From John Quincy's Letters on the Masonic Institution.
"At the time of the murder of Morgan, I was exercising the office of President of the United States. Neither the penalties of Freemasonry, nor the practical execution of them, by the Masons who murdered him, were known to the public in general, nor to me. Freemasonry exercised an absolute control over all the public journals edited by members of the Institution, and over many others by terror and intimidation."
The Point - July 1955 Edited Under Fr. Leonard Feeney, M.I.C.M.
Most Americans, hearing this question, would answer promptly, “Yes, by all means, hate should be outlawed!” Their eagerness to reply can be accounted for all too easily. During the last decade and a half, they have been pounded with a propaganda barrage calculated to leave them in a state of dazed affability toward the whole world. Those advertising techniques that are normally used to encourage Americans to be choosy in matters of soap and toothpaste are now being enlisted to persuade them that there is no such thing as a superior product in matters of culture and creed. On billboards, on bus and subway posters, in newspapers and magazines, through radio and television broadcasts, Americans are being assured and reassured, both subtly and boldly, that “Bigotry is fascism … Only Brotherhood can save our nation … We must be tolerant of all!”
The long-range effects of this campaign are even now evident. It is producing the “spineless citizen”: the man who has no cultural sensibilities; who is incapable of indignation; whose sole mental activity is merely an extension of what he reads in the newspaper or sees on the television screen; who faces moral disaster in his neighborhood, political disaster in his country, and an impending world catastrophe with a blank and smiling countenance. He has only understanding for the enemies of his country. He has nothing but kind sentiments for those who would destroy his home and family. He has an earnest sympathy for anyone who would obliterate his faith. He is universally tolerant. He is totally unprejudiced. If he has any principles, he keeps them well concealed, lest in advocating them he should seem to indicate that contrary principles might be inferior. He is, to the extent of his abilities, exactly like the next citizen, who, he trusts, is trying to be exactly like him: a faceless, characterless putty-man.
Along with everyone else, American Catholics have been hammered with the slogans of the “anti-hate” campaign. Additionally, they remember the stories of how prejudice against Catholics oftentimes made America a very uncomfortable place for their immigrant Catholic grandparents. And so, they too, if asked, would declare unhesitatingly that hate should be outlawed.
What American Catholics do not stop to reflect on is that the Catholic Faith, by its very nature, fosters indignation, intolerant positions, and strong utterance. The Church is set up to continue the divine ministry of Jesus Christ, Who avowed that He had come on Earth, “Not to send peace, but the sword … to cast fire on the Earth, and what will I but that it be kindled.”
In accepting their vocation to be “other Christs,” Catholics are faced with the countless examples of Gospel astringency. They are reminded that the same Jesus Who said, “Learn of me, for I am meek and humble of heart,” likewise said, “I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s enemies shall be they of his own house-hold.” Nor can they forget that the same Jesus, Who submitted Himself to the Jewish mob in the garden of Gethsemani, had previously overturned the tables of the buyers and sellers and driven them from the temple with a whip.
In accepting their position as contemporary members of the Church, American Catholics must take as their heritage the outlooks, attitudes, and purposes of their older brothers and sisters in the Faith — those Catholics who have gone before them and have preserved the Church to our own day. For the Catholic Church is One. The Church that called on its sons to take up the Cross and the sword and drive the infidel from the Holy Land, the Church that isolated the Jews of Christendom with rigid laws and ghetto walls, the Church that has repeatedly condemned the doctrines of those who disagree with her, is the same Catholic Church that claims the loyalty of 35,000,000 twentieth-century Americans.
Along with the Mass, the Sacraments, and all the spiritual treasures that are a Catholic’s baptismal birthright, these American Catholics must also assume the rest of their legacy. As members of the Church Militant — raised by the Sacrament of Confirmation to be Soldiers of Jesus Christ — they are heirs of a tradition that has been marked through the centuries by sustained and unashamed militancy.
Examples of the clash between traditional Catholic observance and the current “anti-hate” campaign could be multiplied indefinitely. Every chapter in every age of the Church’s history will provide them, because the ultimate issue involved is an abiding one, a doctrinal one. It is the Catholic Church’s uncompromising claim to be the One True Church established by God. It is this conviction of Catholics throughout the centuries that leaves our greatest heroes and saints and the very constitution of the Church itself open to the charges of bigotry and intolerance.
The Catholic Church does not believe that all religions are on a common plane. It does not subscribe to the popular notion that, “We’re all headed for the same place, you in your way and we in ours.” The Catholic Church believes that Christianity is the world’s only chance for salvation, and it further insists that true Christians are found only within its fold, under the Supreme Shepherd, the Vicar of Christ, Our Holy Father at Rome.
Inevitably, this belief, when translated into practical action, makes for some intolerant arrangements: Catholics are admonished not to marry heretics and Jews; they may not attend a non-Catholic religious service; Catholic children must be sent to the Church’s schools. The motive behind these bigoted practices is the preservation of the Faith — not as an antique curiosity, but as a vital necessity. And not as a necessity for a chosen few, but as a necessity for all men, everywhere.
It is this terrible urgency about the Faith that explains both the Church’s rigidity in matters of doctrine an her encompassing love in matters of apostolate. For the note of absolute necessity that attaches to Catholic Truth, and makes the Church so intolerant and unbending, is, at the same time, the push and the drive behind every apostle. It is precisely because they are intolerant enough to believe that all men need the Catholic Faith in order to be saved, that the Church’s missionaries, from the time of Saint Paul, have given the world its most heroic example of zealous, consuming, constant, sweating, bleeding, dying but undying, love.
It is this love, this apostolic fervor, that the “anti-hate” program means to eliminate. For the ultimate outcome of the propaganda barrage that is now incessantly pounding the nation will be not only a spineless American citizen, but a spineless American Catholicism — a Catholicism that will be afraid to assert its own singularity and importance, a Catholicism that will try to become more like its neighbor religions, doing nothing to annoy, nothing to criticize, nothing that would in any way cause it to be accused of intolerance, bigotry, or hate.
Certainly no one will suppose that the promoters of the “anti-hate” campaign are just a bunch of well-meaning meddlers who launched the thing in all innocence and who would be dismayed to hear that it might discomfit the Catholic Church. The truth of the matter is much to the contrary. Just as the fast-talking soap commercials play on the gullibility of American housewives to make money for the big soap manufacturers, so the anti-hate slogans are selling Americans a bill of goods that will make rich profits for the Catholic Church’s enterprising enemies.
This deliberate and calculated program is a lineal descendant of that eighteenth-century campaign that clamored for “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” and ended up by wrecking Catholic France. It is akin to all those freethinking, freely-named, anti-Catholic ventures that have been plaguing the Church since the time of the Protestant Revolt — Humanism, Jacobinism, Freemasonry, Liberalism, Secularism, Communism, etc. For however much these movements may differ from one another in the means they advocate, they are all working for the same ultimate end. They are intent on building the City of Man — to the inevitable detriment of the City of God. They are enraged against the Church because of her calm insistence that the one thing that really matters is eternal salvation, and that she is the one divinely-commissioned ark of salvation. They are determined to show that the Church is not that important: if not by destroying her violently, then by reducing her to the level of the sects.
It was this latter expedient that appealed to Jean Jacques Rousseau, herald of the French Revolution and avowed evangelist of the Brotherhood crowd. Rousseau maintained (in The Social Contract, Book IV) that the worship of God should be allowed to continue, provided it did not become an end in itself. Theology must not usurp the superior place of politics; the interests of religion must be subordinate to those of the state. Accordingly, he felt the civil power should decide what articles of belief citizens might hold. And among these articles, Rousseau urged just one prohibition: “anyone daring to say, ‘There is no salvation outside the Church,’ should be banished.” . . .
In the face of a new year that will be the biggest one yet for the Brotherhood promoters, The Point pleads with American Catholics to realign themselves with the militant traditions of their grandfathers. No threat of “bigotry,” no accusation of “intolerance” should temper our zeal or silence our message. We must preserve our commission to “Go forth and teach all nations…;” to “Reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine.”
Unworthy as we are, we American Catholics must protect for ourselves the duty of naming God’s enemies and the privilege of carrying God’s revealed Truth to the people of our country, who, we pray, will hear it, with generosity and gratitude, and who will repeat that intolerant Profession of Faith which the Church requires of all new converts: “ … At the same time, I condemn and reprove all that the Church has condemned and reproved. This same Catholic Faith, outside of which nobody can be saved, which I now freely profess and to which I truly adhere, the same I promise and swear to maintain and profess, with the help of God, entire, inviolate and with firm constancy until the last breath of life; and I shall strive as far as possible that this same Faith shall be held, taught and publicly professed by all those who depend on me, and by those of whom I shall have charge.”
(from the Rituale Romanum, published in 1947 with the Imprimatur of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York.)
This article by John Henderson was originally published at OnePeterFive.
The widespread acceptance of the falsehood promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other influential Freemasons concerning man’s supposed natural goodness has resulted in extreme moral corruption and devastation for souls. In his premier encyclical on the secret society, Pope Leo XIII wrote, “Freemasons, having no faith in those things which we have learned by the revelation of God, deny that our first parents sinned, and consequently think that free will is not at all weakened and inclined to evil. On the contrary, exaggerating rather the power and the excellence of nature, and placing therein alone the principle and rule of justice, they cannot even imagine that there is any need at all of a constant struggle and a perfect steadfastness to overcome the violence and rule of our passions.” The denial or forgetfulness of our fallen condition has led to a neglect of the discussion of the important concept of occasions of sin.
An occasion of sin has been defined as “any person, place, or thing that of its nature or because of human frailty can lead one to do wrong, thereby committing sin.” There are certain kinds of persons and places that are occasions of sin for most people generally due to the nature we all share as children of Adam. There are other persons, places, and things that are occasions of sin only for particular individuals because of differences in age, sex, temperament, virtue, etc.
A venue with an open bar might not be a proximate occasion of the sin of drunkenness for many, but for some it will be. A personal laptop or phone with internet access might not be an occasion of sin for your average elderly woman, but for your average teenage male, these things are proximate occasions of mortal sins against purity.
Our Lord alluded to the concept of occasions of sin when He said, “And if thy right eye scandalize thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. For it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell. And if thy right hand scandalize thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell” (Matt. 5:29,30).
What is crucial to consider is that to be validly absolved through the Sacrament of Penance, we must have a firm purpose of amendment, and we cannot be said to possess this firm purpose if we are not resolved to avoid the voluntary proximate occasions of the sin we are confessing.
A voluntary proximate occasion of sin is an occasion that can easily be avoided. Necessary occasions of sin are such as cannot be avoided without scandal or serious difficulty. When discerning whether an occasion is “necessary” or not, we should remember that Our Lord, in the above quoted Scripture passage, set the standard quite high, stating that our “right eye” and “right hand” are to be discarded if they are keeping us from the life of divine grace.
If the particular sin we are confessing is something we do not have a history of committing, then the measures we resolve to adopt to avoid the occasions of the particular sin need not be as drastic as would be required if the sin we are confessing is something that has become habitual for us.
One of the most significant events in the Christian world in the 19th century was Pope Pius IX’s ex cathedra definition of the dogma of Our Lady’s immaculate conception. The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary contains an antiphon that refers to Our Lady’s role as the “destroyer of heresies” [1], and it is likely that Mary wanted the truth about her immaculate conception to be defined at the particular time in which it was because it is in this age that Masonry’s heresy of man’s natural goodness has gained the most traction. Pius IX’s definition gives us all an occasion to meditate on Our Lady’s singular and unique privilege and, in doing so, has given us an occasion to ponder how it is that we differ from her. Mary did not have concupiscence or any of the other wounds of the soul effected by original sin; we do.
We will be better off the more we conform our minds to reality. How happy is the man who contemplates his fallen nature and acts accordingly, diligently avoiding unnecessary occasions of sin? Msgr. Gaume writes, “Doubtless if men were careful to avoid the occasions of sin, the greater part of those sins which are committed would be avoided.” The greater part of sins which are committed could be avoided if only we were to acknowledge our weaknesses and put restraints on ourselves!
Immaculate Virgin, destroyer of heresies, patroness of the Counter-Revolution, thou who alone were conceived without sin, please pray for us who have recourse to thee!
[1] Office of Matins: “Gaude, Maria Virgo, cunctas haereses sola interemisti in universo mundo. Rejoice, O Virgin Mary, alone thou hast destroyed all heresies throughout the world.”
Letter of Vindex to Nubius.
The following dark letter was written by a member of the Lodge of the Alta Vendita who thought that Joseph Mazzini was going to harm the reputation of the secret society by ordering, and committing himself, too many assassinations. Not only do assassinations damage Masonry’s reputation, they also create martyrs. Tertullian was not wrong when he said that, "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church." Cultural corruption, argued Vindex, is a more effective means of reaching the same ultimate end goal of Masonry – the destruction of the religion of Jesus Christ.
From the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, as quoted in Msgr. Dillon's Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked.
"EVER since we have established ourselves as a body of action, and that order has commenced to reign in the bosom of the most distant lodge, as in that one nearest the centre of action, there is one thought which has profoundly occupied the men who aspire to universal regeneration. That is the thought of the enfranchisement of Italy, from which must one day come the enfranchisement of the entire world, the fraternal republic, and the harmony of humanity. That thought has not yet been seized upon by our brethren beyond the Alps. They believe that revolutionary Italy can only conspire in the shade, deal some strokes of the poniard to sbirri and traitors, and tranquilly undergo the yoke of events which take place beyond the Alps for Italy, but without Italy. This error has been fatal to us on many occasions. It is not necessary to combat it with phrases which would be only to propagate it. It is necessary to kill it by facts. Thus, amidst the cares which have the privilege of agitating the minds of the most vigorous of our lodges, there is one which we ought never to forget.
"The Papacy has at all times exercised a decisive action upon the affairs of Italy. By the hands, by the voices, by the pens, by the hearts of its innumerable bishops, priests, monks, nuns and people in all latitudes, the Papacy finds devotedness without end ready for martyrdom, and that to enthusiasm. Everywhere, whenever it pleases to call upon them, it has friends ready to die or lose all for its cause. This is an immense leverage which the Popes alone have been able to appreciate to its full power, and as yet they have used it only to a certain extent. Today there is no question of reconstituting for ourselves that power, the prestige of which is for the moment weakened. Our final end is that of Voltaire and of the French Revolution, the destruction forever of Catholicism and even of the Christian idea which, if left standing on the ruins of Rome, would be the resuscitation of Christianity later on. But to attain more certainly that result, and not prepare ourselves with gaiety of heart for reverses which adjourn indefinitely, or compromise for ages, the success of a good cause, we must not pay attention to those braggarts of Frenchmen, those cloudy Germans, those melancholy Englishmen, all of whom imagine they can kill Catholicism, now with an impure song, then with an illogical deduction; at another time, with a sarcasm smuggled in like the cottons of Great Britain. Catholicism has a life much more tenacious than that. It has seen the most implacable, the most terrible adversaries, and it has often had the malignant pleasure of throwing holy water on the tombs of the most enraged. Let us permit, then, our brethren of these countries to give themselves up to the sterile intemperance of their anti-Catholic zeal. Let them even mock at our Madonnas and our apparent devotion. With this passport we can conspire at our ease, and arrive little by little at the end we have in view.
"Now the Papacy has been for seventeen centuries inherent to the history of Italy. Italy cannot breathe or move without the permission of the Supreme Pastor. With him she has the hundred arms of Briareus, without him she is condemned to a pitiable impotence. She has nothing but divisions to foment, hatreds to break out, and hostilities to manifest themselves from the highest chain of the Alps to the lowest of the Appenines. We cannot desire such a state of things. It is necessary, then, to seek a remedy for that situation. The remedy is found. The Pope, whoever he may be, will never come to the secret societies. It is for the secret societies to come first to the Church, in the resolve to conquer the two.
"The work which we have undertaken is not the work of a day, nor of a month, nor of a year. It may last many years, a century perhaps, but in our ranks the soldier dies and the fight continues.
"We do not mean to win the Popes to our cause, to make them neophytes of our principles, and propagators of our ideas. That would be a ridiculous dream, no matter in what manner events may turn. Should cardinals or prelates, for example, enter, willingly or by surprise, in some manner, into a part of our secrets, it would be by no means a motive to desire their elevation to the See of Peter. That elevation would destroy us. Ambition alone would bring them to apostasy from us. The needs of power would force them to immolate us. That which we ought to demand, that which we should seek and expect, as the Jews expected the Messiah, is a Pope according to our wants. Alexander VI, with all his private crimes, would not suit us, for he never erred in religious matters. Clement XIV, on the contrary, would suit us from head to foot. Borgia was a libertine, a true sensualist of the eighteenth century strayed into the fifteenth. He has been anathematized, notwithstanding his vices, by all the voices of philosophy and incredulity, and he owes that anathema to the vigour with which he defended the Church. Ganganelli gave himself over, bound hand and foot, to the ministers of the Bourbons, who made him afraid, and to the incredulous who celebrated his tolerance and Ganganelli is become a very great Pope. He is almost in the same condition that it is necessary for us to find another, if that be yet possible. With that we should march more surely to the attack upon the Church than with the pamphlets of our brethren in France, or even with the gold of England. Do you wish to know the reason? It is because by that we should have no more need of the vinegar of Hannibal, no more need of the powder of cannon, no more need even of our arms. We have the little finger of the successor of St. Peter engaged in the plot, and that little finger is of more value for our crusade than all the Innocents, the Urbans, and the St. Bernards of Christianity.
"We do not doubt that we shall arrive at that supreme term of all our efforts; but when? but how? The unknown does not yet manifest itself. Nevertheless, as nothing should separate us from the plan traced out; as, on the contrary, all things should tend to it — as if success were to crown the work scarcely sketched out tomorrow — we wish in this instruction which must rest a secret for the simple initiated, to give to those of the Supreme Lodge, councils with which they should enlighten the universality of the brethren, under the form of an instruction or memorandum. It is of special importance, and because of a discretion, the motives of which are transparent, never to permit it to be felt that these counsels are orders emanating from the Alta Vendita. The clergy is put too much in peril by it, that one can at the present hour permit oneself to play with it, as with one of these small affairs or of these little princes upon which one need but blow to cause them to disappear.
"Little can be done with those old cardinals or with those prelates, whose character is very decided. It is necessary to leave them as we find them, incorrigible, in the school of Consalvi, and draw from our magazines of popularity or unpopularity the arms which will render useful or ridiculous the power in their hands. A word which one can ably invent and which one has the art to spread amongst certain honourable chosen families by whose means it descends into the cafes and from the cafes into the streets; a word can sometimes kill a man. If a prelate comes to Rome to exercise some public function from the depths of the provinces, know presently his character, his antecedents, his qualities, his defects above all things. If he is in advance, a declared enemy, an Albani, a Pallotta, a Bernetti, a Delia Genga, a Riverola, envelope him in all the snares which you can place beneath his feet; create for him one of those reputations which will frighten little children and old women; paint him cruel and sanguinary; recount, regarding him, some traits of cruelty which can be easily engraved in the minds of people. When foreign journals shall gather for us these recitals, which they will embellish in their turn (inevitably because of their respect for truth), show, or rather cause to be shown, by some respectable fool those papers where the names and the excesses of the personages implicated are related. As France and England, so Italy will never be wanting in facile pens which know how to employ themselves in these lies so useful to the good cause. With a newspaper, the language of which they do not understand, but in which they will see the name of their delegate or judge, the people have no need of other proofs. They are in the infancy of liberalism; they believe in liberals, as, later on, they will believe in us, not knowing very well why.
"Crush the enemy whoever he may be; crush the powerful by means of lies and calumnies; but especially crush him in the egg. It is to the youth we must go. It is that which we must seduce; it is that which we must bring under the banner of the secret societies. In order to advance by steps, calculated but sure, in that perilous way, two things are of the first necessity. You ought to have the air of being simple as doves, but you must be prudent as the serpent. Your fathers, your children, your wives themselves, ought always to be ignorant of the secret which you carry in your bosoms. If it pleases you, in order the better to deceive the inquisitorial eye, to go often to confession, you are as by right authorized to preserve the most absolute silence regarding these things. You know that the least revelation, that the slightest indication escaped from you in the tribunal of penance, or elsewhere, can bring on great calamities and that the sentence of death is already pronounced upon the revealer, whether voluntary or involuntary.
"Now then, in order to secure to us a Pope in the manner required, it is necessary to fashion for that Pope a generation worthy of the reign of which we dream. Leave on one side old age and middle life, go to the youth, and, if possible, even to infancy. Never speak in their presence a word of impiety or impurity. Maxima debetur puero reverentia. Never forget these words of the poet for they will preserve you from licences which it is absolutely essential to guard against for the good of the cause. In order to reap profit at the home of each family, in order to give yourself the right of asylum at the domestic hearth, you ought to present yourself with all the appearance of a man grave and moral. Once your reputation is established in the colleges, in the gymnasiums, in the universities, and in the seminaries — once that you shall have captivated the confidence of professors and students, so act that those who are principally engaged in the ecclesiastical state should love to seek your conversation. Nourish their souls with the splendours of ancient Papal Rome. There is always at the bottom of the Italian heart a regret for Republican Rome. Excite, enkindle those natures so full of warmth and of patriotic fire. Offer them at first, but always in secret, inoffensive books, poetry resplendent with national emphasis; then little by little you will bring your disciples to the degree of cooking desired. When upon all the points of the ecclesiastical state at once, this daily work shall have spread our ideas as the light, then you will be able to appreciate the wisdom of the counsel in which we take the initiative.
"Events, which in our opinion, precipitate themselves too rapidly, go necessarily in a few months' time to bring on an intervention of Austria. There are fools who in the lightness of their hearts please themselves in casting others into the midst of perils, and, meanwhile, there are fools who at a given hour drag on even wise men. The revolution which they meditate in Italy will only end in misfortunes and persecutions. Nothing is ripe, neither the men nor the things, and nothing shall be for a long time yet; but from these evils you can easily draw one new chord, and cause it to vibrate in the hearts of the young clergy. That is the hatred of the stranger. Cause the German to become ridiculous and odious even before his foreseen entry. With the idea of the Pontifical supremacy, mix always the old memories of the wars of the priesthood and the Empire. Awaken the smouldering passions of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and thus you will obtain for yourselves the reputation of good Catholics and pure patriots.
"That reputation will open the way for our doctrines to pass to the bosoms of the young clergy, and go even to the depths of convents. In a few years the young clergy will have, by the force of events, invaded all the functions. They will govern, administer, and judge. They will form the council of the Sovereign. They will be called upon to choose the Pontiff who will reign; and that Pontiff, like the greater part of his contemporaries, will be necessarily imbued with the Italian and humanitarian principles which we are about to put in circulation. It is a little grain of mustard which we place in the earth, but the sun of justice will develop it even to be a great power, and you will see one day what a rich harvest that little seed will produce.
"In the way which we trace for our brethren there are found great obstacles to conquer, difficulties of more than one kind to surmount. They will be overcome by experience and by perspicacity; but the end is beautiful. What does it matter to put all the sails to the wind in order to attain it. You wish to revolutionize Italy? Seek out the Pope of whom we give the portrait. You wish to establish the reign of the elect upon the throne of the prostitute of Babylon? Let the clergy march under your banner in the belief always that they march under the banner of the Apostolic Keys. You wish to cause the last vestige of tyranny and of oppression to disappear? Lay your nets like Simon Barjona. Lay them in the depths of sacristies, seminaries, and convents, rather than in the depths of the sea, and if you will precipitate nothing you will give yourself a draught of fishes more miraculous than his. The fisher of fishes will become a fisher of men. You will bring yourselves as friends around the Apostolic Chair. You will have fished up a Revolution in Tiara and Cope, marching with Cross and banner — a Revolution which needs only to be spurred on a little to put the four quarters of the world on fire.
"Let each act of your life tend then to discover the Philosopher's Stone. The alchemists of the middle ages lost their time and the gold of their dupes in the quest of this dream. That of the secret societies will be accomplished for the most simple of reasons, because it is based on the passions of man. Let us not be discouraged then by a check, a reverse, or a defeat. Let us prepare our arms in the silence of the lodges, dress our batteries, flatter all passions the most evil and the most generous, and all lead us to think that our plans will succeed one day above even our most improbable calculations."
Gabriel Garcia Moreno was a great Catholic statesman. He served as president of Ecuador in the mid-19th Century. Moreno was assassinated by order of a Masonic lodge in Germany on the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1875. A rule of life that he had written for himself was found after his death on the last page of a copy of The Imitation of Christ that Moreno always kept in his pocket. What follows is the rule:
“Every morning when saying my prayers I will ask specially for humility. Every day I will hear Mass, say the Rosary, and will read, besides a chapter of the Imitation, this Rule and the instructions which are added to it. I will endeavor to keep myself as much as possible in the presence of God, especially during conversation, that I may not exceed in words. I will often offer my heart to God, principally before beginning any actions. Every hour I will say to myself: ‘I am worse than a demon, and hell out to be my dwelling-place.’ In temptations I will add: ‘What should I think of all this in my last agony?’ In my room never to pray sitting when I can do so on my knees or standing. Practice daily little acts of humility, as kissing the ground; to rejoice when I, or my actions, are censured. Never to speak of myself except to avow my faults or defects. To make efforts, by thinking of Jesus and Mary, to restrain my impatience and go against my natural inclinations; to be kind to all, even with the importunate, and never to speak ill of my enemies. Every morning, before beginning my work, I will write down what I have to do, being very careful to distribute my time well, to give myself only to useful and necessary business, and to continue it with zeal and perseverance. I will scrupulously observe the law of justice and truth, and have no intentions in all my actions save the greater glory of God. . . . I will go to confession every week. . . . I will never pass more than an hour in any amusement, and in general never before eight o’clock in the evening.”
From Fr. Fahey's preface to Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked by Msgr. George Dillon:
“The formation in ‘tolerance’ given in the Lodges aims not merely at that negative mental state which puts religious truth and error on the same level, treating them both with indifference; it aims at the production of a positive hatred of what it calls the ‘intolerance’ of the Catholic Church, namely the Catholic Church’s insistence on the Divine Plan for order. The formation in Masonic ‘tolerance,’ then, is really a formation in hatred of the firmness and strength of the Catholic Church, in standing for the Supernatural Life and order of the world. This is the ultimate reason why Anglo-Saxon Masonry, ostensibly so conservative, has constantly favoured movements towards the Left, opposed to the true order of the world.”
