The Enlightenment, Catholics, Jesuits, Freemasons, and Revolutionaries

Washington in his Masonic Apron

An important aspect of the Enlightenment that needs to be looked at before we can return to our series on the history of the Church of England is Freemasonry.  Freemasonry is a system of lodges to which men belong in fraternal organization for purposes of business and social alliance, charitable works, and political activity.  Historically it also had much to do with intellectual discussion and exchange of knowledge.

According to Masonic myth and legend, Freemasonry has an ancient history going back to the geometer Euclid, the construction of the monuments of ancient Egypt, the building of the temple of Solomon, the construction of the medieval cathedrals etc.  Historical data is far more mundane however.

The medieval craft system of guilds organized professionals by craft for the training of new members for that craft as well as for charitable outreach, pious devotion, the regulation of the craft and its business practices, and socialization.  One such guild was the stonemason’s guild.  In Britain the guild system survived the Reformation and, in fact, the professional classes which the guilds represented were overwhelmingly in favor of the new Protestantism.  Being of the professional classes and able to send their male progeny to universities, the guilds were composed of men of above average education who were very much alive to the scientific developments and philosophical/theological currents of the day.  In Tudor and Stuart England, guildhalls were often the scene of lively conversations and political intrigue.  They were as much gentlemen’s clubs as they were professional fraternities. 

A stonemasons’ guild “lodge” in Edinburgh, Scotland –the Ancient Lodge of Edinburgh, Mary’s Chapel (so named because it met in Mary’s Chapel, Niddry’s Wind, Edinburgh) –was the first of these lodges that took in members who were not, in fact, stone masons.   The minutes of the lodge show that in 1634 Lord Alexander, Sir Anthony Alexander, and Sir Alexander Strachan were admitted to the lodge as “speculative” members (as differentiated from “operative” members who were actual stone masons).  Some claim that this lodge had been accepting these sort of honorary members since at least 1600.  It is notable that these recorded members are from the aristocracy as it shows both a desire to participate in the intellectual and charitable life of the lodge on the part of men whose own social class lacked this sort of cohesion, and a certain liberality of mind in these nobility being willing to participate in activities with men of wealth but without title. Incidentally, Sir Alexander Strachan, one of these speculative members, was closely connected to King Charles I, which certainly made his membership politically advantageous to the lodge, at least until the Civil War. 

It is difficult to say exactly why the Stone Mason’s guild became the nucleus of these new associations.  There could be a number of factors.  Stone Masons were a more mobile profession than most other guilds with masons moving around the country—indeed around Europe—wherever work was to be found and thus they had a stronger tradition of welcoming new members than the more settled guilds such as goldsmiths or furriers.  Also, because they worked for contract rather than owning their own business, they were not so much in competition with one another as members of those guilds whose businesses in the same town encouraged a certain rivalry and mistrust.  For whatever reason, through the seventeenth and certainly in the eighteenth century, there were fewer and fewer “operative” stonemasons and more and more “speculative” masons admitted to membership in English lodges.

And perhaps because masonry involved the sciences—mathematics, geometry, physics, and even a basic knowledge of geology and the different qualities of stone, the lodges drew men of scientific inquiry.  During the years of the English Civil War and the religious chaos that came with the breakdown of English religion into dozens of sects from the orthodox Presbyterians and Congregationalists to the far more outré groups such as the Quakers, and even more the Diggers, Ranters, and Fifth Monarchy Men, many of your more educated and professional men began to question Christian doctrines such as the Trinity which they perceived to be irrational.  We see by the end of the period the rise of Unitarianism and then the jump to Deism which posited belief in a Supreme Being but One who set the “clockwork” of the universe into an eternal motion and then abandoned it to itself. 

Freemasonry spread from England to France in the early eighteenth century, aided by both the partisans of the exiled Stuarts and the commercial and intellectual ties that developed with France despite the political tensions between the two countries.  The French Lodges tended to draw political liberals (as well as scientists and philosophes) and were in many ways the incubators for democratic ideas that would set in motion the French Revolution.  Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot were all Freemasons.  Freemasonry established itself among the American colonists as well and George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Monroe, John Hancock, Benedict Arnold, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and Elbridge Gerry were all Freemasons. 

In Europe Freemasonry became associated with opposition to the Catholic Church as part of the ancien regime.  The alliance of “Throne and Altar” which characterized pre-revolutionary France proved all but fatal to the Catholic Church.  While Freemasons are not associated with the Jacobins and the extremes of the Terror, the French lodges had long served as breeding grounds of democratic ideals.  The intellectual curiosity characteristic of Freemasonry also made the Masons question many Catholic beliefs and practices that represented the medieval world and had grown into an outdated ridiculousness by the Enlightenment.  The papal bulls of Clement XII and Benedict XIV proscribing membership in the Freemasons had never been ratified by the French Crown and consequently many French clergy belonged to the Freemasons.  Some lodges were exclusively clerical. 

Freemasons, who found the rigid intellectualism of the Jesuits to be opposed to their own spirit of intellectual inquiry, played critical roles in having the Jesuits expelled from Portugal (1759), France (1764), the Spanish Empire (1767) and Malta (1769) leading up to the suppression of the Order in 1773.  By no means,  however, should they be credited (or blamed) entirely for the downfall of the Society of Jesus as the Jesuits had entire coalitions of enemies working against them. 

In the nineteenth century, Italian Freemasons were very active in both the revolutions against the papacy in the Papal States and the move for Italian unification and the ending of temporal power for the Popes.  Giuseppe Garibaldi, the “George Washington of Italy” whose military genius was able to bring down the power of the various Italian princes—including the papacy—was a vehement Freemason.  All in all, the relationship between Freemasonry and Catholicism has not been a happy one.  

Franciscans of The Immaculate--and Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Saint Maximilian Kolbe, OFM Conv.

Let me write a bit more about the Franciscans of the Immaculate—or rather let me compare and contrast their two sources of inspiration—Saint Maximilian Maria Kolbe OFM Conv.  and Saint Francis of Assisi.
Raymond Kolbe was born January 8 1894 in a section of Poland then occupied by and ruled by Russia.   His father was an ethnic German (and the name was Kolb) and his mother, Polish.  He had three siblings, only one of whom lived to adulthood.  His father was arrested and executed by the Russians shortly before Maximilian was ordained a priest because he, the father, was involved in the movement for Polish independence and nationhood.  From his childhood Raymond was inculcated with a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Kolbe and his elder brother, Francis, in 1907 fled Russian dominated Poland to Lvov in the Austrian ruled Polish Ukraine where they entered the novitiate of the Conventual Franciscans.   Kolbe was sent on to study in Rome where he earned doctorates in both Theology and Philosophy.
During his time in Rome he witnessed a massive demonstration by the Italian Freemasons against the Church and attacking the Pope, Pius X, personally.  Demonstrators filled Saint Peter’s Square—then part of Italy—with blasphemous banners and shouting obscene slogans.  All this needs to be put into the context of Italian independence and the virulent anti-Catholicism of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian George Washington, a Mason and freethinker who hated the Church and papacy.  Italian Freemasons were a noisy minority more inspired by a hatred of organized religion than the principles of Freemasonry, but for Kolbe the Freemasons became the bogeyman of evil attempting to destroy the Church.
This experience of Freemasonry in Italy led Kolbe on his return to Poland to organize the “Militia of the Immaculate,” a movement of Polish laity to combat the influence of Freemasonry.  The battle with Freemasonry became the organizing principle of Kolbe’s life.  Don’t misunderstand Kolbe’s conservativism— Kolbe was a thoroughly modern man and used the modern media in his battle against Freemasonry.  He opened a publishing house that printed catechisms and other instructional materials as well as devotional tracts, he had a daily newspaper with a quarter million readers, and a monthly magazine that had a million subscribers.  He also used the radio in his attempts to reach an audience.  He had two passions: for the Blessed Mother and against Freemasonry.   
Unfortunately, Kolbe and other anti-Freemasons often slid into anti-Semitism.  European Freemasonry in the late 19^th and early 20^th century included many secular Jews precisely because Freemasonry advocated an intellectual and scholarly freedom of thought that more conservative religious voices—orthodox rabbis as well as Catholic theologians—feared.  Freemasonry was the voice of secular intellectualism and embraced the ideas of Spinoza, Rousseau, Hume, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, Ingersoll, Einstein and others.  By no means were all Freethinkers Jews but secular Jews were prominent among Freethinkers and this undermined the hopes of many Poles not simply for an independent Poland but the restoration of Catholic Poland, and not only Catholic Poland but a Marian Poland. 
Anti-Semitism is woven into the Polish Catholic culture going back for centuries.  It is not that many Catholic Poles did not have good relationships with their Jewish fellow Poles. (One cannot say neighbors because for the most part Jews and Gentiles lived in separate communities, even when in the same cities and there was not much contact between Christians and religious (orthodox) Jews.  One of my favorite sites in Krakow is Kazimierz, the old Jewish Quarter.  When one goes there now one sees the desolation created by the Holocaust: the elegant synagogues now museums of a vanished, slaughtered, culture.)   Nevertheless, many Polish Catholics and many Polish Jews, at least among those who were integrated into mainstream Polish society, were friends.  Jerzy Kluger and Karol Wojtyla, later John Paul II, were boyhood friends and that was not unusual.  But in the Polish tradition there were stories and legends and songs of the blood libel, there were depictions in stone and stained glass of Jews murdering Christian children, bedtime stories and campfire tales made Jews out to be bogeymen and monsters.  Kolbe was not conscious of this flaw in the culture and often reinforced it in his attempts to discredit those he saw as enemies of the Church. 
Kolbe’s work brought the Conventual Franciscans to prominence in Poland and the number of vocations enabled them to open missions in Japan where Kolbe served for several years in the 1930’s—but his publishing work was too important for him to be away for long.  Kolbe was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for—among other things—sheltering Jews in his monastery.  He was sent to Auschwitz. 
Now Auschwitz was actually four main camps and 45 satellite camps.  Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz I.  This must be differentiated from Auschwitz II or Birkenau which was primarily an extinction camp where prisoners were normally held only until they could be gassed.   Auschwitz I was primarily for long-term prisoners.  While, there are exceptions Jews normally were marked for extinction; Poles were held in Auschwitz I and kept for forced labor.  The two camps, by the way, are remarkably different.  While Birkenau was a massive complex of wooden barracks in which those Jews were held who were not to be gassed immediately but worked to death, wooden barracks that were no more than huge shacks that did not even keep out the cold and which held hundreds of slave-prisoners, Auschwitz I was an orderly village of well-built brick structures which housed the prisoners.  In Auschwitz I There were trees and stone-lined avenues among the barracks.  It was by no means a pleasant place but it wasn’t the architecture of despair and death that marked Birkenau.  Of course most of those sent to Auschwitz II or Birkenau were gassed immediately.
In Auschwitz I Kolbe was put to work as were the rest of the prisoners.  He was only there about five months when three prisoners escaped.  As a warning to other prisoners, ten men were selected to be put in a starvation bunker where they would die a slow and painful death of hunger.  One of the ten, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out “O, my wife, my children!”  Kolbe stepped forward and asked to replace the family man. 
Kolbe lasted two weeks without food or water.  He kept up the courage of the other prisoners by singing with them and telling them stories as well as giving them the reassurances of our Christian faith.  Finally he alone was left alive—barley alive.  A nurse was sent into the cell to give him an injection of Carbolic Acid. It was August 14^th, the vigil of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 
Kolbe’s canonization was not without controversy.  Anti-Semitic passages from his magazine and newspaper were cited.  John Paul II was passionately determined to advance the cause of his fellow Pole however.  The anti-Semitic tone of some of his writings needs to be balanced against his actions which not only show no trace of animosity towards Jews but a recognition of the human dignity of all people regardless of race or creed.  The anti-Semitism found in Polish culture was woven into his personality much as racism has become part of the warp and woof of American culture.  It is a reminder to us all to be very critical of our cultural assumptions and examine our own words to see when they betray prejudices of which we are not consciously aware.  Paula Deen isn’t the only racist in America.  Far from it. 
Kolbe was devoted to the Virgin Mary and is devotion to her can be said to have marked his spirituality far more profoundly than his Franciscanism.  While they are not, of course, mutually exclusive, in our next entry we will look at Saint Francis and see what he brought to the Church.  The Franciscans of the Immaculate are far more disciples of Maximilian Kolbe than they are of Francis of Assisi.  That is not a problem but it needs to be noted.   

So Maybe The Da Vinci Code Isn't Fiction?

The Opus Dei administered Basilica

of Sant'Appolinare in the center of

Rome--less than a mile from the Vatican

This is just what the Vatican (and the Church) doesn’t need right now—a lurid story of a kidnapped teen, a drug mobster, n cigar-smoking archbishop who runs a bank, the FreeMasons, an exhumed corpse in an Opus Dei Church and Dan Brown’s tales coming to life.  Granted all the individuals mentioned are dead and most of the events happened some time  back, but still—this is more than just another nail in the Church’s moral credibility.      
Enrico de Pedis (1954-1990)  was an Italian mobster who despite (or because of) his involvement with the Drug Trafficking in Rome had ties to both the Vatican and to the Italian Secret Service.  He was a suspect in the unresolved kidnapping of Emanuela Orlandi, the fifteen year old daughter of a Vatican employee.  The kidnapping itself seems to have been linked to the Vatican Bank scandal that involved the 1982 murder of Roberto Calvi, the head of the Banco Ambrosiano in which the Vatican Bank was a major stockholder and which was heavily involved in money laundering for the Italian underworld.  The Banco Ambrosiano had gone bankrupt in 1982.  Calvi was a member of an illegal Italian Masonic Lodge (illegal because it had been expelled from The Grand Orient of Italy, the Italian Masonic organization) to which many powerful Italian, politicians, and Mafiosi also belonged.  It was rumored that there were several Vatican officials, including American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican Bank at the time, belonged.  It has been theorized that the Orlandi kidnapping was part of the mob’s warning the Vatican that it had better cover the losses of the bankrupt Banco Ambrosiano.  Whatever—the whole thing is a mess.  Who’s in bed with whom in the Vatican is an issue that needs to be resolved and cleaned up with far greater urgency than the “problem” of  American nuns. 
        When de Pedis was gunned down in a Roman street in 1990 his family reputedly paid the Vatican more than a half million dollars to construct an elaborate tomb in the Church of Sant’Appolinare a Vatican-owned basilica administered by Opus Dei.  And here we thought The DaVinci Code was just a piece of improbable fiction!  It was the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, at that time Cardinal Ugo Poletti, a man of many questionable ties, who argued on the family’s behalf.  (de Pedis had been married in that church and expressed a wish to be buried there.)   Supposedly de Pedis had reversed himself and persuaded his fellow mobsters to back off pressuring the Vatican over the Banco Ambrosiano debts and for this act of piety he was accorded such a privileged burial place.  It all boils down to: Hey you guys in the red dresses, leave the nuns alone and go clean your own house.  There simply is no integrity left to the Vatican’s reputation  and this is a formula for disaster.  O, and guess what--the Vatican wants closer clergy supervision over Caritas Internationalis, the lay administered charity fund that distributes billions annually to the poor of the world.  Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities are the American agencies that are part of Caritas.  No, Holy Father, better leave this to the laity.  We have had enough scandals. 

Two Remarks on George Washington

Emanuel Leutze's 1851 painting of Washington

Crossing the Delaware--the surprise attack on British

forces at the Battle of Trenton, Christmas night 1776.

Permit me just two more remarks about George Washington before we move on.  George Washington wore  his Masonic Apron and other lodge insignia for the laying of the cornerstone of the United States Capitol in 1793.  If an American President today appeared in Masonic insignia there would be a huge outcry from Catholics on the right and secularists on the left.  I think we need to pay attention however to the significance of his wearing these symbols of a private affiliation for the performance of a public act.  While I don’t think one could say—given the earlier entries in this series of blogs—that Washington conceived of this Republic as a “Christian Nation” or a “Judeo-Christian Nation” as some of the advocates of keeping atheistic displays off the Leesburg Courthouse Lawn, Washington certainly did not believe that one’s religious biases should be kept out of public life.   Freemasonry is not a religion but its insignia, rituals, and symbols stand for a belief system and Washington himself displayed those symbols of the Masonic belief system at one of the most important events in the history of the Republic. 
     Now, on for another remark about Washington though having nothing apropos of the religious debate.  We all have in our mind the image of Washington crossing the Delaware, standing in the prow of a boat and looking noble.  According to one of his chief officers, General Henry Knox—who weighted over 300 lbs—Washington was seated in the boat and wanted to make sure that Knox was seated too, declaring:  "Shift your fat ass, Henry, but slowly, or you'll swamp the damn boat!"  Sort of makes us shift our image of ol'George, doesn't it?

The Christian Faith of George Washington II



"Ancient of Days" by William Blake

(1757-1827) British Poet and Painter,

depicting God as the Architect of the

Universe, a common theme in

Enlightenment thought

Let’s pick up the Anglican/Episcopalian saga before looking at George Washington’s type of Christianity.  As I said in the last entry we hear that the hero of our Revolution and our First President was Episcopalian and we think “he’s almost a Catholic!” but that only shows to go you how little we know about Episcopalians or Anglicans at the time of George Washington.  This is an important topic for another reason as well.  When we look at the question of Anglican’s having “Valid Orders” it is important that we know their history to see if their doctrines of Eucharist and Priesthood have always conformed to what we Catholics believe to be the historic faith of the Church as it has come to us from the Apostles. 

      Henry VIII did not steer his Church of England on a Protestant course when he broke communion with Rome in 1536.  He kept not only the Mass but virtually all Catholic doctrine and practice other than religious life.  He closed the monasteries for a variety of reasons—financial gain for the crown being one of them but he changed almost nothing else.  The Pope’s name was dropped from the Mass but the Mass remained otherwise unchanged even for the Latin.  All Henry wanted was a non-papal Catholicism.  But he obviously knew what the future held and the Council of Regency he appointed to govern England until his son and heir, the future Edward VI, was old enough to govern for himself, was decidedly Protestant in its religious views.  Henry did die when his son was only nine and as Edward died before reaching his majority, this Regency Council governed England for the entire period.  The Protestant leaning majority soon rid itself of the more conservative minority and under the aegis of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury and thoroughly Protestant member of the Privy Council, transformed Henry’s non-papal Catholic Church into a Calvinist Church.  As regards the sacraments and worship they did this in two steps.  The first substantial Liturgical revision came with the 1549 Book of Common Prayer issued only two years after Edward’s ascension to the throne.  (There had been a few interpolations of English into the communion rite of the Latin Mass almost immediately after Henry’s death, but the Mass itself was untouched for over two years while Archbishop Cranmer prepared his new liturgy)  This first Prayerbook retained vestments, altars, and other Catholic ceremonial but it was no sooner published than Cranmer issued a second book that was stripped of almost all Catholic elements.  Like Luther, Cranmer was particularly ardent to strip the Mass (and priesthood) of any sense of sacrifice.  The rites of ordination of priests and consecration of bishops were similarly altered to remove any concept of a “sacrificing priesthood.”  The motivation for this was the mistaken idea about Catholic teaching, an idea, incidentally, held by many Catholics who had exaggerated sound doctrine into superstitious claptrap that each Mass was in and of itself a “sacrifice” as opposed to the idea that in each Mass the one sacrifice of Christ becomes present to us.  In orthodox Catholicism, unlike in what was once the popular Catholic imagination, Christ is not sacrificed again and again every time Mass is offered.  Christ has died once and for all.  In the Mass we are made present to that one eternal sacrifice which is sufficient for the redemption of the world. 

       The Mass neither repeats that sacrifice nor adds anything to it.  Knowing this we can see why Cranmer, Luther and other Reformers were anxious to avoid the idea of the Mass as Sacrifice even if they over-reacted in their zeal to protect the uniqueness of Christ’s once-and-for-all sacrifice.  But there were other problems in the Mass as well,  The “offertory” prayers of the “old Mass” ambiguously suggested that there were two sacrifices at the Mass, the first and lesser being the sacrifice of bread and wine to God so that they could be used in the second and essential “sacrifice,” in which Christ’s one and eternal Sacrifice is made present (or in the exaggerated view, in which Christ is offered again (and again and again) in each Mass). Cranmer’s work of stripping the Mass of any idea of Sacrifice was quick but thorough. It reduced the Mass, now known as “Holy Communion” to a mere memorial of Christ’s saving death.  Cranmer’s concept of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist was ambiguously confusing but is best summed up in the beautiful (but doctrinally problematic) prayer:  Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee and feed on him in thy heart by faith and with thanksgiving.  Beautiful sentiment—but is Christ present only by faith and what do we mean by remembrance? 

      In any event, At King Edward’s death in 1553, the Church of England had been thoroughly Protestantized and those clinging to Catholic theology or practice had been forced from their ecclesiastical offices and sometimes (but not always) imprisoned. 

       At Edward’s death, his Catholic sister Mary ascended the throne and in her five year reign restored the Catholic Faith and practice, bringing the Church of England back into the Roman Communion.  Unfortunately she did this in a particularly violent and bloody way, without any modicum of restraint or prudence, despite the advice of her Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury (who was also her cousin) Cardinal Reginald Pole.  Pole and Mary died the same day, November 17, 1558, leaving Mary’s successor, her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, in need of a New Archbishop who could make a new—and Protestant--beginning.

        Elizabeth was one of the few genuinely intelligent people to sit on the English throne and she was not only fluent in classical languages but well instructed in theology. (Curiously, while she had a keen grasp of doctrine it sometimes seems that she lacked Christian faith.)   Her religious biases were for the sort of non-papal Catholicism of her Father.  She liked ritual and well understood that religious ritual actually bolstered the authority of the Crown. But Elizabeth had a problem and that was getting the power to rule firmly into her hands.  No one expected her to be Queen.  They expected her to marry and her husband to be King.  Elizabeth had no such strategy in mind. As she herself asserted, she had “the heart and stomach of a King” and was determined to rule in her own name.  To consolidate her power she had to woo the House of Commons for its support against the at-the-time all-powerful House of Lords.  The Commons, representing townsfolk, was thoroughly Protestant.  Actually they were Puritans, staunch Protestants who wanted to rid the Church of England of anything Roman.  The Reformation was on again and on with a fury.  The communion tables came back, the altars went out.  Vestments were destroyed; crosses and candles swept from the sanctuaries; statues and stained glass smashed.  Ordinary table bread was used for Holy Communion and tankards replaced chalices.  A new Prayerbook came out in 1559, substantially identical to the second Prayerbook of King Edward VI.  Priests and bishops were married (though not to each other—that comes later.) Matthew Parker, her choice for Archbishop of Canterbury, was consecrated according to the Ritual as reformed by Cranmer during the time of King Edward, not according to the Catholic Rite.  Theologians like Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury drew on Scripture and the Fathers to explain and justify the Reforms.  Elizabethan Anglicanism differed from Rome but was very orthodox—though with a strong Calvinist bent—in its soteriology.  Elizabethan Anglican sacramental theology is a bit more complex and while Catholics may not find it to be “orthodox,” was well rooted in patristics and sixteenth century New Testament scholarship.  Elizabeth had a remarkably long reign—almost forty-five years—and by her death England was thoroughly Protestant and thoroughly Reformed (i.e. Calvinist).  I don’t know that she was totally happy about that, but it is what she left as her legacy.

      Elizabeth was succeeded by her Calvinist cousin, King James VI of Scotland who became James I of England.  James too was highly educated and interested in matters theological.  His wife, Anne of Denmark, was a convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism but James remained a staunch Anglican though of High-Church sentiments rather than Puritan.  James is famous for having sponsored the English translation of the Bible that bears his name.   Beginning in the reign of James I and continuing on through that of his son, Charles I, there was a spiritual and theological revival in the English Church that crystalized during the tenure of William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury.  Patristic scholarship and theological reflection, as well as somewhat of a recovery of the pre-Reformation English mystical tradition brought new—and very orthodox—life to the Church of England.  Under Laud’s administration, there was also somewhat of a corresponding liturgical revival though by no means a restoration of pre-Reformation ceremonial.  Unfortunately, it came crashing down with executions of King Charles and Archbishop Laud in 1649 and 1645 respectively.  During Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth the Church of England splintered hopelessly.  The Episcopacy was abolished (temporarily) in favor of Presbyterianism but religious dissent burst out into numerous exotic forms with Quakers and Levelers, Baptists and Diggers, Congregationalists, Ranters and Fifth Monarchists.  What was beneath this disintegration of a National Church into numerous sects of dubious orthodoxy was the triumph of a neo-gnostic Illuminism in which the subjective religious experience of the individual was allowed to take precedence over the collective wisdom and ancient tradition of the community of the faithful.  When ultimate authority is not some outside source—be it scripture, sacred authors, papal authority, tradition—but individual opinion then there is no cohesive religious bond that means anything.  Reason may—or may not—play a role in the formation of opinions and while most of these sects were radically subjective with no regard for reason, there were many in society that saw religion as essentially irrational and opted not for faith but instead for rational philosophy and natural science to replace any sort of Divine Revelation be it canonical or individual.  This then, the mid-seventeenth century, is a period in which many embraced Enlightenment rationalism leading them to a very rational view of God as the impersonal architect of the universe.  It is here that we get Issac Newton, John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexander Pope, Joseph Priestly and a host of other very modern thinkers who had moved far beyond a theocentric view of science, philosophy, human society, religion, and the universe itself.  This was also the incubator in which Freemasonry was hatched as a rational alternative to Christian myth and ritual.   This rationalism was not without its effect on the Church of England which was closely connected to the universities and whose clergy were trained at those universities.  In the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries there were many priests and bishops—not to mention laity—who conformed in worship to Anglican practice but whose theology was riddled with rationalism that led to Arianism,  Socinianism, and even Unitarianism.  Christ’s Virgin Birth and his Physical Resurrection were called into question by some and many saw the Church existing primarily for character formation in sound morals rather than as a belief system.  Sermons were often moral exhortations free of specifically Christian doctrine and prayers were no more than the formation of moral precepts with references to a Transcendent Being.  This skepticism was by no means limited to Anglicanism and in America was found also among the New England Congregationalists.  It would cause a reaction in the formation of an Evangelical wing that was behind the First Great Awakening with the preaching of such Anglican promoters of Christian orthodoxy as George Whitefield and John Wesley.  In the nineteenth century it would be responsible for the reaction we call The Oxford Movement and the revival of Catholic heritage in the Church of England and the American Episcopal Church.  At the time of the American Revolution, however, the Anglican and Episcopal Churches had an evangelical wing but were heavily tipped in favor of religious rationalism.  But what about George himself?  Did he hold an evangelical faith or was he given to religious rationalism?  Well that is for next time.   

Benjamin Franklin--A Most Unorthodox "Christian"

Onwards with the Judeo-Christian Nation issue to determine whether or not our American heritage is indeed, undisputedly as Ms Barbara Curtis of Mommy Blog asserts, a “Judeo-Christian nation.”  We looked at our colonial roots (December 15) which can give some affirmation to the idea and then to the Founding Fathers where the issue becomes more complicated.  We had two entries (December 16, 17) on Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence, as well as being the author of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom which, in turn, influenced the non-establishment clause of the Bill of Rights which lies at the heart of the problem of religious displays in public space.  Yesterday I tried to use the Tim Tebow phenomenon to illustrate the difference between government-space and public space as well as between religious holidays/symbols and cultural celebrations/symbols.  So now back to the Founding Fathers and we will look at Benjamin Franklin to see his religious convictions and what they might say about “Christian Nation.”  Franklin is usually identified as a Quaker but his roots, in fact, were Congregationalist and he was baptized as an infant at the Old South Meeting House in Boston.  His parents destined him for the clergy—a fate for which Benjamin would have been incalculably ill suited.  I don’t know that he ever affiliated with the Quakers—it seems unlikely as having fled to Philadelphia (the seat of American Quakerism) at age 17, then on to London for a brief period before returning to Philadelphia where he joined the Masons at the age of twenty-five and within four years was elected Grand Master of his Lodge.  Quakers eschewed secret societies and while Franklin dressed plain and lived frugally his ties to the Masons would indicate he had already become a rationalist rather than a believer when he settled in the City of Brotherly Love.  Indeed when Franklin wrote his autobiography in 1771 he identified himself as a Deist and claimed to have long been won to that philosophy.  Franklin was very interested in religion.  In 1774, when living in London as the agent of the Pennsylvania Colony, he was present at the founding meeting of Unitarianism.  A decade later while serving as ambassador to France, Franklin gave advice to the Papal Nuncio regarding administration of the Catholic Church in the newly independent United States.  Indeed Franklin recommended John Carroll as superior of the American Mission—the provisional administration of the Church until the establishment of a Catholic hierarchy in 1789.  Franklin had become acquainted with Carroll in 1776 when they journeyed together and with Samuel Chase and Charles Carroll (John’s cousin) to Canada to seek Canadian support for the Revolution.  Carroll, incidentally, was excommunicated for this act by the Bishop of Quebec, but he retained Franklin’s esteem.  Franklin, like so many liberals across the ages, was an elitist and while he admired Jesus as great moral teacher he favored organized religion principally because of its potential to shape the morals of the common people of which he did not consider himself one.  Not only did he not affiliate to any organized religion, but Franklin himself, while exalting moral behavior as the necessary foundation of any civilization, was no moral rigorist and always allowed himself considerable latitude in his personal life.  He was however, the consummate gentleman and charmed all, religious and agnostic alike.  John Adams said of him “The Catholics consider him almost a Catholic, The Church of England claimed him as one of them; the Presbyterians thought him half-a-Presbyterian and the Friends believe him a wet Quaker.” 

     In order to clarify Franklin’s religious stance we perhaps should briefly look at Freemasonry and also at Unitarianism and its relationship to orthodox Christianity and to Deism. 

      Freemasonry rose in Britain in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries.  The oldest lodges were in Scotland but the movement seems to have travelled into the southern kingdom along with the Stuarts when in 1603 James VI of Scotland came to the English Throne as James I.  While the origins seem to have been a fraternal organization of artisans and craftsmen, from the very beginning there was an interest in scientific knowledge.  Indeed the Scots lodge at Kilwinning, considered to be the Mother or first lodge in Masonry, is spoken of in the 1559 Schaw Statutes: the warden of the lodge of Kilwinning …take trial of the art of memory and the science thereof, of every craftsman (fellowe of craft) and every apprentice according to the air of their vocations.”  William Schaw, by the way, was not only one of the leaders of the Kilwining Lodge but the “Master of Works” to King James VI of Scotland before his ascension to the English Throne.  This provides a possible link to the spread of Freemasonry from Scotland to England. 

     Scottish Freemasonry is linked to the (Protestant) Reformation in Scotland and while the Scots Reformation was Calvinistic many of its supporters were no more interested in Calvinism than Catholicism but only wanted the intellectual freedom that the break with Rome seemed to represent.  This is true in both Scotland and England where once papal authority was broken, the Church—now the Reformed Church—was never able to establish control over the belief of the citizenry.  The origins of the separation of Church and State are firmly rooted in the Reformation principles that each individual is the judge of his or her orthodoxy.  Freemasonry attracted inquiring minds that wanted to discuss matters of science, politics, morals, and natural religion without the dominance of hierarchy.  There are strong ties between Freemasonry and the Enlightenment.  While today many Masons are devout members of mainline Protestant Churches with an orthodox appreciation of the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, that would not have been typical in the seventeenth and eighteenth century where Freemasonry was tied to rationalism and Deism—and even agnosticism. 

     Freemasonry requires the belief in a Supreme Being but as a matter of principle leaves that Supreme Being undefined.  There is also the reference to “Sacred Law.”  While in the United States this “volume of Sacred Law” is most commonly the King James Bible, it can be any religious or philosophical text depending on the makeup of the members.  Indeed in Lodges of mixed religious memberships—Christians, Hindus, Muslims—several “volumes of Sacred Law” might be displayed together.  In other words, religion is somewhat of whatever the individual decides to make it.  In a Christian context this not only produces a religious relativism, but it permits the Christian faith to be understood so broadly as to be without substance. In this system natural science rather than revealed truth is the basis of moral behavior and that would be perfectly consistent with the thought of not only of the Mason, Franklin, but the non-Mason Deist, Jefferson. It is not Christian doctrine however in which the teachings of Jesus are not only illustrative of good morals but their foundation.  Well, that is enough for today.  We will save Unitarianism for another day.  Suffice it to say that Franklin was very definitely post-Christian in his own beliefs but thought that organized religion was a good thing for shaping the moral character of individuals less sophisticated than himself and his fellow Deists.  I don’t think one could say that he supported the idea of a Christian Nation, one built on orthodox Christian (or Judeo-Christian) doctrine but while not practicing it himself, he did encourage formal religion for the common citizen.  It would be inconsistent with his thought, however, to claim that he would support special legal or societal status for one religion over another.