An excerpt from, "The CIA and the Study of Religion" by Michael Graziano, American Religion:
Studying the Central Intelligence Agency can be a frustrating experience. The Agency’s documents are protected by law, becoming visible to the public only through a haphazard and glacial declassification process. At the same time, the CIA engages in deliberate obfuscation, leaking inaccurate information about itself to cloud the historical record. My book, Errand Into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA, was profoundly shaped both by archival availability and suspicions about the limitations of those very same archives. The story I found was what US intelligence officers in the Second World War called the “religious approach” to intelligence: a concerted effort by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and its spiritual successor, the CIA, to study and operationalize religious knowledge in the service of US policy. As the book’s coverage grew, however, data collection felt like playing Jenga in reverse—a memo here, a transcript there—with each additional piece teetering towards a portrait of an agency that defies depiction. Rather than write an overarching history of the CIA, I chose to focus on deeper, narrower examples that illuminated how US intelligence officers worked with religion and how, in turn, religion worked on them.
. . .Moran points to the distinction between theorizing about religion and shaping religion: were the OSS and CIA misunderstanding Catholicism or shaping their preferred form of it? In the book, I demonstrate how theorizing about religion and shaping it are two sides of the same coin, especially when you have the resources and political will, as these agencies did, to theorize in order to shape. While there was certainly confusion about the Church within the intelligence services, their officers nonetheless labored to shape a preferred strand of Catholicism. For the OSS and CIA, the appeal of using Roman Catholicism as a model for religion writ large could be found in the qualities that ostensibly made it easy to study: the Church lent itself to mapping on an organizational chart, a tidy pyramid with the pope on top. These kinds of simple visual aids were designed to help officers theorize. They were especially useful to those who joined the OSS from the corporate world. As intelligence officers theorized how to best work with the Church, they shaped the US government’s understanding of the Church and, later, the way US Americans thought of it, too.
An excerpt from, "Freemasons Thank Francis for his Christmas Message" One Peter Five, January 16, 2019:
In affirming with emphasis the importance of the concepts expressed by Francis, the Grand Lodge of Spain observes: “The words of the Pope show how far the Church has come from the content of Humanum Genus (1884), the last great Catholic condemnation of Masonry.”
In the encyclical Humanum Genus Pope Leo XIII condemned Masonry without half-measures, stigmatizing “the great modern error of religious indifferentism and of the equality of all religions,” an attitude which the pope of that time called “the most opportune way to annihilate all religions, and especially Catholicism, which, because it is the one true religion, cannot be placed in a bundle with all the others without enormous injustice.”
According to the Spanish Masons, the way in which the present pope condemns religious fundamentalism and asks for fraternity and tolerance brings the Church alongside Masonry, uniting them in their commitment to universal fraternity, apart from their differences in the political, cultural, natural and religious fields.
The expression of esteem for the Pope by Masonry is noteworthy, but not surprising. After Paul VI, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (who has been an honorary member of the Rotary Club since 1999) is decisively the Pope most appreciated by international Masonry.
In 1736, the Inquisition investigated a Masonic lodge in Florence, Italy, which it condemned in June 1737. The lodge had originally been founded in 1733 by the English Freemason Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset, but accepted Italian members, such as the lodge's secretary Tommaso Crudeli. Also in 1736, on 26 December, Andrew Michael Ramsay delivered an oration to a Masonic meeting in Paris on the eve of the election of Charles Radclyffe as Grand Master of the French Freemasons. In March 1737 he sent an edited copy to the chief minister, Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury, seeking his approval for its delivery to an assembly of Freemasons, and his approval of the craft in general. Fleury's response was to brand the Freemasons as traitors, and ban their assemblies. This ban, and the Italian investigation led, in 1738, to Pope Clement XII promulgating In eminenti apostolatus, the first canonical prohibition of Masonic associations.
Clement XII wrote that the reasons for prohibiting Masonic associations are that members, "content with [a] form of natural virtue, are associated with one another" by oaths with "grave penalties ... to conceal in inviolable silence whatever they secretly do together." These associations have aroused suspicions that "to join these associations is precisely synonymous with incurring the taint of evil and infamy, for if they were not involved in evil doing, they would never be so very averse to the light [of publicity] ... The rumor [of these doings] has so grown that" several governments have suppressed them "as being opposed to the welfare of the kingdom." Clement XII wrote that these kinds of associations are "not consistent with the provisions of either civil or canon law" since they harm both "the peace of the civil state" and "the spiritual salvation of souls."
