Freemasons build on good-works ethic
In pursuit of his Christian duty, the Rev. Matthew Wissell used to dress up as a clown.
Pastor of Eastham United Methodist Church on Cape Cod and a Freemason, Wissell spent six years entertaining young burn victims at Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston. The Shriners are part of the Freemasons, the global fraternal organization founded in 18th-century England that spends millions of dollars on charitable works, motivated in part by its minimalist religious requirement that members profess faith in one God.
Wissell followed his grandfather's footsteps into the Freemasons 15 years ago.
"As a United Methodist, we understand that faith is more than simply adhering to a group of beliefs," he said. "It's living out our beliefs in the world in a very tangible way."
Celebrating their 275th anniversary this year, the 38,000-member Massachusetts Freemasons - down from more than 100,000 a generation ago - have run TV ads to attract new members and publicize a group that for centuries piqued the interest of conspiracy theorists obsessed with its supposedly nefarious secrets and religious heresies. The group's US membership peaked around 1960 but has been almost halved, to 2.5 million, since.
The first significant third party in American history cracked the Electoral College in 1832 on a platform devoted solely to exterminating Freemasonry: the Anti-Masonic Party. Evangelical clergy of the time condemned Freemasons as deists, or worse. Today, cabalistic notions about the group linger mainly in potboiler plots. "The Da Vinci Code" revels in references to the organization and its roots in medieval stonemason guilds. ("The secret knowledge of how to use a wedged keystone to build a vaulted archway was part of the wisdom that had made the Masons such wealthy craftsmen, and it was a secret they guarded carefully," novelist Dan Brown wrote in his blockbuster.)
And Freemasons squirreled away the titular stash in the movie "National Treasure," putting themselves atop a secret fortune.
"I can assure you that is not the case," said Roger W. Pageau grand master of Freemasons in Massachusetts, who said he'd probably be in Bermuda if it were. Which is not to deny the impressiveness of the Boston grand lodge. Masonic symbols in tile on the façade splash color onto Tremont Street, while inside, the monthly meeting room is replete with a wooden throne, upholstered side benches, and scalloped ceiling.
Yet behind the ornate appearance, one church sees a theological foe. Dick Cusick, the 61-year-old insurance coordinator for the grand lodge and a Catholic, said when the Vatican learned that he had been a Freemason for 23 years and he vowed to remain in the organization, he was excommunicated.
The Vatican considers the mandatory belief in nothing more than a supreme being to be a renunciation of such teachings as the Trinity and Jesus' divinity, The Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, reported last year. Pageau said, however, that the Freemasons don't require Catholic members, or those of any other faiths, to renounce any of their churches' teachings, and that the group counts many Catholics among its members.
But Cusick says he ran into trouble when the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the Catholic charity for which he worked, learned of his Freemason affiliation and alerted Rome.
For a man engaged in Catholic social works, getting the boot stung.
"I fed the homeless," he said. "Every Wednesday, I did a prison ministry down in Bridgewater."
Belief in God and devotion to ritual aside, the group is fraternal, not theological, and its chapters, called lodges, tend to have distinct personalities, says Pageau. Harvard, for instance, hosts a lodge that is open to men with some connection to the university. It recently welcomed 25 new members, while the Freemasons statewide added 600 members last year. Pageau hopes these numbers signal a wave of renewed interest in the fraternity that included George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Paul Revere in its membership.
Wissell is far from the only minister in the Freemasons.
"My pastor today is a member," said Pageau, also a Methodist, "and his father was, and his father was." But "we are not a religion. Hopefully, we are not even a substitute for religion, although maybe in some cases we are."
Monthly meetings begin and end with a prayer, but "we don't talk about Jesus, or Mohammed. We talk about God."
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