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@AAronL1968

I'm surprised to see the Vatican not showing any flexibility or readiness to rethink older views but clinging instead to what appears to be that conservative Catholic obsession, antimasonry.

The French right has a long been hostile to freemasonry. In 1797 Abbé Augustin Barruel accused the freemasons of having plotted to undermine the church and monarchy in France, and by the early twentieth century, antimasonry obsessed the French right and ultraright; Charles Maurras, the master thinker of the French ultraright, identified the masons as one of four groups , the others being Jews, protestants, and immigrant stock , choking the "real France" to death.

Inspired by such hostility, German occupiers and their French collaborators organized an antimasonic exhibition in Paris that opened in 1940 and toured the country, drawing over one million visitors:

https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/video/afe85000452/exposition-maconnique

Note how antimasonry is blended with antisemitism in the exhibition.

Right wing antimasonry was/is by no means confined to France. The conspiracy theorizing and antisemitism that accompanies antimasonry has its echoes not just in early twentieth century movements like that of Franco in Spain, but also in the ravings of Q-Anon and similar anglophone ultraright groups of our time. I wonder if the conservative Catholic and Trumpthinker-in-chief Steve Bannon is also an antimason.