Only 5000 Freemasons in NZ; Church says Catholics can’t join

Freemasons from throughout the country gathered recently in Wanaka. The fraternity has been opening up in recent years in the hope of gaining new members. New Zealand Freemasons Grand Master James L. Watt told the Otago Daily Times that the fraternity is being less secretive in order to “dispel a lot of the myths”.

“There is no goat tied up front here,” he said jokingly. “No plans to take over the world at the moment.”

The Freemasons have lost 45,000 members in the last decade.

The ODT article noted that Freemasonry is not associated with a single religion, and has “welcomed Catholic, Muslim, Hindu and Jewish members”.

In 2023, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith reiterated the Church’s long-held position that Catholics are forbidden from joining the Freemasons. The Dicastery wrote “that active membership in Freemasonry by a member of the faithful is forbidden because of the irreconcilability between Catholic doctrine and Freemasonry”.

The Church’s position is that Catholics enrolled in Masonic associations “are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion”.

The Dicastery’s note came in the wake of increasing membership of Freemason groups by Catholics in the Philippines. Bishops in the Philippines were urged to create a strategy that should include both a doctrinal and a pastoral approach.

Mr Watt told the ODT that, in addition to being dedicated to have good moral standing, the group also required its members to believe in a “supreme being”. Freemasonry insists that members are taught its values, which are then put into action through philanthropic work.

Freemasons did not often advertise or recruit, instead any interested members were asked to approach them.

But from the Catholic perspective, Freemasonry appears to relativise the religious faith of its members with respect to a “broader truth, which instead is shown in the community of good will, that is, in the Masonic fraternity”, stated a 1985 article in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.

“For a Catholic Christian, it is not possible to live his relationship with God in a twofold mode, that is, dividing it into a supra-confessional humanitarian form and an interior Christian form,” said the article, which is also published in the doctrinal dicastery’s archives.

“Only Jesus Christ is, in fact, the Teacher of Truth, and only in him can Christians find the light and the strength to live according to God’s plan, working for the true good of their brethren,” it said.

FULL STORY

Freemasons becoming less secretive | Otago Daily Times Online News (By Rawan Saadi/Otago Daily Times)

Catholics must not join Masonic groups, membership remains serious sin – NZ Catholic Newspaper (CNS)