Freemasonry and the Sacred Crocodile

March 5, 2011 in anticlericalism, Freemasonry 22 Comments Tags: anticlericalism, Freemasonry, Leo Taxil

I am including a chapter on anticlericalism in my revised The Church Impotent.

When I was a student at St. Matthew’s Grammar School in Baltimore in the mid 1950s, I remember being told by a nun that Leo XII had a vision of Freemasonry. He looked at all the grades from the lowest to the highest, and fainted when he reached the top because there was the Head Freemason: Satan!

I recently came across the inspiration of this interesting story: Leo Taxil. Her is a bookseller’s summary of the career of Leo Taxil and his role in anticlericalism:

Leo Taxil (ne Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages), 1854-1907, was a piece of work. He was raised Catholic but turned against the Church at an early age and became a prolific author and publisher of scurrilous (and often semi-pornographic) attacks on the Catholic Church and the clergy. He attracted a considerable following in anti-clerical and Freethought circles throughout France. Thus, it was big news for his old following as well as for Catholics when, in 1885, he converted to Catholicism and renounced his past writings. His new main bugaboo was Freemasonry & he applied the same degree of venom and zealotry against Freemasonry that he had used against the church. Masons were corrupt, conspiratorial, followers of Satan, etc. Initially his conversion was accepted enthusiastically; he even had an audience with Pope Leo XIII. As time went on, however, his claims became increasingly grandiose. He announced that he had taken under his wing one Diana Vaughan, daughter of a prominent Freemason and descendant of the alchemist Thomas Vaughan, who had left the Order and denounced its Satanic orgies, etc. Diana’s stories became wilder and wilder and all but Taxil’s most fervent followers became increaingly uneasy Church officials began to ask for a public appearance with Diana telling her story herself. At one point Taxil revealed that Diana’s real father was Asmodeus and that, angered by a Freemason’s plot to kill his daughter, he turned the errant Mason into a crocodile who was forced to remain in his mansion playing the piano with the tip of his tail. The pressure became overwhelming and Taxil promised to produce the girl on April 19, 1897. The large crowd of Catholics and journalists was met with Taxil’s denunciation of their gullibility and the confession that the whole thing was a hoax. The Paris police got him out in one piece and he retired from the whole schmier.

Perhaps the piano playing aroused people’s suspicions. Of course it was entirely believable that a Freemason would be changed into a crocodile, but could a crocodile really play the piano with the tip of his tail? That seems a bit far-fetched.

Women and Confession

February 16, 2011 in anticlericalism 27 Comments Tags: anticlericalism, Confession, women

Crowhill makes the point:

There is a perspective on the problem of (heterosexual) abuse that I think Catholics avoid — for obvious reasons.

When a man gives a woman spiritual counsel, it is an intrinsically intimate thing and the possibility of sexual entanglement is very real. The husband is the head of the home and of his wife. When a priest gives “spiritual direction” to a married woman, he is usurping the husband’s place and creating sexual tension.

No man, priest or not, has any business giving spiritual counsel to any woman who is not his wife. And no woman has any business giving spiritual counsel to a man.

I have been researching anticlericalism. It is much milder in Protestant countries than in Catholic countries, where it sometimes becomes murderous.

A recurring theme in Catholic anticlericalism is the resentment and jealousy that the husband feels when his wife starts talking intimately to another man, whether in confession or spiritual direction.

Jules Michelet, the French historian, was horrified by this intrusion into the relationship of husband and wife. He objected to confession because priests asked detailed questions about sexual practices. One historian has observed that French disliked priests “because through the confessional, where the penitents were mostly women, they exercised power over men’s sexuality.”

A really sore point in France for Catholic men was contraception. If the married couple practiced coitus interruptus, the wife was blameless; the sin was solely the husband’s. The French bishops in 1870 at the First Vatican Council were going to ask the Council to allow priests to give absolution to a man if he was practicing coitus interruptus, but the Council adjourned because of the political situation before the matter could be discussed.

Celibacy and the Mission of the Church

February 4, 2011 in anticlericalism, Celibacy 7 Comments Tags: anticlericalism, Celibacy, missions

In Männer Glauben Anders, Markus Hofer sketches the situation in the early church: the married men heading local churches and the wandering celibate missionary.

In Death Comes to the Archbishop, it is clear that the missionary priests must be celibate, because they have to be ready to go anywhere, into dangerous situations, on a moment’s notice. Celibacy can be lonely, especially for a missionary far from his native land and extended family, but it is necessary to spread the kingdom. The model of the celibate missionary won out in the Western Church, although it was not observed with great care. The constant legislation against clerical marriage and clerical concubinage indicates that priests were not following the discipline. For a priest who lived in a village his whole life it was hard to see the missionary purpose of celibacy.

After Ignatius of Loyola’s conversion, he established for his followers an intensely masculine environment in which they had to be ready to go anywhere at anytime to do the work of God. It was an adventurous masculine life, and obviously incommpatible with marriage. Ignatius would upset the local clergy in Spain when he arrived and tried to get the local bishop to enforce the discipline of celibacy.

The missionaries of the Church have an obvious connection with celibacy. While I respect married Protestant missionaries, I wonder how they can bring their wives and especially their children into dangerous environments. These do not have to be in the recesses of Africa or New Guinea. Many urban areas are dangerous, both in the United States and Europe. A priest in Naples who tried to keep young men out of organized crime was murdered by the Mafia.

Perhaps (and I emphasize perhaps) the missionary vitality of the Western Church as compared with the Eastern Churches is at least in part explained by the celibacy of it clergy.

As to celibacy being a sign in a sex-obsessed age – I don’t know. We do not know how often violations, even criminal violations, occur; but they get a lot of publicity and they discredit celibacy, and give evidence for the belief that celibates are hypocrites. However, I have been researching the anticlericalism of the Spanish Civil War, and the anticlericals had a special and intense hatred for truly celibate priests. Some priests were told their lives would be spared if they had sex; the priests refused to violate their vows and were shot – shot if they were lucky. Sexual torture was a favorite weapon of the Republican anticlericals. So perhaps celibacy is a sign of contradiction, and a necessary one.