There is, indeed, a good deal of difficulty in tracing all these evils to the action of the Freemasons; for on the Continent, especially in Spain, the society has been always of a more secret nature than in these countries. Members of the Craft in England and the United States are generally well known to belong to it; their halls and lodges in the larger towns are imposing and conspicuous; their emblems and badges are often seen in the light of day. But on the Continent we see very little of all this; it is a thoroughly secret society; the members and their movements are carefully veiled from sight. As we said before, Freemasonry, on its introduction to the Continent, at once assumed a political character. The Deists and free-thinkers of the last century utilized it as a potent means of combining against the Church, and of carrying on their evil propaganda. In this way they were aided by the Jansenists, with different motives it is true, but still, when it was a question of opposing the religious Orders, with a whole heart. The working of the society in Spain in this century has necessarily been more stealthy and insidious than in France, for there it was face to face with a truly Catholic population devotedly attached to the Church.
By means of atheistical French literature, the works of Voltaire and other unbelievers, translated into Spanish, brought across the border in large bales, and disseminated through the Peninsula, the Freemasons had already indoctrinated a large number of active and restless spirits with revolutionary and anti-Christian ideas, when the troubles and civil war of 1834 gave them the opportunity they desired of making an onslaught on the religious Orders. At such times the minds of men are in a ferment, and the most incredible reports may be spread abroad, and will be implicitly believed by the populace. Accordingly, on the awful visitation of cholera, which swept over Europe at that time, desolating cities and towns, and leaving thousands upon thousands of families in mourning, in Madrid the report was industriously spread by the Masons that the Monks and Friars had poisoned the wells, and were the cause of the sickness among the people. In a mad fit of rage the populace rose on all sides, rushed to the convents and monasteries, and murdered all the inmates they could lay their hands upon. This awful event is referred to in the Memorial.
Such a state of things may seem hardly possible in the nineteenth century; and yet a similar catastrophe nearly happened in Lisbon a few years ago, the circumstances of which were related to the writer by one of the Dominicans who was living there at the time. It appears that the Dominican nuns had opened a dispensary for the relief of the poor. Strange to say, the frightful report soon went abroad that the nuns were stealing children, and killing and boiling them down to make a healing ointment out of their remains. The city was in an uproar; it was unsafe for priests and nuns to be seen in the streets; and the populace who really believed the absurd story, being in a furious state of excitement, were on the point of burning down the convent, and maltreating the nuns.
To return to Spain, the popular rising in Madrid was utilized by the revolutionary party in carrying out, the following year, the suppression of all the convents and monasteries in the country. The religious were driven out into the world; and their lands, goods, libraries, and art-treasures were sold for the benefit of the public debt, and to supply means to carry on the civil war. The bishops and secular clergy as well were also robbed, numerous episcopal sees were suppressed, and the goods of the Church declared to be national property. The Freemason Government promised to look after the interests of the Church by paying salaries to all ecclesiastics. As a result, Spain was filled, in a few years, with a poverty-stricken and starving clergy, and ruined churches and mouldering abbeys were to be seen on all sides. The effects of that great spoliation are still felt in the Peninsula; for though the religious Orders have revived in the meantime, and numerous convents and monasteries have been built, the priests are not in sufficient numbers for the needs of the population, which thereby, in many places, is suffering great spiritual destitution.
The policy of robbery and confiscation was boldly advocated for the Philippines, just before the late war, in one of the leading reviews of Madrid. Juan Ferrando Gomez, in a series of articles[1] bitterly hostile to the Philippine Friars, proposed their entire suppression. They should be turned out of their convents and missionary houses by a secret decree, of which they were to be kept in ignorance till the execution actually took place. Their convents in Manila would be useful as barracks and Government offices, their country estates could be divided amongst their tenants, and the rents formerly paid to the Friars could be commuted into a tax to be paid to the State. Moreover, the Archbishop of Manila, and any others of the bishops belonging to the religious Orders, should be forced out of the country. Besides that, the schools and university belonging to the Friars should also be either suppressed, or taken out of their hands. Reading these flagrantly unjust proposals in the light of recent Spanish history, and with the help of the Memorial, we are inclined to believe that, without much further pressure from the Freemasons, the Spanish Ministry would have carried them out. Fortunately for the Friars, as well as the natives, they have no voice in the matter now. Under the American flag the religious will be treated as citizens, having the common right of citizens, neither to be molested in their persons nor robbed of their property. The President of the United States has declared this in clear terms to the Holy See.
With regard to Freemasonry in Spanish or Latin America, the Rev. Reuben Parsons has recently written on the subject (see [Appendix III].), substantiating all his assertions by quotations from Masonic organs or other unprejudiced sources, and clearly exposing the systematic war which the lodges in South and Central America have carried on against religion. He shows how it has started revolutions, assassinated the leaders of the people, exiled the clergy, and persecuted the Church in other ways.
We will now endeavor to trace the history of Freemasonry in the Philippines and its connection with the insurrection there. In the Philippines Freemasonry found itself face to face with a simple native population, mostly Christian, and an active body of Spanish missionaries belonging to various religious Orders, loyal to their native country, possessing unbounded influence over their flocks, and rapidly bringing under the yoke of Christ the tribes who were still Pagan. The religious were a power that they could not hope to cope with for a long time; and so at first they were left unmolested, while the members of the Craft were gathering converts, and strengthening their position, among a class more suitable to their nefarious designs, viz., the mestizos, or half-breeds; the Filipinos, or those who, though born in the country, consider themselves the pure-blooded descendants of the early colonists; and the Spanish officials, numbers of whom were already Masons before they went to the Archipelago.
That the Freemasonry in the Philippines has shown itself of a distinctly sanguinary nature is not to be wondered at when we consider its close connection with Spain. The Lodge of Action, or Red Lodge, composed of determined revolutionists ready to use the dagger, and prepared to wade through a sea of blood to accomplish their designs, represented by Mazzini and the Carbonari in Italy, has a large following in Spain, and was presided over, a few years ago, by Zorilla, the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Spain.
The following account of the growth of Freemasonry in the Philippines, taken from the Rosario, an organ published in Rome, the editor of which has access to special information, and is in close touch with friars who have been living for many years in the archipelago as missionaries, will be of profound interest. In or about 1860 many of the strangers who frequented the Philippines were Freemasons, and members of the lodges of Singapore, Hongkong, Java, Macao, and the open ports of China. This was at a period when England, Holland, France, the United States, for colonial reasons of their own, showed hostility to Spain. It was therefore quite natural that, in those lodges, an anti-Spanish spirit gradually arose in the Philippines. Seeing this spirit arising, two officials of the Spanish navy, Malcampo and Mendez Nunez, Freemasons themselves, determined to oppose Freemasonry to Freemasonry, by founding lodges that would uphold the Spanish interests; they therefore established, at Cavite, the Lodge Primera Luz Filippina, placing it under the Grand Orient of Lusitania, and a little afterwards another lodge at Zamboanga, for the officials, seamen, and civil functionaries who held positions in Mindanao.
In opposition to these, the strangers residing in the Philippines established at Manila itself a lodge of the Scottish rite, as a point d’appui for the enemies of Spain. They thus moved the centre of conspiracy against Spain to the islands themselves, and tried to draw the natives into their nets by giving them important positions in the Craft. The two opposing factions of Freemasonry also increased their numbers largely by taking in the political exiles who were sent to the Philippines as a result of the part taken by them in the various civil wars in the Peninsula, most of whom gave their names and services to one or the other. It is remarkable that these two bodies, guided by opposite political principles, one depending on a Spanish centre and directed principally by Spaniards, the other directed principally by Germans, English, and Americans, and opposed to Spanish interests, found, at least in one direction, a point of concord, namely, in opposition to the religious Orders. Although the Spanish Masons were actuated by a love for their mother-country, still the well-known anti-clericalism of Freemasonry prevailed over every other consideration, blinding them to the fact that the best and most influential representatives of Spain in the Philippines were to be found in the religious Orders, who were the only civilizing force able to deal with the natives. They thus indirectly paved the way for the insurrection; for it is well known that from the ranks of the opposing factions, and principally by reason of their anti-clerical tendencies, arose the sanguinary society of the “Katipunan,” which made it its direct aim to expel the friars, and overturn the Spanish government in the islands. The Grand Orient, the organ of this society, declared that one of the first articles of its programme was the extermination of the religious. And here it may be noticed that the ninth term of the proposals made by the insurgents to America was as follows: “There shall be a general religious toleration; but measures shall be adopted for the abolition and expulsion of the religious communities, who, with an iron hand, have hitherto demoralized the actual civil administration.”