in the early history of Australia. It is well known that its early “colonization” was by thousands of convicts, but it is not so well known that the army units sent down under to guard the convicts took their Masonry with them in their traveling military lodges. Technically, the convict who had served out his time could avail himself of all the opportunities of a new land, but whether he built a business of his own, or a substantial farming operation, he and his family, perhaps for several generations, had to live with the stigma of penal servitude, firmly fixing them at a lower level of the social scale. All that was required to change that status was for the ex-convict to be accepted into a Masonic lodge, which put him at once in the position of sworn brotherhood with officers of the garrison, leading citizens, and members of the government. This advantage was not available to the many Irish ex-convicts, whose Roman Catholicism precluded the Masonic ladder to social acceptance. Australia took to Freemasonry, and there are over three thousand lodges there now.
The social status of Freemasonry in Britain has been assured in years past by the patronage of the royal family, but that, too, may be changing. Prince Charles is the first British male heir to the throne to reject Masonry in almost two hundred years. The explanation most frequently given, but unconfirmed, is that Charles has been influenced against Masonry by his father, Prince Philip, who bitterly resented the pressure brought to bear on him to become a Freemason by his father-in-law, King George VI. Philip did join but remained totally inactive, so the present Grand Master is the royal cousin, the duke of Kent.
It must not be thought, however, that the vows of brotherhood created a great melting pot in which class distinctions disappeared. When the duke of Sussex became Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge, he suggested that a lodge be assembled made up entirely of peers of the realm, so that he might have a “proper” lodge to serve as Worshipful Master. Royal patronage did, however, make it much easier to have Masonic lodges in naval and military units, and lodge rooms in such venerable institutions as Scotland Yard and the Bank of England.
In addition to the royal rejection by the Prince of Wales, British Masonry is still smarting under the residue of the attacks on the order by Stephen Knight and others, as witness a ten-minute bill introduced (unsuccessfully) to the House of Commons in June 1988, intended to curtail the acceptance of Freemasons into the Metropolitan Police.
It’s too early to evaluate the success of its efforts, but the United Grand Lodge of England has made some attempts to counter the bad press. One of them, begun in 1986, was a program of free public tours of Freemason’s Hall, but unfortunately some of the press coverage of those tours was insulting and facetious (and at least partially fictitious). For example, an article in the Illustrated London News of November 1987, entitled “Temple of Horrors,” featured an illustration of thousands of bats flying from Freemason’s Hall. It ostensibly reported the tour from a woman’s viewpoint. After sharing her observations on the odors of the Hall (“halitosis, brilliantine and furniture polish”), the author introduces just two of her fellow visitors, both Americans. One is described as a “Freemasoness”—the first I’ve ever heard of—who of course has spiked heels that clack on the marble floor, and who at one point is observed stroking statues of Jonathan and David. The other American is a Texan who chews gum incessantly and responds to the conductor’s comments with “Wowee” and “Gee whiz.” (I have known a lot of Texans, who certainly have mastered some of the most ingenious epithets and pungent expletives in the English-speaking world, but I never heard one say “Wowee” or “Gee whiz.” Perhaps Gomer Pyle is still running on British TV). As the group stops to examine a star set in the floor, the reporter observes that she would not be surprised to “see the Prince of Darkness himself burst up through the lapis lazuli star with red smoke swirling from flared nostrils.” Passing a closed door, she speculates on the possibility that chickens are having their heads cut off on the other side. It is difficult to imagine what such a style of reporting does for the publication’s readers, but perhaps it prompted waves of laughter from the author’s own circle of friends, which is frequently the primary objective of that form of journalism. Such articles should also set minds at ease that Freemasonry does not control the free press in Britain.
In earlier times Freemasonry had been a powerful force for religious freedom. The newly formed United States was made up of colonies in which bigotry and religious intolerance were part of the way of life. Colonies had their own state religions, and the State of Connecticut remained officially Congregationalist until 1818. Roger Williams fled religious intolerance in Massachusetts to found Rhode Island, and even the Catholic Calverts only got their charter for Maryland by agreeing that the state religion would be Anglican Catholicism. Virginia was militantly Church of England, with laws calling for the public whipping of Baptist and Methodist ministers who dared to preach sermons to their followers. Under the pressure of that persecution, a number of those congregations left Virginia for the wooded wilderness of the American Southeast, where they still hold sway. Nor could the Roman Catholics be condemned in any way for this bigotry in the Land of the Free, for they comprised less than one percent of the population in 1776. It was up to the disparate Protestants to work things out for themselves, and by no means were they all in favor of the proposed religious freedom to be guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. The Masonic affiliations of many of the men who fought for those rights indicate that they took seriously their vows to uphold the principle that how a man chose to worship God was his own business.
As useful as Freemasonry may have been to its members in the past, however, the major issue for the order today is where does it go from here? The concentration on individual morality and group charity has not halted the erosion of recruitment, as young men more frequently decline to follow their fathers and grandfathers into the Craft. One problem may be that, in an increasingly permissive and materialistic society, the concepts of personal morality, personal pride, and personal honor may appear antiquated. If so, a program needs to be launched to bring them back, not just as concepts but as real modes of behavior. If Freemasonry could help to do that, it would be doing us all a great favor, caught as we are in a society in which substantial monetary gain seems to modify the social and moral stigma of crime. The man who steals a five-thousand-dollar automobile is a thief, a crook, and an outcast, but the man who steals 20 million has no shortage of cocktail invitations. A friend paid thirty dollars to take me to dinner to hear a highly successful ex-convict predict the future of the world economy, and after the lecture questions were put to him by the audience—largely made up of bankers, brokers, and businessmen—in an atmosphere of attentive respect. Prison is not as dull for the man who commits his crimes on Wall Street or on Pennsylvania Avenue, because he can occupy his hours writing a book against a substantial advance from his publisher and correspond with his agent about subsequent paid lectures and television talk-show appearances. In such a climate, any force for a resurgence of personal morality would be most welcome.
Much more unique to Freemasonry, and of potential benefit to all, is its ancient tradition against litigation. Each year the United States sees the birth of 3.8 million babies and 8 million lawsuits. It has been reported that of all of the men and women practicing law on the face of the earth, over 60 percent are in the United States. Recently, in the Kentucky county in which I live, a drunken driver at the wheel of a pickup truck drove head-on into a church bus, which burst into flames and killed twenty-seven people. In the ensuing weeks I heard as much conversation about the lawsuit potential of the accident as I did about the shocking deaths of twenty-four innocent youngsters.
In response to the proliferation of litigation, the rapidly rising costs of liability insurance have affected the cost and even the availability of vital goods and services. In one community in Georgia, the doctors practicing obstetrics and gynecology announced that they would no longer accept any patient who was an attorney, wife of an attorney, or employee of a law firm, all from a growing and realistic fear of malpractice suits. The unfortunate expectant mothers were forced to drive about seventy miles to Savannah for prenatal care and childbirth. Even the gentle laws of hospitality suffer, and one becomes frightened to let neighbors and guests use a swimming pool or ride a horse, or to let their children climb a tree.
The Freemasons could provide a great service if they would bring their ancient attitudes toward litigation into the light and into the public forum. Their old rules say that lawsuits are the settlement of last resort, and that—even then—the suit should be for restitution only, and not for money damages. While it is clear that the Masonic attitudes were designed for relationships among the fraternity, and by no means anticipated the types of litigation we see today, the Old Charge is quite clear that men are to try all other remedies before seeking the redress of the courts. Three million men asserting that point of view publicly, and to their legislators, could exert a powerful influence and force. Some such force is necessary, before a situation that is already running wild degenerates to the point that an increasingly aggressive society, motivated primarily by the achievement of material success, launches more and more planned monetary attacks that draw upon a confusing complexity of laws which no one man could ever hope to memorize, much less understand.
Even more important to the whole world would be for Freemasonry to publicly promulgate and work for its Old Charges regarding bonds of brotherhood among men of all religious faiths, as well as the exhortations to its members that each should give time and active support to his own faith. As this book is being written, religion, the love of God, is still the major problem in many lands. It is the basis for political turmoil, terrorism, and outright war and carries the potential for much more of the same in the future. The Sikhs in India, who want their own state in the Punjab, made the intensity of their feelings known by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and felt the punishment of machine guns turned loose on their sacred Golden Temple at Amritsar. The Indian army dispatched Hindu troops to Sri Lanka to help put down an uprising of Buddhist Tamils. Khomeini proved that religion could be a stronger force than welfare programs and high-tech weaponry as he overthrew a government and then sent hundreds of thousands of his Shi’ite followers against the equally militant Sunnis of Iraq. Both sides were ready to die over what had begun as a difference of opinion over which of Mohammed’s relatives had the right to inherit his leadership of Islam. The situation became even more divisive in Beirut when, in May 1988, pro-Iranian Shi’ites battled pro-Syrian Shi’ites with tanks and machine guns, until hundreds of coreligionists lay dead and mutilated in the streets.
The Russians thought that they had effectively blocked the young people of Central Asia from the Islamic faith of their fathers by reducing the number of meddresseh, or Moslem seminaries, from over four hundred to just two. Antireligious lectures were delivered in the schools and, for good measure, antireligious posters were mounted in Moslem shrines (“Praying to God,” reads one of them, “is like asking that two plus two please not equal four”). But in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan, to which they had sent Uzbek troops—Moslem descendants of the Mongols—the Russians were surprised when the Uzbeks and the Afghan guerrillas shouted to each other from behind their rocks, “Brother, we are both Believers and Sons of the Prophet. Why do we try to kill each other for these Russians?” The Uzbeks had to be withdrawn from combat, and the Russians must have pondered how these young men in their twenties could consider themselves Moslems when the total machinery of government, schools, and government-controlled media had consistently pounded into them that there is no God.
In Britain, church membership has fallen off sharply, and bishops of the Church of England have questioned the miracles of the New Testament. In northern Europe, more people stay away from church than attend. In Japan, a wave of anti-Semitism is gaining momentum with books, articles, and even posters in the Tokyo subway. In Greece, it has been proposed that most of the wealth of the Orthodox church be place under government control.
In Switzerland in 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre happily embraced excommunication from the Roman church for himself and his thousands of followers around the world as he consecrated four bishops against the express orders of the Holy See. He declared his determination to return the church to its status before what he termed the “heretical” changes of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Membership in the priesthood in the United States has also declined sharply, and the membership of religious orders has dropped from a peak of over one hundred thousand to little more than six thousand in 1988. Catholic schools have been closed and churches shut down for lack of priests to lead them. Nor will women be permitted to fill that gap in the Catholic church, because it has been determined that although women may be accorded larger roles in the church, they will never be ordained as priests. (They are not alone in this: In October 1987 Southern Baptist churches ousted an entire congregation that had selected a female pastor, citing scriptural reference that women cannot have authority over men.)
Pope John Paul II has not hesitated to chastise church dissidents, but dissension continues unabated, particularly in regard to marriage within the priesthood, the role of women, abortion, the use of condoms to prevent AIDS, birth control, and homosexuality. Nor has he resolved the problems of the communist priests in Latin American politics, even though he has forbidden their activities.
In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan is apparently alive and well, militantly antiblack and anti-Catholic. The image of television evangelists has been tarnished, perhaps beyond repair, by the personal conduct of some of their number. In 1987 the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision of a federal judge in Louisiana that violated the constitutional precept of the separation of church and state: In March, U.S. District Court Judge W. Brevard Hand had ruled against what he termed “secular humanism”—the attempt to teach moral behavior on a secular rather than a religious basis. He ordered forty-four textbooks removed from the schools, including two home economics books for budding homemakers. No more could the story of George Washington and the cherry tree be used to teach a moral lesson. “If this court is compelled to purge ‘God is great, God is good, we thank him for our daily food’ from the classroom,” said the judge, “then this court must also purge from the classroom those things that serve to teach that salvation is through one’s self rather than through a deity.” Also in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a state law that required state schools to teach “creationism”—the literal creation story from the Book of Genesis—along with the theory of evolution. The ruling seriously angered Protestant fundamentalists, who have also expressed their objection to the Supreme Court’s three-part standard for school programs: The program must have a purely secular purpose; it cannot have the effect of advancing the cause of any religion; and it must avoid entangling the government in religious matters. In the meantime, another appeal is waiting to be heard, in which a federal judge in Tennessee decided that fundamentalist children should be excused from having to read classroom books that violate their religious beliefs, citing portions of The Diary of Anne Frank, Cinderella, and The Wizard of Oz.
We have spoken here of fundamentalist Moslems, fundamentalist Catholics, and fundamentalist Protestants, and one more group must be cited. With the Iran-Iraq war in a state of uncertain truce and the Soviets withdrawn from Afghanistan, the most potentially explosive situation left in the world may be wrapped up in the fundamentalists in Israel, who can complicate either or both of two very vital issues. First is the matter of the uprisings in the Occupied Territories (where even a prime minister described the local residents, some of whose families may have been there for ten generations, as “foreigners”). It is important for Israel to be recognized as a democracy, especially in its relations with the United States, and even with many American Jews. To preserve that impression, it must find a way to deal with the substantial non-Jewish population it has acquired in military victories. To achieve its overriding ambition of preserving a purely Jewish state, Israel cannot allow those non-Jews equal voting rights, which would permit them a substantial voice in the Knesset. To many Israelis, the solution is to give up some of the conquered territory, as the lesser of two catastrophes. Others are angered at the thought of such a move, and some even mention that Israel does not yet have all of the land that God originally gave to His chosen people. The hard-right fundamentalists have tougher solutions, such as simply expelling the Moslem population and replacing it with Jewish settlers, a move that would risk the condemnation of the rest of the world and perhaps war as well.
The other problem in Israel brings us right back to Freemasonry, because it is squarely centered on the original site of the Temple of Solomon on Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the birthplace of the Knights Templar. Perhaps no spot on earth cries out for the brotherhood of men of different religions more than the site of the original Temple of Solomon, in a situation so tense that some writers have speculated that it could well trigger World War III. And for the first time in this book, we are not discussing allegories based on the temple, but the real temple, on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
It is of vital importance to three great religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. King David had the vision to build a great house of God and purchased the threshing floor of Ornan, on Mount Moriah, for the building. It remained for his son, Solomon, to actually construct the temple, which took seven years to complete, in the tenth century B.C. In 587 B.C. Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar, when the temple was stripped of all its valuables and then burned to the ground.
About fifty years later Babylon was taken by the Persians, who permitted the Jews to return from exile to the practice of their religion. The Persians named one Zerubbabel as governor, who with the encouragement of the high priest Joshua determined to build a second temple on the same site. It was a sizable structure, but without the magnificence of Solomon’s offering. It was completed about 515 B.C. and served for centuries, but not without pain and conflict and change of ownership.
In 168 B.C. the king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, failed in his attempt to subdue Egypt but ravaged the Jewish territory between, giving the temple its darkest days of desecration. Circumcision was outlawed, punishable by death, as was any celebration of the Jewish sabbath. As a deliberate humiliation of the Jews, whose dietary laws prohibited pork, Antiochus had an altar built on the Temple Mount for the sacrifice of swine.
None of this was lost on a guerrilla band of militant Jews who operated in the hills under a man named Mattathias. The band became known as the Maccabees, or the “hammerers.” Upon the death of Mattathias, command passed to his son Judas (or Judah). The enemy so underrated this military genius that before one major battle the opposing general arranged for the sale of the Jewish army to slave dealers, only to have his own army defeated by the Maccabees, whom they overwhelmingly outnumbered. One victory followed another until the Maccabees had taken Jerusalem. Going to the temple to offer their prayers of thanksgiving and to relight the sacred menorah, they discovered just a tiny bit of consecrated oil. It would take eight days to go through the ritual required to consecrate more, while the amount on hand would last less than a day. They went ahead anyway, and witnessed a miracle as the small amount of oil burned for eight days and nights until the new oil was ready, a miracle still remembered in the celebration of Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights.
But the Romans were coming, and their conquest of Jerusalem kept the holy city away from Jewish control for over two thousand years until the Six Day War in 1967. It was King Herod, the Roman appointee, who undertook to expand and beautify the second temple. It would be larger than Solomon’s temple, and to accommodate its expanded foundations a massive retaining wall was built on the southwest side of the Temple Mount. It was in the colonnaded courtyard of this expanded temple that Jesus Christ walked and taught His disciples. This newest temple had the shortest life, as it was totally destroyed by the Romans in the civil strife of A.D. 70. All that remains of the elaborate structure is part of the retaining wall, now called the Western Wall, or the Wailing Wall.
Although Israel got possession of Jerusalem in 1967, they have been reluctant to take possession of the Temple Mount. It is still policed by Moslems, because instead of a Jewish temple to God, the mount is crowned with two mosques built during the days of Islamic rule, including the famous mosaic-covered, gold-topped Dome of the Rock. This situation is a matter of dissension and disagreement among Israelis. Most are willing to leave well enough alone for the moment; but at the other end of the spectrum are fundamentalists, such as the Gush Emunim, “the Faithful,” who find that attitude as intolerable as the idea of Moslems worshiping on the very site of the temple of God, while Jews are restricted to the foundation wall below. Meir Kahane, the American rabbi who heads the far-right Kach fundamentalists, has no problem with the Moslems. He simply says that they should all be driven out of Israel, after which the problem of the Temple Mount could be easily dealt with.
These groups and others want a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount, preferably on the very site of the Temple of Solomon. Why else would there be a program to teach ancient temple ritual at the Orthodox seminary Yeshivah Ateret Hacohanim? The overriding question for the world is whether any of these groups prevail to the point that they actually consider tearing down the mosque of the Dome of the Rock to make way for a new temple. This would undoubtedly arouse the wrath of every Moslem in the world, who hold the site sacred as the place where Mohammed ascended the ladder to the very throne of Allah. There is no way to predict the violence—from sporadic terrorism to outright war. Any Moslem ruler who declined to join in would be risking his throne.
Yet to the Jews, this low hill in Jerusalem, this Temple Mount, is the most sacred place on earth. The Temple of Solomon predates Christianity by a thousand years and Islam by many more. And to the Christian, too, the place where Christ debated and taught, and drove out the money-changers, is sacred ground. The Catholic church has suggested that Jerusalem become an international city, a concept which may have merit, but which does not solve the problem. It is not the city itself but the few sacred acres of Mount Moriah that sit at the center of the controversy. Can the followers of three great religions, three great ways to worship God, find a way to come together in peace and brotherhood in this tiny space? This is the place where, more than anywhere else, the central religious attitude of Freemasonry could be applied with the most beneficial effect to the rest of the world, where men who avow their beliefs in a Supreme Being could meet in brotherhood and bear full respect for the other man’s mode of worship.
To achieve that goal on the Temple Mount would be a monumental task. Should there be one tripartite temple for all? Is it practical to leave the Dome of the Rock as it is, but build a Jewish temple and a Christian shrine on the mount, all connected with a common courtyard or plaza? A sensible plan needs to be made and then sold: to Israel, because it controls the land and desires a temple; to Moslems, because they will be concerned over any desecration of the Dome of the Rock; and to Christians, who are denominationally splintered, so that an interfaith group might be required to administer the Christian portion.
Just mounting a move in that direction might help to thwart the plans of those willing to risk war in a maniacal game of king-of-the-hill, to set their God above other gods, whichever of the three He may be. Whoever wins, men will die, and it is time that men stopped dying, and killing, over how merciful, compassionate, and all-caring is their God. Churches have said, and are still saying, that their followers cannot be Freemasons, because to acknowledge all religions is to denigrate the “true religion” by equating it with all the other false ones, so I am certainly not suggesting that all men become Freemasons. What I am suggesting is that about 5 million Freemasons in the world, who do accept brotherhood with men of all faiths, in that spirit might take the lead in solving the problem of the Temple Mount by combining their religious attitudes with their veneration of the Temple of Solomon, to the benefit of the whole world. It would be a long and expensive journey from west to east, but it would give new meaning to each man shaping himself into the perfect ashlar ready to take its place in the Temple of God. It would be a wonderful way to complete the unfinished Temple of Solomon and to complete a full-circle circumambulation back to the very first purpose of their predecessor Knights of the Temple, the safe passage of all pilgrims to that holy place.