The previous US president might technically be excommunicated from the Catholic Church for turning into a Grasp Mason
Former US President Joe Biden, a self-professed Catholic, has joined an African-American Masonic lodge as a ‘Grasp Mason’. The Vatican takes a dim view of Freemasonry, and Catholics who be part of the fraternal order face excommunication.
Biden was inducted into the Most Worshipful Prince Corridor Grand Lodge in South Carolina on Sunday, sooner or later earlier than he left workplace. In a personal ceremony, the lodge’s grand grasp, Victor C. Main, granted Biden “Grasp Mason membership with full honors,” in keeping with an announcement revealed by the group final weekend that circulated on-line on Friday.
”To be a Freemason is to be a part of a brotherhood devoted to non-public progress, service to others, and the pursuit of data and fact,” the lodge wrote. Biden’s service, the assertion added, “displays the core values” of this brotherhood.
Though its origins stretch again to the fifteenth century, trendy Freemasonry developed in Britain within the early 1700s and shortly grew right into a Europe- and US-wide fraternity for philosophers, spiritual dissidents, occultists, and the enterprise and political elite. Some 14 US presidents, together with George Washington, have been Freemasons.
Prince Corridor Masonry is a traditionally black sect of Freemasonry based in 1775 by a freed slave in Boston.
Biden has not publicly acknowledged becoming a member of the ranks of the Prince Corridor Masons. Nevertheless, his membership within the group stands at odds together with his Catholic religion.
Pope Clement XII forbade Catholics from training Freemasonry in 1738, and this papal ban remained in place till 1983, when the Vatican issued a brand new order banning membership in organizations that “plot towards the Church.” Whereas the brand new order didn’t explicitly title Freemasonry, it maintained excommunication as a possible punishment for Catholics who be part of such organizations.
”The devoted who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and should not obtain Holy Communion,” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would go on to turn out to be Pope, declared on the time.
All through his political life, Biden has generally embraced political positions that contradict his religion. Again in 2021, the US Convention of Catholic Bishops drafted a doc that will have forbidden Biden from receiving Holy Communion over his pro-abortion views. After Pope Francis declared Biden a “good Catholic,” and stated that he ought to proceed receiving Communion, the doc was revised to state that Catholic politicians have a “particular accountability to embody Church educating of their service of the widespread good.”
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