In my online circles, it's not unusual to claim that the Catholic Church was infiltrated by the Freemasons, but the counterfactual in my title will strike readers as preposterous. I won't argue, but it's worth asking why it is preposterous. As Henri Daniel-Rops points out, the Freemasons didn't start out being explicitly anti-Catholic.
Too many writers are prejudiced for or against freemasons, and have argued accordingly. More unfortunately, they endow their concept of freemasonry in the eighteenth century with characteristics that belong rather to the attack it launched against the Church during the nineteenth and twentieth...
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