Duly reported by now was the Vatican’s hosting of a Marxist-Christian dialogue in January, earlier this year. Pope Francis freely encouraged the interaction while, moreover, conspicuously neglecting to mention Christ, Christianity, or the fact that the Catholic Church has a long history of decided condemnation of Marxist Communism. Similar disconcerting dealings include Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio’s presiding over a Masonic conference in February in which he renewed requests for a “permanent dialogue” with Freemasonry.
“Dialogue” is an important theme to Masons, as expressed by the Grand Master Gustavo Raffi upon Francis’ election: he celebrated the hope for “a Church of the people [which] may…dialogue with…Freemasonry…. This is the ‘white smoke’ that [Masons] are waiting for from the Church of our time.” Yet, like Communism, membership in Freemasonry remains forbidden due to irreconcilable differences with Church doctrine.
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Papal condemnation of Marxism and Freemasonry, in fact, goes back to just after the founding of these movements, the mid-nineteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, respectively. Membership in either is strictly forbidden by Mother Church, disallowing the reception of Holy Communion for affiliates (and full excommunication by some Church councils). Collaboration with Communists was warned against as recently as Pope Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est, even on the level of charitable activity, in that Catholic charity must be centrally such rather than effectively supportive of other ideologies. And paradoxically, just late last year, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith reaffirmed the Church’s ban on Catholics joining Freemasonry.
In other words, one (still) may not deal with the Devil, nor ally with the Antichrist. Christ Himself warned of secret societies and called out Communists by name—notably, just prior to the publication of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto—in approved private revelations occurring in mid-nineteenth century France, when and where their insidious machinations in large part debuted. These associations are definitively described by Our Lord as the “enemies of the Church and her Christ.”
According to the revelations, these movements are both an extreme offense to God and an allowed, merciful chastisement by Heaven, taking the form of “the malice of revolutionary men.” As with the ancient Israelites, God is permitting modern man to experience the natural consequences of embracing anti-God ideologies, breeding what He describes as “deep-rooted impiety and absolute incredulity.” Doubting or denying the immutable laws and truth of God, man seeks to replace them with his own contriving, desiring to make himself “like unto God.”
Psalm 81 describes the similar waywardness and punishment of the Israelites: “Thou [shall not] adore a strange god…. But my people heard not my voice…. So, I let them go according to the desires of their heart: they shall walk in their own inventions….” Yet today’s idolatrous “desires of the heart” surpass those of the Israelites; for in the revelations, Christ describes current times as “never having been exceeded in iniquity.” The Israelites fell into these sins due to weakness, but the “inventions” of the Marxists and Masons are anti-God, anti-Church, in principle, from their very inception.
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Theirs is an overt stamping upon the rights of God as outlined in the first three commandments. Marx is famously quoted as saying that “Communism begins at the outset with atheism.” Lenin stated, “Communism abolishes eternal truths, all religion, and morality.” And during the recent Vatican-Masonic dialogue, Stefano Bisi, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, specified that Freemasons need only believe in the “Great Architect of the Universe,” such that “absolute truths and walls…must be torn down.”
Venerable Fulton Sheen aptly warned of a (resulting) “religion without the Cross, a liturgy without a world to come, a religion to destroy a religion, or a politics which is a religion—one that renders unto Caesar even the things that are God’s.” Grand Master Raffi apparently celebrates such a vision, stating, “Fraternity and dialogue are [Francis’] first concrete words: maybe in the new Church nothing will ever be like before.”
The Israelites knew that reparation was necessary to “turn God’s face back” to them, so to speak; to embrace God’s blessing and religion once again. And the remedy is the same today, as outlined in the revelations to initiate the Holy Face Devotion. Therein, Christ reveals no less than the greatest devotion to make reparation for the greatest crimes—those that are not “just” un-Christian but anti-Church.
