The sect of the Gnostics at the origin of Freemasonry

The sect of the Gnostics at the origin of Freemasonry

Freemasonry is the modern form of anti-Christianity as it has shown itself from the beginning of the Church and developed in the course of centuries. That it can be related in some ways beyond the Christian era to pagan naturalism, rites and symbols used in the mysteries of the East, Greece and ancient Rome, is a filiation to which we do not want to contradict, leaving the scholars to appreciate the value of these connections.

By the mysterious forms in which she delights, by the secrets she imposes on her adepts, by the ceremonies that accompany her initiations, Freemasonry in fact recalls those secret associations in which the pagan worship of nature sought a veil for his theories and even more for his practices.

No one is unaware, on the other hand, that to give an air of high antiquity, by putting on its doctrines a biblical tint, Freemasonry has woven a whole network of legends and fables that would tend to recede its origins until the construction of the temple of Solomon, through descendants whose history would have completely lost track.

Vain efforts to conceal the anti-Christian character of the sect! It is to other sources that we must go back, when or wants to look for how it could be formed in the Christian world and develop in the Middle Ages an occult society having no other goal than the destruction of the Catholic Church and consequently the doctrine of all Christianity.

This obscure, dark society, which operates in secrecy and mystery against the Catholic Church, its doctrine and its institutions, to restore pagan naturalism in new forms, we find it, Our Very Dear Brothers, from the beginning of the Christian era: it is called the sect of the Gnostics. And it is not only we who point out the perfect analogy between the beliefs, rites and usages of Gnosticism and those of Freemasonry. We only reproduce the confessions of the most accredited writers of the sect that Our Holy Father Pope Leo XIII has just condemned following his august predecessors.

Yes, from the very beginning of the Church, we see in the shadows, in opposition to its dogmas, the formation of anti-Christian groups professing most of the ideas of modern Freemasonry: the confusion of God and world under the name of universal nature, denial of the deity of Jesus Christ degraded to the rank of lawmakers and philosophers of antiquity, monopoly of science attributed to a small number of initiates with regard to the faith of Christians treated ignorance and superstition, on the one hand men who aspire to light and on the other those who remain plunged in darkness, all this language and all these claims, with rites and symbols of equal value, we find them in the conventicles of Gnosis as in the Masonic lodges, so that one could say, without abusing the connection, that the Gnostics were Freemasons of the first three centuries of the Church.

Bishop Freppel - Pastoral Instruction on Freemasonry (1885)


[emphasis in the original]