Freemasonry: The Naked Truth

Let us begin by setting Freemasonry in its historical context.

At the beginning, there was no problem concerning the compatibility of the Catholic Church and the Masonic guilds of the Middle Ages. They worked together to conceive and build the wonderful gravity-defying cathedrals that are admired all around the Christian world, and the Craft was in fact mainly dedicated to this task and the glory of God.

When the first speculative Freemasons used the tools and the challenges facing the cathedral builders to found their spiritual reflexion, there was no problem either. When the first attempt to federate the different developments of this movement were set up at the beginning of the 18^th century, culminating in a general constitution and guidelines, a belief in God was the first requirement for joining the movement.

At the beginning, speculative Freemasonry was one hundred percent theistic. One third of the founders of the Grand Lodge of England on June 24, 1717, were members of the Royal Society, the English Academy of Science[1]. Among them was John Theophilus Desaguliers, a renowned scientist and demonstrator at the Royal Society and a friend of Newton, whose work he popularized. He was also an Anglican clergyman, although he spent most of his time on his scientific activities.

It was in 1723 that the Presbyterian Pastor James Anderson, with the help Desaguliers, published the "Constitutions of the Free-Masons", also known as "Anderson's Constitutions". The development of Freemasonry is considered to begin with this work. Since both Anderson and Desaguliers were clergymen, the Constitutions were obviously theistic. However, although they were Christian and believed in God, they were not Roman Catholics, and this ultimately led to major problems with the Vatican.

But when the very first Grand Lodge was set up in London in 1717, there was no reaction from Rome, nor when Anderson’s Constitutions were published in 1723. Probably because this took place in England, which was no longer a fief of the Roman Catholic church and, at the beginning, it concerned a relatively small God-fearing group. Throughout the 17th century and at the beginning of the 18th century, the pioneers of Freemasonry were all Christians. During meetings, any religious reference was only to God, not even to the ”Great Architect of the Universe”. What’s more, the main symbol used in the Rituals is still the reconstruction of the Temple of Salomon.