The Nordic bishops’ conference issued a pastoral letter June 29 reiterating that Catholics are absolutely barred from joining Masonic lodges, in response to “decades of speculation” that the situation in Scandinavia is a special case for Catholic affiliation with Freemasonry.
The conference, which includes the dioceses of Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, and Norway, issued the letter “to clarify a matter that for many years, if not decades, has generated uncertainty, speculation and diverging opinions in our countries: the question of whether or not Catholic faithful in the Nordic countries may be Freemasons or belong to a Masonic lodge,” according to the text.
The bishops wrote that “In the light of differences sometimes perceived to exist between the various strands of Freemasonry, an opinion took hold in our countries supposing that Freemasons in the Nordic countries are distinct in such a way that membership might be permitted for the Catholic faithful in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.”
However, the bishops reiterated, while these questions have “caused disquiet, indeed a degree of uproar in our local Churches,” “there exists no exception, no particular norm or rule, and in consequence no dispensation in the Church that distinguishes adherence to Freemasonry in the Nordic countries from the provisions of the universal law of the Church,” which totally prohibits Catholics from joining any Masonic associations, under pain of canonical penalty.
The letter, which was circulated on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul to all clergy in the Nordic region, includes four “pastoral and sacramental provisions” for Catholics who need to sever a masonic affiliation — including the ban on their receiving Communion and the other sacraments until they do so — and for those Freemasons who wish to enter the Catholic Church.
The bishops also noted that they raised the issue with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith during a plenary assembly in Rome in 2023, calling the Vatican doctrinal department’s response “crystal clear” that the ban on Catholic association with Masonic lodges or groups is universal and absolute.
“We wish to stress that [the] Catholic Church’s firmness on the question of adherence to Freemasonry is not a negative judgement on the good will or good works of individuals,” wrote the bishops in their letter on Monday. “The Church’s position springs from awareness that the theological and philosophical principles of freemasonry are incompatible with confession of the Catholic faith.”
In an introduction to the letter, conference president Bishop Erik Varden, OCSO, of Trondheim said that “to be a Christian is to make fundamental choices. Our speech is to be ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’, not ‘A little bit of this and a little bit of that’.”
“We are obliged to tell our priests that no Catholic can be a Freemason; so that our priests in turn can guide and direct the unfaithful with clarity and charity — for the preaching of the truth in love is a high form of charity.”
The Nordic bishops’ letter is the latest in a series of interventions by the Vatican and bishops conferences in recent years which reiterate the total and universal condemnation of Freemasonry by the Church, and the inability of Catholic Freemasons to receive the sacraments.
In 2023, a doctrinal note signed by Pope Francis and DDF prefect Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez called for “a coordinated strategy among the individual bishops” of the Philippines to address “very significant” Masonic membership and sympathy in the country.
The DDF note also identified “a large number of sympathizers and associates who are personally convinced that there is no opposition between membership in the Catholic Church and in Masonic lodges.”
That note was issued as a correction to a public statement on the same issue earlier that year from the Philippine bishops’ conference doctrinal commission, which expressed “openness to the situation of individual Catholics (on a case-to-case basis)” who had joined Masonic lodges, while reiterating the Church’s canonical and theological opposition to Masonic association as a whole.
The Vatican response offered no accommodation or openness to Catholics who have joined Masonic lodges, even on a case-by-case basis, and instead reminded the bishop that “those [Catholics] who are formally and knowingly enrolled in Masonic lodges and have embraced Masonic principles fall under the provisions in the [1983 CDF] Declaration.”
That declaration, signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was issued shortly before the 1983 Code of Canon Law came into force and stated that “the faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.”
A change in the wording of the 1983 Code from the 1917 Code, which removed the use of the term “Masonic,” gave rise to an erroneous impression in some territories and among some canonists that Catholic membership of the Freemasons was no longer always and everywhere impossible and prohibited, prompting several corrections from the Vatican, both before and after the new code came into force.
In fact, the committee responsible for the revision of the Code of Canon Law proposed and decided to remove explicit reference to Freemasonry in the canon on prohibited societies because of concerns the canon would otherwise be too narrowly interpreted — that Catholics might think only Masonic societies were banned by the law.
In his introductory note to the Nordic bishops’ letter on Monday, Bishop Varden acknowledged this historical confusion, and the various Church documents which have attempted to clarify matters over the last four decades.
In particular, Varden noted a 1980 declaration from the German bishops’ conference — a summary of which he included as an attachment to the Nordic bishops’ letter — which was issued after substantial dialogue with local masonic lodges in that country.
“We can be grateful to the German bishops for speaking so clearly, 46 years ago, about the objective truth of Catholic teaching and for denouncing as falsehood the notion that a putative ‘Copernican revolution’ had, with the Second Vatican Council, replaced the notion of objective truth with a notion of human dignity by which each individual might be thought empowered to evaluate subjectively what truth is and is not,” said Varden. “The truth that liberates and saves is the truth revealed by God in Christ, none else.”
The German report concluded that, the desire for more dialogue with people of goodwill notwithstanding, the Masonic worldview and concepts of truth and religion remain totally relativistic and incompatible with the Christian faith.
The understanding of God in Masonry remains deistic and excludes Divine revelation, the German bishops found, and the Masonic principles of toleration and equivalency among faiths continue to promote religious indifference in members.
The German bishops also stated that Masonic rituals and spirituality have a clear quasi-sacramental character and are seen to be higher and purer than those of a mason’s personal religion, while Freemasonry believes and promotes the sufficiency of Masonry alone for the perfection of mankind, excluding and denying the necessity of Christ for the salvation of mankind and the unique power of Baptism and the other sacraments.
The notion of supposed “Christian Lodges” is a fiction, said the German bishops, because, even when they are not explicitly deistic or atheistic, so-called Christian Lodges actually only adapt Christianity to masonry and never the other way around.
The German bishops’ declaration in 1980 followed years of confusion on the issue during the decades following the Second Vatican Council II.
In October of 1966, the Nordic bishops issued a statement that, because of their substantially different character, bishops in Scandinavian dioceses could make a determination for themselves which, if any, Masonic lodges ought be considered still proscribed by canonical norms and which could be tolerated for Catholics to join.
That declaration, along with others of its kind, was formally corrected in 1981 by the then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Franjo Šeper, in a declaration from the CDF stating that the specific premise that Masonic lodges are substantially different in different countries and regions was a “false and tendentious” interpretation of the law.
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Masonic lodges began as trade guilds of stoneworkers in Medieval England and Scotland.
Despite historical fictions pretending to find links to ancient Egypt and the construction of Solomon’s Temple, the modern iteration of Freemasonry as a club for alchemists, pseudo-philosophers, political dissidents, and religious non-conformists, began in a London pub in 1717.
Shortly thereafter, Masonic lodges spread throughout Europe. In the beginning, Catholics could join as members, too — Francis I of Austria was a patron — since the Church had as yet made no pronouncements about it, one way or another.
That changed in 1738, when Pope Clement XII banned Freemasonry as promoting religious indifferentism — the idea that it didn’t matter what you believed about God, as long as you were a good mason, because everyone in the lodge was serving a higher notion of natural virtue.
From Clement until the promulgation of the first universal Code of Canon Law in 1917, eight popes issued encyclicals or papal bulls denouncing Freemasonry and imposing a penalty of automatic excommunication reserved to the Holy See for any Catholic who joined.
The Church has continuously condemned the idea of Freemasonry because it removed Catholics from legitimate ecclesiastical oversight while they were being, effectively, catechised into a new philosophy — a different way of looking at the world.
When the Church’s leaders first spoke about Masonry as “plotting against the faith,” they meant that the Masonic worldview was subverting the teaching of the Church for Catholics who joined, and teaching them that it was equally valid to be a Catholic, a Protestant, some other religion entirely, or nothing at all — and that it was becoming a Mason, not being baptized, which would lead to a person’s spiritual and moral fulfillment.
In 1821, Pius VII’s apostolic constitution Ecclesiam a Iesu Christo repeated the papal ban on Masonic societies, including those attempting to violently overthrow the papal states.
But, the pope taught that the true threat came from the Masonic philosophy of religious indifferentism, and promotion of what would today be called “secularism.”
In one of several encyclicals condemning Freemasonry, Leo XIII explained the secuarist agenda of Masonry which, he said, included “the State, which [Masonry believes] ought to be absolutely atheistic, having the inalienable right and duty to form the heart and the spirit of its citizens,” as well as the treatment of marriage as a merely civil contract which could be dissolved at will.
Freemasonry often says of itself that it isn’t a religion, that it’s just a society of men who value fellowship, cooperation, natural virtue, “that religion in which all men agree,” according to Leo.
However, the pope explained, there are a lot of Masonic rituals which the Church considers to be religious in tone, even quasi-sacramental.
The first ritual of initiation in Freemasonry, to become an “entered apprentice,” involves the applicant stripping down and removing any articles he may be wearing, like a wedding ring or crucifix.
Then he’s told to get half dressed, wearing a shirt on his right side, one trouser leg rolled up, one slipper and blindfold.
Then a noose is placed around his neck and he’s led into the lodge hall where he’s announced as “Mr. X, who has long been in darkness and now seeks to be brought to light.”
The candidate is then told to embrace the “principle of Freemasonry that the natural eye cannot perceive of the mysteries of the Order until the heart has embraced the deep spiritual and mystic meanings of those sublime mysteries.”
For his part, the aspiring apprentice also affirms that he is in search of “the light” which only Masonry can give him.
The rest of the ritual involves moments where the candidate is made to process through the hall blindfolded (sometimes at swordpoint), kneel, be prayed over, and eventually be admitted to the lodge.
Higher degrees of Masonic initiation involve explicitly anti-Catholic rituals.
In the thirtieth degree of the Scottish Rite (which is actually American), the Mason is presented with a skull wearing a papal tiara and told it “represents the tiara of the cruel and cowardly pontiff” and “is therefore the crown of an imposter.”
At one point in the ritual, a senior Mason stabs the skull with a dagger, while the candidate yells “Down with imposter, down with crime,” before stamping on it.