LYING IS THEIR RULE, Satan is their God, and shameful deeds their sacrifice.” Pius VIII, Traditae Humilitati Nostrae, 1829. Gregory XVI compares the secret societies to a sink in which “are congregated and intermingled all the sacrileges, infamy and blasphemy which are contained in the most abominable heresies.” Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos, 1832. “Those baneful secret sects which have come forth from the darkness for the ruin and devastation of Church and State,” Pius IX, Quo Pluribus, 1846, to whom he later applied the words of Our Lord: “You are from your father the devil, and it is the works of your father that you wish to do.” Pius IX, Singulari Quadam, 1864.
“You see then before you the two systems. . . . On the one side is the Church of ‘men of goodwill’, one, holy, visible and universal; on the other, the ecclesia malignantium, as the Scriptures call it, the Church of men of evil will; one in enmity against the Church of God, though manifold as the multiplicity of evil; unholy in thought, word, deed, intention and will; invisible because secret, stealthy, subterraneous, working out of sight, and in darkness undermining the private purities of homes, the public order of States, the thrones of princes.” Cardinal Manning: Rome and the Revolution, 1867. “Filled with the spirit of Satan, who knows how to trans- form himself into an angel of light, Freemasonry puts forward as its pretended aim the good of humanity. Paying a lip service to the authority of law, and even to the obligations of religion, it aims (as its own statutes declare), at the destruction of civil authority and of the Christian priesthood, both of which it regards as the foes of human liberty.” Leo XIII: Parvenu a la Vingtcinquieme annee, 1902.
The original title of this book, which was compiled from a series of lectures delivered in Edinburgh in October, 1884 by Mgr. Dillon, was The War of Antichrist with the Church and Christian Civilization. The author wrote it “in order to do his part in carrying out the instruction given by the Sovereign Pontiff in the Encyclical Humanum Genus when he called upon the pastors of souls, to whom it was addressed, to ‘instruct the people as to the artifices used by societies of this kind in seducing men and enticing them into their ranks, and as to the depravity of their opinions and the wickedness of their acts’. Mgr. Dillon’s work has already been honoured by the Holy Father himself with so marked and so unusual an approbation that there is no need for us to accord it any further praise than merely to take note of the fact. The book was presented to His Holiness, accompanied by an Italian version of its table of contents, and of long extracts from its principal sections, and Leo XIII was pleased to order that the Italian version should be completed, and the book printed and published at Rome at his own expense.” (The Month, Sept. 1885). Despite the fact that the lectures were delivered by a Catholic prelate to an audience composed mainly of members of his own faith, we feel that the subject of international political skullduggery is one which cannot fail to interest Catholic and non-Catholic alike, the more so indeed since events in the course of the decades following the original publication of this book have confirmed the lecturer’s thesis. The last four editions have appeared under the title of Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked.