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English Methodists and the Myth of the Catholic Antichrist (c. 1755 – 1817)
Paul’s second epistle to the community at Thessalonica warned that the second coming of Christ will be preceded by the appearance of ‘the man of sin’ (or ‘the man of lawlessness’), who will work false miracles and exalt himself over God, setting himself up in God’s Temple, all in accordance with the plans of Satan (2 Thess 2:1-17). The ‘man of sin’ was subsequently linked to the Antichrist mentioned in John’s first and second epistle (1 John 2:18-22, 4:3, 2 John 1:7). Various diabolic figures from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation have also been interpreted as relating to the Antichrist. These allusions to a diabolic character were fleshed out over time. According to Norman Cohn (1975), ‘over the centuries new and terrible anxieties began to make themselves felt in Christian minds, until it came to seem that the world was in the grip of demons and that their human allies were everywhere, even in the heart of Christendom itself.’ The Antichrist was regarded as an authentic manifestation of evil, who would lead Satan’s forces in a cosmic war against the followers of Christ. The Antichrist was intertwined with millenarian expectations of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The arrival of the Antichrist, as Cohn (1957) observed, was considered no mere ‘phantasy about some remote and indefinite future but a prophecy which was infallible and which at almost any given moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment’. [1]
The Seven-Headed Beast (Silos Apocalypse, Illuminated Manuscript) [Wikimedia Commons]
‘A wild beast coming up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns’
In English-Methodist discourses during the eighteenth century, it was often the Catholic popes – sometimes individually, sometimes collectively – who were mythicised as ‘the Antichrist’. The tone for these discourses about ‘Antichrist’ was set by the original founders and leaders of the Methodist movement, John Wesley (1703 – 1791) and Charles Wesley (1707 – 1788), both of whom were enthusiastic millenarians.
John Wesley’s general ambivalence and prejudice towards Roman Catholicism has been well documented by David Butler (1995), but it is specifically to John Wesley’s construction of the so-called ‘Romish Antichrist’ that we now turn. According to Butler, it was in his commentary on Revelation in his Explanatory Notes on the New Testament (1755) that John Wesley recorded his ‘oddest thoughts on the Papacy’. John Wesley’s preface to this section of his Explanatory Notes records how he despaired of understanding much of Revelation until he encountered ‘the works of the great Bengelius’, (i.e., Johann Bengel’s Gnomon, published in 1742), the reading of which ‘revived’ his hopes of understanding ‘even the prophecies’ recorded in the Book of Revelation. According to John Wesley, much of his commentary on Revelation was partly translated and abridged from observations found in Bengel’s Gnomon, albeit he allowed himself ‘the liberty’ to alter some of Bengel’s observations, and to add a few notes where he felt that Bengel’s account was incomplete. Where Johann Bengel ends and John Wesley begins is not always clear, but that they were seemingly much in agreement – at least in the passages that John Wesley derived or lifted from Bengel – seems reasonably certain.
John Wesley believed that the role of Antichrist, ‘the beast with seven heads’, was not assigned to just a single individual, but to ‘a body of men’ at some moments in history, and ‘an individual’ at others, which he summarised as ‘the papacy of many ages’. In particular, he seems to have had in mind all popes since the beginning of the papacy of Gregory VII in 1073. He regarded this fantastical ‘beast’ to be no mere legend but a real and imminent danger. Commenting on Revelation 13:1 (‘and I stood on the sand of the sea, and saw a wild beast coming up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten diadems, and upon his heads a name of blasphemy’), John Wesley stated that ‘O reader! This is a subject wherein we also are deeply concerned; and which must be treated, not as a point of curiosity, but as a solemn warning from God. The danger is near.’ According to John Wesley, the sea that the Antichrist was prophesied to emerge from was not ‘the abyss’ but rather ‘Europe’, and ‘the beast’ was ‘the Romish papacy, as it came to a point six hundred years since, stands now, and will for some time longer.’ John Wesley was not, it seems, entirely sure about the exact arrival of the Antichrist, suggesting that the Antichrist arrived some 600 to 700 years previously (from the perspective of his writing in the 1750s), at some point between the beginning of the papacy of Gregory VII and the conclusion of the papacy of Alexander III (i.e., between 1073 and 1181), though he fixated primarily on Gregory VII. Butler convincingly suggests that Wesley’s strongest suspicion was that Gregory VII was the original manifestation of ‘the beast’. This seems to be confirmed by a closer examination of Wesley’s commentary on Revelation. In his comment on Revelation 13:1, Wesley stated that ‘whatever power the papacy has had from Gregory VII, this the Apocalyptic beast represents’. And in his commentary on Revelation 17:11, Wesley states that: ‘the beast consists as it were of eight parts. The seven heads are seven of them; and the eighth is his whole body, or the beast himself … The whole succession of popes from Gregory VII are undoubtedly antichrist. Yet this hinders not, but that the last pope in this succession will be more eminently the antichrist, the man of sin; adding to that of his predecessors a peculiar degree of wickedness from the bottomless pit. This individual person, as a pope, is the seventh head of the beast; as the man of sin, he is the eighth, or the beast himself.’ Despite his warnings about the danger posed by ‘the beast’ in his Explanatory Notes in 1755, John Wesley seems to have believed that the beast would eventually be defeated in 1836 (following the chronology of Johann Bengel). In his commentary on Revelation 17:10, he speculates simply that in 1836, ‘the beast [will be] finally overthrown’. In fact, it seems that just 22 years later, John Wesley was already confident that the power of ‘the beast’ was already in decline. According to Butler, Wesley wrote a letter to Joseph Benson (another Methodist minister) in 1777, stating that ‘the Romish Anti-Christ is already so fallen that he will not again lift up his head in any considerable degree. … I therefore concur with you in believing that his tyranny is past never to return’. [2]
Two pages from John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 12th edition
Around the same time that John Wesley was finishing his Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, his brother, Charles Wesley, also made reference to the ‘Romish Antichrist’. In April 1754, he wrote a letter to an unknown correspondent. In this apocalyptic letter, Charles Wesley referred to the ‘labyrinth’ of ‘scriptural Prophecies’ that God had guided him through, and the arrival of the ‘Kingdom of our Lord in its fulness upon earth’ after certain key events: ‘the conversion of God’s antient people the Jews, their restoration to their own land; [and] the destruction of the Romish Antichrist & of all the other adversaries of Christ’s kingdom’. [3]
Kenneth Newport (1996), in his comprehensive survey of Methodist millenarianism (mostly premillennialism), identifies a number of other Methodist preachers who referred or alluded to the ‘Roman’, ‘Rome’ or Catholic ‘Antichrist’. For example, according to Newport, Joseph Sutcliffe (1762 – 1856), a preacher appointed by John Wesley to the Redruth Circuit in 1786, and the author of several works including a commentary on scripture and a 25-page pamphlet on the ‘glorious millennium, and the second coming of Christ’ (1798), constructed an elaborate millennial narrative combining elements of pre- and post-millennialism (with Christ’s second coming prior to his thousand-year reign on Earth, but with Christ returning to and ruling the earthly Church from heaven, and the millennium not entirely free from the vices and wickedness of earlier times, and with the millennium followed by one final cataclysmic battle between Jesus and Satan at its conclusion). In Sutcliffe’s narrative, the Roman ‘Antichrist’ (‘the pagan and the papal beast’) is defeated, the Jews embrace Christianity, and play a special eschatological role in helping to convert ‘the Turks, Tartars, Persians, and the numerous nations of the African shores’; ‘dwelling among all commercial nations, and being perfectly acquainted with their manners, customs, languages and religions, they [the Jews] are already arranged as an army of missionaries’. Later, Satan attacks the Jews, who by then are in Jerusalem, but Satan is defeated when Christ appears in visible form to slay his enemies. This is all expected to occur in the nineteenth century (beginning with the final defeat of the Antichrist circa 1820 and the battle against Satan in Jerusalem circa 1865). Then, after a thousand years of Christ’s rule of the earthly Church from the Celestial Court (i.e., a temporary paradise on Earth, a kingdom ruled from heaven, rather than located in heaven), Satan will escape his thousand-year imprisonment in the ‘bottomless pit’ to return for one last cosmic battle, but will be defeated by ‘the Lord Jesus’ who returns from heaven in ‘flaming fire’. After this, there will be the final judgement, the destruction of the wicked, and the resurrection of the righteous in the everlasting heavenly kingdom of God (presumably circa 2865). And according to Newport, Thomas Coke (1747 – 1814), the co-founder of Methodism in America and the first Methodist bishop, also developed a vibrant millenarian narrative in his Commentary on the Holy Bible (1803), in which the Antichrist already rules the Earth (presumably unbeknownst to most people), and has done so since the year 606 CE, but the Antichrist will be destroyed after his 1,260 year reign, in circa 1866, after which the Jews and Gentiles will all embrace Christianity, and the millennium will begin. [4]
Thomas Taylor (1738 – 1816), an influential Methodist preacher and friend of John Wesley, also argued that the ‘great Anti-christ’ was the ‘church of Rome’, in his Ten Sermons on the Millennium; or, the Glory of the Latter Days (1789). According to Taylor, ‘a glorious time’ was coming, when ‘Jesus will reign, and every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess him to be Lord’. This blessed time will, Taylor suggested, involve the ‘destruction of Antichrist’, ‘the chaining of the dragon’, ‘wars and fighting ceasing’ and ‘the gathering in of the Jews’, among other events. Turning to the subject of Antichrist, Taylor observed that ‘every person, persons or thing, which oppose Christ, may be termed Anti-christ’. According to Taylor, the Antichrist thus consists of many groups, including ‘the Jews’, ‘the Turks’ and ‘Socinians’. But for Taylor, the ‘great Antichrist’ was the Catholic Church. For example, whilst he summed up the reasons for ‘the Jews’ being on the list in just one sentence (‘the opposers of Christ, in that they reject his government, will not have this man to reign over them, and thereby judge themselves unworthy of everlasting life’), and similarly ‘the Turks’ and ‘Socinians’ in one sentence apiece, the Catholic Church received several pages of criticism. According to Taylor, ‘but what is most generally understood by that term’ [i.e., Antichrist], ‘and what the scriptures in very clear terms mark out, as well as history, for Antichrists are, the doctrine, hierarchy and discipline of the church of Rome. The Pope and Cardinals, together with the whole herd of secular and regular priests and begging friars, joined with their whole train of legends for doctrines, may be said to be the great Antichrist’. Taylor outlined over several pages of the sermon what he considered to be the sins of the ‘church of Rome’, including as highlights, ‘infallibility’, ‘transubstantiation’, ‘praying to the dead’, ‘purgatory’, ‘priestly absolution’, ‘persecutions’, ‘torture’ and ‘the Inquisition’. He suggested that in its ‘superstitious discipline’ and ‘horrid cruelties’, the ‘church of Rome’ was the ‘whore of Babylon’. [5]
Significantly, Adam Clarke, a prominent Methodist preacher and bible scholar from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whose anti-Judaism and anti-Catholicism I examined as part of a collaborative project between the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester and the John Rylands Research Institute, also embraced many hostile myths and stereotypes about Catholics (and Jews), but rejected the millenarian ideas of the previously discussed Methodists. Adam Clarke was born c. 1760 – 1762 (the exact year being unknown) in Londonderry. He died of cholera in London on 28 August 1832. Clarke met John and Charles Wesley at the Kingswood school in Bristol when he was approximately eighteen years of age, and was appointed by them to preach at Bradford on Avon in Wiltshire. His circuit soon extended to other towns and villages, and he was later assigned to the London Circuit. He was elected three times to the Presidency of the Methodist Conference and was widely respected as a preacher and scholar.
Unlike the previously discussed Methodists, Clarke did not believe in a gathering in or restoration of the Jews, or their mass conversion to Christianity, or their role in the final struggle against Antichrist. Instead, he suggested in his commentary on the New Testament, published in 1817, and his commentary on the Old Testament, published in 1825, that the role of Jews was simply to serve as a wretched and dispersed people, as perpetual monuments to the truth of Christianity. In his commentary on Matthew 24, he argued that the Jews, preserved as ‘a people scattered through all nations, … without temple, sacrifices, or political government’, reluctantly stand forth, despite their attempts to ‘suppress the truth’, as ‘unimpeachable collateral evidence’ of the predictions found in the New Testament. Reading the Gospel of Matthew as a prophetic text written before the sacking of Jerusalem, Clarke argued that ‘the destruction of Jerusalem’ had been foretold, and was a remarkable demonstration of ‘divine vengeance’ and a ‘signal manifestation of Christ’s power and glory’. Clarke concluded that, ‘thus has the prophecy of Christ been most literally and terribly fulfilled, on a people who are still preserved as continued monuments of the truth of our Lord’s prediction, and of the truth of the Christian religion’. Similarly, in his commentary on Jeremiah 15:4, he argued that the statement, ‘I will cause them to be removed into all kingdoms of the earth’, was in respect to ‘the succeeding state of the Jews in their different generations’. According to Clarke, ‘never was there a prophecy more literally fulfilled; and it is still a standing monument of Divine truth. Let infidelity cast its eyes on the scattered Jews whom it may meet with in every civilized nation of the world; and then let it deny the truth of this prophecy, if it can’. In his preface to the Epistle to the Romans, Clarke argued that the calamities endured by the Jews, and their continued survival as a distinct and separate people despite a ‘dispersion of about 1700 years, over all the face of the earth, everywhere in a state of ignominy and contempt’, was evidence of a ‘standing miracle’, and the extraordinary will and interposal of Heaven. According to Clarke, the continued presence of the Jews as a distinct but dispersed people, ‘for many ages, harassed, persecuted, butchered and distressed’ (by ‘Pagans and pretended Christians’), as ‘the most detestable of all people upon the face of the earth’, but nevertheless preserved, was in line with a prediction in the book of Jeremiah (‘for I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have driven thee: but I will not make a full end of thee, but correct thee in measure’ [Jeremiah 46:28]), that God will bring an end to other nations, but not the Jews. Clarke concluded, in a somewhat ontological vein, that ‘thus the very being of the Jews, in their present circumstances, is a standing public proof of the truth of Revelation’ [6]
Again, unlike the Methodist millenarians, Clarke did not prophesise the destruction of the Catholic Church or speculate with confidence as to the identity of Antichrist. Reflecting on the Antichrist in his commentary on Revelation 11:7 (‘and when they [the two witnesses] shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them and shall overcome them, and kill them’), Clarke observed that the beast from the bottomless pit ‘may be what is called Antichrist’, but he concluded that other than some power opposed to ‘genuine Christianity’ and under ‘the influence and appointment of the devil’, it was impossible to say who or what Antichrist is. He noted that the conjectures about the identity of the beast (and the two witnesses) are manifold. As examples, he mentions as possibilities, ‘some Jewish power or person’, ‘one of the persecuting Heathen emperors’, and ‘the papal power’. Ultimately, the Antichrist (‘the beast’) remains an uncertain and shadowy figure in Clarke’s discourse. [7]
Portrait of Dr Adam Clarke, c. 1806, Methodist Archives /PLP 26/11/24
With his rejection of millenarian ideas, his limited interest in speculating about the identity of Antichrist, and his belief that Jews would be preserved in their dispersed, separate and wretched condition as perennial monuments to the truth of Christianity (rather than a gathering in of the Jews, and their embracing of Christianity), Clarke seems to have been an outlier compared to many of his Methodist colleagues from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, whilst he seems to have been indifferent to the idea of a Catholic Antichrist, he did embrace other hostile myths and stereotypes about Catholics (as well as many hostile myths and stereotypes about Jews). Adam Clarke’s anti-Judaism and anti-Catholicism are examined in more detail in my article published in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library: ‘“Monuments” to the truth of Christianity: Anti-Judaism in the Works of Adam Clarke’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, volume 93, issue 1, Spring 2017, 45-66 [link to journal volume] [link to author accepted manuscript]
References
[1] Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonisation of Christians in Medieval Christendom (1975; repr., London: Pimlico, 2005), 23; and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957; repr., London: Pimlico, 1993), 35.
[2] David Butler, Methodists and Papists: John Wesley and the Catholic Church in the Eighteenth Century (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1995), 129-134; and John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, notes on the Revelation 13:1 and 17:10-11, originally published in 1755, but the 12th edition has been used in this blog (New York: Carlton & Porter, no date), available online at archive.org, pages 650, 697-702, 714-715.
[3] The Unfinished letter from Charles Wesley to an unnamed correspondent, 25 April 1754, can be found in the John Rylands Special Collections, DDCW 1/51. For a transcript and discussion of this letter, see Kenneth G. C. Newport, ‘Charles Wesley’s Interpretation of Some Biblical Prophecies According to a Previously Unpublished Letter’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 77, no. 2 (1995), available online at Manchester eScholar, pages 31-52.
[4] Kenneth G. C. Newport, ‘Methodists and the Millennium: Eschatological Expectation and the Interpretation of Biblical Prophecy in Early British Methodism’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 78, no. 1 (1996), available online at Manchester eScholar, pages 103-122. For Joseph Sutcliffe, see pages 109-112. For Thomas Coke, see pages 121-122; and Joseph Sutcliffe, A Treatise on the Universal Spread of the Gospel, the Glorious Millenium, and the Second Coming of Christ (Doncaster: Gazette-Office, 1798).
[5] Thomas Taylor, Ten Sermons on the Millennium; or, The Glory of the Latter Days (Hull: G. Prince, 1789), sermon 1, ‘The Destruction of Antichrist’, pages 20-28.
[6] Adam Clarke, The New Testament, of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; containing the text, taken from the most correct copies of the present authorised translation, including the marginal readings and parallel texts, with a commentary and critical notes. Designed as a help to a better understanding of the sacred writings, 3 volumes (London: J. Butterworth, 1817), commentary on Matthew 24:30-31 (and concluding notes for Matthew 24), and preface to commentary on Romans, page viii; and Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments. The text carefully printed from the most correct copies of the present authorized translation, including the marginal readings and parallel texts. With a commentary and critical notes, designed as a help to a better understanding of the sacred writings, 5 volumes (London: J. Butterworth, 1825), commentary on Jeremiah 15:4, 46:28.
[7] Clarke, The New Testament, of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, commentary on Revelation 11:7.
Pope Francis, Robert Hugh Benson, and the “Spirit of the World”
According to a recent report in The Times newspaper (30 January 2015), “the Pope has urged anyone who wants to understand him to read a science fiction novel published in 1907 by Robert Hugh Benson”. Monsignor Benson was an Anglican priest and novelist who embraced Catholicism in 1903. He was the son of Edward White Benson, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury from 1883 to 1896. He passed away in 1914 at the age of 42, possibly from pneumonia judging by an account of the last days of his life by Canon Sharrock in the Tablet, 24 October 1914, 569. The report in The Times observes that his novel, Lord of the World, set in a dystopian twenty-first century, “sees Marxists, humanists and Freemasons taking over a society where euthanasia is obligatory for the ill and Esperanto is the common language. The antichrist returns, becoming the president of the world before going to war with the Catholic Church, precipitating the end of the world.” Tom Kington, “Etonian novelist shaped Pope’s world view,” The Times, 30 January 2015, 40.
The report in the Times had in mind the papal press conference that occurred during a recent flight (on 19 January 2015) from the Philippines to Rome. According to News.Va, the pope stated: “Think of the Balilla [an Italian Fascist youth organization during the 1920s and 1930s], think of the Hitler Youth…. They colonized the people, they wanted to do it. So much suffering … Each people has its own culture, its own history. … But when conditions are imposed by colonizing empires, they seek to make these peoples lose their own identity and create uniformity. This is spherical globalization — all points are equidistant from the centre. And true globalization — I like to say this — is not a sphere. It is important to globalize, but not like the sphere but rather, like the polyhedron. Namely that each people, every part, preserves its identity without being ideologically colonized. This is ‘ideological colonization’. There is a book — excuse me I’m advertising — there is a book, perhaps the style is a bit heavy at the beginning, because it was written in 1907 in London…. At that time, the writer had seen this drama of ideological colonization and described it in that book. It is called Lord of the World. The author is Benson, written in 1907. I suggest you read it. Reading it, you’ll understand well what I mean by ideological colonization” (link to report in News.Va).
Pope Francis made another remark endorsing Benson’s book a year earlier in his homily at Mass on 18 November 2013, suggesting that the novel demonstrates how the “spirit of the world” can lead to “progressivism”, “uniformity of thought” and “apostasy” (link). It seems that Benson’s dystopian drama, Lord of the World, is important for Pope Francis, providing (as far as the pope is concerned) a partly metaphoric, partly prophetic narration of past, present and future history, “ideological colonization,” and the “spirit of the world” (the latter phrase used by Pope Francis and Monsignor Benson on a number of occasions). Others have expressed similar admiration for the novel’s so-called prophetic nature. For example, Joseph Pearce, an English Catholic author, has described Benson’s “novel-nightmare” as a work of prophecy which is “coming true before our very eyes.” Joseph Pearce, Catholic Literary Giants (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 141. Dale Ahlquist, a fervent supporter of the movement to have G. K. Chesterton declared a saint, despite the anti-Jewish stereotypes and caricatures in Chesterton’s novels and journalistic essays (Chesterton’s stereotypes are discussed in my book, Chesterton’s Jews), has also expressed admiration for Benson’s Lord of the World. According to Ahlquist, “whether or not Monsignor Benson’s picture of our future is accurate, the fact is his picture of our present is chillingly accurate.” Dale Ahlquist, “A surprising book about the end of the world, but we know that the world ends,” The Catholic Servant 17, no. 4 (May 2011), 12 (link).
Benson’s novel combines elements of then – and now – pervasive anti-Masonic conspiracy theories, theological myths about the arrival of the Anti-Christ, and millenarian narratives about the end of the world. Benson was by no means entirely original in combining these themes, or in suggesting that the Anti-Christ would be either Masonic or Jewish. English Catholics had already been exposed to such ideas prior to Lord of the World. For example, Henry Manning, the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, had argued that the Anti-Christ would be of the “Jewish race”, and he suggested that the erosion of the Church’s temporal power in the 1860s by the Risorgimento (Italian unification), demonstrated that this Antichrist may already be in the world (link). During the Diana Vaughan hoax in the mid-1890s, letters and articles in various Catholic newspapers (such as the Tablet) supported the idea that a Masonic conspiracy was attempting to destroy the Church, and that an inner-circle of Freemasons called the “Palladians” were worshipping Lucifer (link). Colonel James Ratton, an English Catholic author, argued in 1904 that Jews and Freemasons were conspiring to control the world, and that the so-called “Sovereign Pontiff of Freemasonry” and the Jewish “Anti-Christ” were working together to rebuild Solomon’s Temple (link).
In the alternative history constructed in Benson’s anti-Masonic apocalyptic novel, the twenty-first century world has been divided into three great powers: the “Eastern Empire” (consisting of Russia east of the Ural Mountains, Asia, Australia and New Zealand), “Europe” (consisting of Russia west of the Ural Mountains, Europe and Africa), and the “American Republic” (consisting of the North and South American continents). At the beginning of the novel, these three competing “forces” hold sway across the globe. In the huge Eastern Empire, “a federalism of States,” there are the “Eastern religions,” a volatile melting-pot of Sufism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Islam, and Pantheism. Elsewhere in the world there are only two surviving religions, Catholicism (concentrated primarily in Rome and Ireland) and a religious Masonic “Humanitarianism.” It is explained that “Protestantism is dead”, as “supernatural religion” could not thrive without an “absolute authority”. “Private judgement in matters of faith,” it transpires, led to the “disintegration” of Protestantism. Interestingly, Judaism is not mentioned in the novel, and Jews are only mentioned in passing. However, at one point, Father Percy Franklin (the hero of the novel) does observe that: “A great access of Jews to Freemasonry is to be expected; hitherto they have held aloof to some extent, but the ‘abolition of the Idea of God’ is tending to draw in those Jews, now greatly on the increase once more, who repudiate all notion of a personal Messiah.” Robert Hugh Benson, Lord of the World (1907).
Though described as “anti-supernatural” – i.e. without a belief in God – “Humanitarianism” is portrayed as a new pantheistic religion, providing a succour to satisfy Man’s craving for the supernatural, through the rituals of Freemasonry, and the creed that “God is Man”. Echoing Nietzsche’s famous declaration that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. … Must we not ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it?” [Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 125], this new religion declares that Man, having learned his own divinity, is now God. In Benson’s alternative history, Freemasonry has spread throughout Europe, and has seized control of most of the churches and cathedrals. It has replaced Anglicanism as the official religion of England, and unlike Catholicism, it is permitted to display its symbols. As the novel develops, attendance at Masonic “Humanitarianism” services becomes mandatory (with increasing periods of incarceration mandated for those who refuse to attend). Robert Hugh Benson, Lord of the World (1907).
Mirroring anti-Masonic conspiracy theories, such as the Diana Vaughan narratives – that had the Tablet persuaded at the end of the nineteenth century that “there is an inner Masonry whose workings are unknown to the general run of Masons,” and that “Satanism is practised under circumstances at least pointing to Masonic association” (“Devil Worship in France,” The Tablet, 3 October 1896, 529-530) – the narrator in Benson’s novel explains that an inner circle or higher grade of Freemasonry is responsible for the anti-religious movement. According to the narrator of the novel, “what Catholics had always suspected then became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures … It had become evident then that Catholics had been right, and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible throughout the world for the strange movement against religion.” Robert Hugh Benson, Lord of the World (1907).
The principal antagonist in the novel is Senator Julian Felsenburgh, a Masonic “Grand Master,” who champions the cause of “Universal Brotherhood,” as the successful “consummation of history” and the manifestation of the “Spirit of the World” (an allusion, it would seem, to Hegel’s teleological philosophy of history and the Weltgeist). In the novel, it becomes increasingly apparent that Felsenburgh is the Anti-Christ, whose arrival will usher in the destruction of the world (which occurs at the end of the novel). He has the power to convince those he meets that he is the true Saviour of the world (for example, at one point Father Percy Franklin recalls people kneeling before a picture of Felsenburgh, or calling out his name on their deathbeds, and in a meeting with the pope, he explains that Felsenburgh was called by some newspapers “the Son of Man” and “the Saviour of the World”). Felsenburgh has a number of special abilities, such as an amazing facility with words and facts, the ability to converse in at least fifteen languages, an astonishing memory, and an intuitive grasp of the histories, expectations, hopes and fears of all sects and castes. This allowed him to negotiate a peace between the various factions in the Eastern Empire, and then between the three empires, resulting in world peace and the end of war. He is later appointed as President of Europe, and ultimately as President of the World. In his capacity as President of Europe, he arranges the bombardment and utter destruction of Rome, which in this alternative history (written of course long before the Lateran Treaty of 1929), had been fully restored to the Church as the sovereign capital of Catholicism – in return for all the other churches in Italy being relinquished to the Humanitarianists. The destruction of Rome occurs when the pope and all but three cardinals (one of whom is Cardinal Percy Franklin) are present. A new pope is elected by the remaining cardinals: Cardinal Franklin, who takes the names Silvester. Pope Silvester III forms a secret Church network. Later, as President of the World, Felsenburgh introduces a new law legalizing the “euthanasia” (i.e. systematic extermination) of all surviving Catholics. At the end of the novel, the Antichrist has discovered the location of the pope and his new College of Cardinals (at Tel Megiddo – Armageddon), and a large force of military Zeppelins (called Volors) is dispatched to wipe out this last vestige of Catholicism. Robert Hugh Benson, Lord of the World (1907).
Pope Francis made no reference to the Anti-Christ and anti-Masonic narratives within Lord of the World. It is thus likely that on the occasions he referred to the novel, he was more concerned with it as a metaphor for globalisation, secularisation, contraception, same-sex marriages, and other so-called evil aspects of the “Spirit of the World” which he has lamented on various occasions, rather than with (a mythicized construction of) Freemasonry. In the novel, Freemasonry & Humanitarianism were linked to the so-called “Spirit of the world”, a concept that Pope Francis has referred to on a number of occasions. At Assisi, the pope stated that a Christian cannot co-exist with the “Spirit of the World,” which, he suggested, leads only to vanity, arrogance and pride. According to Pope Francis, “the Spirit of the World” is the” leprosy” and the “cancer” of society. He explained that the Spirit of the World “is an idol, it is not of God” (report in the Catholic Herald) (report by Zenit). However, whilst Freemasonry and the Anti-Christ were not explicitly evident in his references to Lord of the World, it is unlikely that their presence in the novel would have deterred him. Pope Francis has made many references to Satan, on occasion linking the evil “prince of this world” with the “spirit of the world” (report by Zenit). And with regard to Freemasonry, there are reasons to think that he may consider it an anti-Christian agency. In 2013, returning from Brazil, he made some conciliatory remarks about gay men who seek God, though he went on to criticise gay-rights lobbying. He suggested that such lobbying was orchestrated by Freemasons. “The problem,” he explained, is “lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem” (report by the BBC).
It is noteworthy that whatever the pope’s concerns with Freemasonry, his remarks about it have been interpreted as a coded warning about a secret Masonic group in the Vatican by at least one regular correspondent at the Catholic Herald. According to Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, “it is to be noted that the Pope has constantly warned of the desacralisation of the Church, and its turning into an NGO. Is he warning us against the agenda of the masonic lobby?” Lucie-Smith suggests that such an entity, if embedded within the Vatican, would be a “real enemy within.” He concludes: “Let us hope and pray that there is no masonic lobby in the Vatican. But the very fact the Holy Father has mentioned it, makes one wonder.” Alexander Lucie-Smith, “Should we be worried that Pope Francis mentioned a masonic lobby in his famous press conference?”, Catholic Herald, 30 July 2013.
It would seem that there is still a long way to go before the anti-Masonic conspiracy narrative loses its allure.
“The Demons are Interchangeable”: Damian Thompson on Anti-Catholic Conspiracy Theories
History is replete with a number of bizarre yet dangerous anti-Jewish and anti-Masonic conspiracy theories, such as the Diana Vaughan hoax, various narratives about the so-called Jewish and/or Masonic “Anti-Christ”, and the infamous ritual murder blood libels. Jews and Freemasons have also been accused of being secretive, manipulative and greedy, and blamed for supposedly controlling the press, stock markets and international finance. Anti-Catholic conspiracy narratives are no less fantastic, dangerous, and venomous. An excellent recent article in the Catholic Herald by Dr Damian Thompson – an expert on apocalyptic beliefs and Antichrist narratives – justifiably noted that we may “laugh at ludicrous anti-Catholic conspiracies. But we underestimate how many minds they poison.” He observes that conspiracy propagandists are “having a field day constructing alternative realities that frighten us and poison our minds.” And whilst those hostile to Jews and Freemasons have the notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to fuel their imagination, anti-Catholics have the Monita Secreta (a forged document purported to be the secret protocols of the Jesuits). Damian Thompson, “No, the Jesuits didn’t start World War I,” Catholic Herald, 22 January 2015.
According to Thompson’s lucid consideration in the Catholic Herald, Catholics are accused, even today – or perhaps especially today in this age of the internet and mass media – of all kinds of bizarre things, such as being responsible for the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Thompson explains that according to the conspiracy theory, the Jesuits (and presumably also their so-called accomplices, the “Rothschild/Morgan/Rockefeller cartel”) came up with a diabolic scheme to build a “death ship” – which they would falsely claim to be unsinkable – in order to lure a number of opponents of their so-called US Federal Reserve cartel to a “watery grave”.
The Sinking of the Titanic, Willy Stöwer, 1912
Other anti-Catholic conspiracy theories blame Catholics for starting the First World War, and instigating the 9/11 terrorist attack. As Thompson rightly notes, in the construction of these ludicrous and yet poisonous conspiracy theories: “The demons are interchangeable: Catholics, Freemasons, the Illuminati and, most persistently, Jews. The structure of the story remains broadly the same. ‘They’ are rich, powerful, secretive and plotting world domination. The righteous must act now to thwart their plans.” It is thus unsurprising that Jews and Freemasons have also been blamed for the First World War, and accused of master-minding the attack on the World Trade Center; and if someone was to tell me that a deranged theory exists, accusing “the Illuminati” or “the Knights Templar” of participating in the 9/11 attack, it would not surprise me – such is the surreal nature of the conspiracy theory.
One of the things that impressed me about Thompson’s article, is that it does not shy away from the fact that Catholics too have been “progenitors” of such theories: “Catholics need to face up to the reality that, over 2,000 years, elements in the Church have been progenitors as well as victims of conspiracy theories. Mostly this should be a source of shame – but we need to bear in mind that paranoid thinking is to some extent part of the DNA of Christianity in general; Protestants and Eastern Orthodox are also vulnerable to it.” As Thompson reports: “Alas, certain Right-wing Catholics have not been able to resist the lure of the Protocols: they were favourite reading material of Bishop Richard Williamson, disgraced bishop of the Society of St Pius X (which expelled him in 2012).” Thompson goes on to explain that: “Williamson, though an Englishman, was immersed in a French Catholic conspiratorial subculture that predates the Protocols. Ultra-clericalist Frenchmen in the Third Republic blamed all their misfortunes on Jews and Freemasons.”
Interestingly, as I discovered during my PhD, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such narratives were not confined to ultra-clerical French Catholics. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s, articles and columns in popular English Catholic newspapers, in particular the Tablet (which was not then the liberal Catholic magazine it is today), also went along with such narratives, accusing Jews of conspiring with Freemasons against the Church. For example, a report in the Tablet in March 1897 noted that: “In criticizing the Anti-Semitic policy of the clerical party on the Continent, it must be remembered that the Ghetto is there the focus and centre of the Liberal warfare against Catholicism, and that Jews and Freemasons form everywhere the vanguard of the forces of infidelity. By their address in capturing and manipulating the political machinery and the power of the press, they have contrived in Catholic countries to organize a systematic persecution of the Catholic Church, and to trample on the faith and practices of Catholicism as though they represented but the belief of a contemptible and impotent minority. The alliance of the Synagogue with the Lodges is in all continental countries the symbol of the triumph of infidelity over Christianity, and the creed of modern, no less than of ancient Judaism, is hostility to the Christian name.” See “Anti-Semitism in the Austrian Elections,” The Tablet, 27 March 1897, 481-482. During the Dreyfus Affair, the Tablet reported in February 1898, that it is suspicious that “in the sudden clamour for the revision of the Dreyfus trial … it is a subsidized movement, financed by the moneyed interest, which has made the cause of the Jewish Captain its own.” The Tablet stated that: “We shall not, we trust, be accused of palliating or condoning the excesses of anti-Semitism, by pointing out that the Jews, in France, Italy, and Austria, the three principal Catholic nations of the continent, exercise a political influence entirely disproportioned to their numbers, and that this influence is always exercised against the religion of the country. In close alliance with the Freemasons, … they form the backbone of the party of aggressive liberalism, with war to the knife against the Church as the sum and aim of its policy.” See “Captain Dreyfus and His Champions”, The Tablet, 12 February 1898, 238. Furthermore, during the late nineteenth century, the Tablet and the Catholic Herald were somewhat credulous (though not quite as credulous as La Croix) when it came to reports of Luciferian Freemasonry (for example, during the Diana Vaughan hoax).
Thompson provides other (more theological) examples of conspiracy-like narratives. He explains that the Book of Revelation in the New Testament is “a conspiracy theory whose authors introduced early Christians to the notion of the Antichrist, littering the text with mathematical codes and lurid allegory.” Thompson correctly notes that in some Protestant anti-Catholic narratives, the Pope has been vilified as this shadowy Antichrist figure. Significantly, he also acknowledges and laments that the Antichrist has not been confined to anti-Catholic narratives, but has also been used by some prominent Catholics to vilify non-Catholics: “Today it seems repugnant to Catholics that Luther should have identified the Pope as Antichrist. We forget that both pontiffs and Catholic monarchs had previously taken great pleasure in identifying their own enemies as this Satanic figure, whom the Bible explicitly tells us will emerge from disguise shortly before Jesus returns.” Significantly, as I discovered during my own PhD research (link for brief summary of PhD), such narratives were not confined to pontiffs, Catholic monarchs, or ultra-clericalist French Catholics in the Third Republic. Prominent English Catholics during the nineteenth- and the early twentieth-centuries, such as Father Henry Manning (who went on to become the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster) and Canon Dr William Barry (of the Archdiocese of Birmingham), as well as less prominent figures, repeated narratives about how the so-called “Jewish Antichrist” would arrive (or had already arrived) to lead anti-Christian forces against the Church (link for English Catholic Narratives about the “Jewish Antichrist”).
Thompson humbly concludes that he is “not qualified to say what the Church’s theological response should be to this aspect of its heritage.” Not being a Catholic myself, I am even less qualified to comment on the Church’s theological response to this aspects of its heritage, though like Dr Thompson, I believe the Church has a duty to respond in some way, if “it is to heal the wounds it has created.” Thompson suggests that whilst the Church did not invent the conspiracy theory narrative (for example, shadowy inventions similar to the diabolic Antichrist existed in pre-Christian Jewish and pagan myths), “in practical terms it should be alert to its persistence on the fringes of Catholicism.” Unfortunately, he suggests that Pope Francis may have his work cut out if he wishes to address the persistence of such narratives. According to Thompson: “Pope Francis is perceived – and presents himself – as a new broom in the Vatican. Ironically, this may make it more difficult to sweep away the conspiratorial mindset, since he himself hints that corrupt curial officials have seized control of dicasteries.”
Thompson suggests as a first step that the Vatican needs to learn how to better employ the internet. One can only hope that it not already too late in this age of mass media, when blog posts and tweets can circulate the globe and reach a huge audience very quickly, to dismantle the myriad of prejudiced myths and conspiracy theories (whether the role of diabolical villain is assigned to Jews, Freemasons, Catholics, Ahmadi, Roma, or some other group or combination of groups). Unfortunately, one suspects that such pernicious narratives are now resiliently embedded in the digital discourse (though this should not stop us attempting to dismantle them).
English Catholic Narratives about the “Jewish Antichrist” (1860 – 1923)
Paul’s second epistle to the community at Thessalonica warned that the second coming of Christ will be preceded by the appearance of “the man of sin,” who will work false miracles and exalt himself over God, setting himself up in God’s Temple, all in accordance with the plans of Satan (2 Thess 2:1-17). The “man of sin” was subsequently linked to the Antichrist mentioned in John’s first and second epistle (1 John 2:18-22, 4:3, 2 John 1:7). Various diabolic figures from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation have also been interpreted as relating to the Antichrist. These allusions to a diabolic character were fleshed out over time. It was perhaps inevitable that the Jews, already key villains in Christian myths, and the Antichrist, would coalesce into a new mythological character, “the Jewish Antichrist,” whose arrival would mark the beginning of an apocalyptic conflict. The anti-Jewish accusation that the Antichrist, a servant of Satan, will be born to Jews, gained popularity during the Middle Ages. According to Norman Cohn, over time it “came to seem that the world was in the grip of demons and that their human allies were everywhere, even in the heart of Christendom itself.” The Antichrist was regarded as an authentic manifestation of evil, who would lead Satan’s forces in a war against the followers of Christ. The Antichrist was intertwined with millenarian expectations of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. As Joshua Trachtenberg observed in his study of antisemitic myths, in the modern era the Antichrist legend may be “too easily dismissed as pure fantasy, merely another of the fabulous motifs that entertained the Middle Ages, without exerting any momentous influence upon the thought and action of the common people.” Trachtenberg concluded however that the Antichrist myth was considered by many “a terrifying reality.” The arrival of the Antichrist, as Cohn observed, was considered no mere “phantasy about some remote and indefinite future but a prophecy which was infallible and which at almost any given moment was felt to be on the point of fulfilment.” See Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonisation of Christians in Medieval Christendom (1975; repr., London, Pimlico, 2005), 23; Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (1943; repr. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 32-43; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957; repr., London: Pimlico, 1993), 35, passim.
Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, by Luca Signorelli, Circa 1500
A prominent construction of “the Jewish Antichrist” narrative was articulated by Father Henry Manning in the early 1860s (a few years prior to his appointment as the Archbishop of Westminster – i.e. the head of the recently re-constituted English Catholic hierarchy). Manning discussed the arrival of the Jewish Antichrist in a series of lectures delivered in 1860 at the church of St. Mary of the Angels, Bayswater. These lectures discussed the then impending threat to the temporal power of the Church. The lectures were published as a booklet in 1861, and republished in a larger volume along with a number of other lectures in 1862. This was a time when the Papal States was being seized and dismantled by the Risorgimento. At this time Father Manning, who had converted to Catholicism in 1851 and was advancing rapidly within the Church, was it seems quite willing to accept the Jew as a scapegoat for the catastrophe. Whilst he later adopted more positive stereotypes of the Jews, he nevertheless republished these lectures verbatim with a new preface in 1880, by which time he had been the Archbishop of Westminster for fifteen years and a Cardinal for five years. See Henry Edward Manning, The Present Crisis of the Holy See Tested by Prophecy (London: Burns & Lambert, 1861), 1-92, and Henry Edward Manning, The Temporal Power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, (second edition, London, 1862; third edition, London, 1880), Part II, 81-173.
Cardinal Manning (1808-1892)
Manning explained in these lectures that whilst it may “run counter to the popular spirit of these times,” and expose him to “the contempt or compassion of those who believe the world to be governed by the action of the human will alone,” his intention was to examine the present situation of the Church by the “light of a prophecy.” According to Manning, “the theory, that politics and religion have different spheres, is an illusion and a snare.” He referred to a conflict between “two ultimate powers,” two forces arrayed and marshalled against each other, that of “Christ and Antichrist.” Manning argued that “the interpretation universally received by anti-catholic controversialists, whereby, first, Antichrist is held to be a spirit or system, and not a person, and next, to be the Catholic or Roman Church, or the Vicar of the Incarnate Word, is the master-stroke of deceit.” Such a deception, he suggested, was an attempt to allay fears, inspire unwarranted confidence, and misdirect attention from the true Antichrist. The “prophecies of Revelation,” he explained, are explicit about the coming of Antichrist, describing the Antichrist with “the attributes of a person.” According to Manning, “to deny the personality of Antichrist, is therefore to deny the plain testimony of Holy Scripture.” Manning informed his audience that the “[Church] Fathers believed that Antichrist will be of the Jewish race.” He stated that such was the opinion of St. Irenaeus, St. Jerome, the authors of texts ascribed to St. Hippolytus, and St. Ambrose, St. Gregory the Great, the Italian Jesuit theologian Robert Bellarmine (canonised in 1930), and many others. He concluded that they were probably correct, considering that “the Antichrist will come to deceive the Jews, according to the prophecy of our Lord.” Manning explained that whilst the Antichrist will at first pretend to believe in the “law of Moses,” he will only do so “in dissimulation, to deceive them, and to obtain supreme power.” Afterwards he will “reject the law of Moses, and will deny the true God who gave it.” According to Manning, the Antichrist will be received by the Jews because they are still awaiting the coming of their “false Messias,” and “they have prepared themselves for delusion by crucifying the true Messias.” It is not “difficult to understand how those who have lost the true and divine idea of the Messias may accept a false,” Manning stated, and that “being dazzled by the greatness of political and military successes, and inflated with the pantheistic and Socinian notions of the dignity of man, may pay to the person of Antichrist the honour which Christians pay to the true Messias.” The Antichrist, Manning argued, will be “a temporal deliverer, the restorer of their temporal power; or, in other words, a political and military prince.” Manning explained that the only thing that will hinder the arrival of the Antichrist is the Church and Christian civilisation, as “the lawless one … has no antagonist on earth more direct than the Vicar of Jesus Christ.” Manning argued that there are two types of society. The first type is the “natural society” in which “the political order … comes from the will of man.” Conversely, the second type, the “supernatural society,” is that which “still being penetrated by the spirit of faith and of the Catholic unity, is true and faithful to the principles upon which Christendom was first constituted.” He argued that many countries in “Christian Europe” have changed from the supernatural type of society to the natural type of society, banishing religion from politics and the State, and declaring that “all sects are equally participators in the political life and political power of the nation.” Manning clarified that he was not arguing that the Jews (“that race who deny the coming of God in the flesh, that is, who deny the Incarnation”) should naturally be denied “admission to political privileges”. “On the contrary,” he stated, “if there be no other order than the order of nature, it would be a political injustice to exclude any one of the race of Israel from a participation of equal privileges.” However, he then stated that: “I maintain equally, that in the day in which you admit those who deny the Incarnation to an equality of privileges, you remove the social life and order in which you live from the Incarnation to the basis of mere nature.” This, he concluded, “is precisely what was foretold of the antichristian period.” He considered this reduction of the supernatural society, imbued with the spirit of faith, to a mere natural society based on the will of man, in which Jews are granted equal political rights, to be a confirmation of the prophecy of the Antichrist. After the lectures, Manning wrote to his friend (and later four-time British Prime Minister), William Gladstone, about the “Italian Question,” explaining that he would “die with the belief that it is what I have endeavoured to sketch in those lectures on the Antichrist.” See Henry Edward Manning, The Present Crisis of the Holy See Tested by Prophecy (London: Burns & Lambert, 1861), 1, 20-21, 22-34, 44-47; Letter from Manning to Gladstone, 26 October 1861, in Peter Erb, ed., The Correspondence of Henry Manning and William Ewart Gladstone, volume III, 1861-1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13-15.
Significantly, Cardinal Manning later expressed admiration for the communal solidarity and organisation of the Jews, and raised his voice in defence of Jews on a number of occasions. In an address delivered at a meeting organised by the Lord Mayor of London in 1882, Manning condemned the persecution of Jews in Russia, and asked, “for uprightness, for refinement, for generosity, for charity, for all the graces and virtues that adorn humanity where will be found examples brighter or more true of human excellence than in this Hebrew race?” Manning defended Jews from the ritual murder accusations, and was presented with an illuminated address of thanks by Herman Adler, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, and a number of other prominent Anglo-Jews. In response, Manning stated that: “I can therefore bear witness to the charity and generosity of my Jewish fellow-countrymen. I have found them forward in all good works. In the care of your children, of your sick, and of your poor, you give us a noble example of generosity and efficiency. You are inflexible, as we are also, in maintaining that Education is essentially a religious work. Your Schools, as ours, are firmly and fearlessly religious.—I have been witness of your care of the sick in the festivals of the Metropolitan Free Hospital.—Of the watchful care of your poor I have had full evidence. When, driven out by tyranny in Russia, they came over in multitudes to our shores, I was witness of your wise and efficient administration.” Manning also stated, in a letter written to Sir John Simon in December 1890, that the Jews are: “a race with a sacred history of nearly four thousand years, a present without a parallel, dispersed in all lands, with an imperishable personal identity, isolated and changeless, greatly afflicted, without home or fatherland; visibly reserved for a future of signal mercy. … any man who does not believe [in] their future must be a careless reader, not only of the old Jewish Scriptures, but even of our own.” It would seem that Manning still maintained an essentializing construction of “the Jews” as a distinct, unchanging people, singled out for some future purpose, but whereas previously he constructed that image from mythological narratives of the Jewish Antichrist, he now engaged with more positive stereotypes. These positive stereotypes were nevertheless still essentializing constructions drawn from his reading of sacred history and scripture. Whilst any essentializing of a group as “the other” can be dangerous and petrifying, even when couched in such positive, almost sacralising language, it does at least seem clear that Manning’s view about the Jews had changed significantly and for the better. See Transcript of speech by Cardinal Manning, in “Persecution of the Jews in Russia,” Times, 2 February 1882, 4; “The Cardinal Archbishop and the English Jews: Presentation to His Eminence,” Tablet, 1 November 1890, 701; Letter from Cardinal Manning to Sir John Simon, 8 December 1890, printed in “The Cardinal and the Jews,” Tablet, 13 December 1890, 935.
Regrettably, Manning’s earlier theological construction of the Jewish Antichrist, untempered by his later stereotype of the refined, charitable, community-minded Jew, served to influence later English Catholic authors. For example, in the early years of the twentieth century, Colonel James Ratton, a retired army doctor and anti-Jewish/anti-Masonic author, in his strangely named book, X-Rays in Freemasonry, linked Jews and Freemasons in an alleged anti-Church conspiracy, jointly led by “the Jewish Antichrist” and the so-called “Sovereign Pontiff of Freemasonry” (the latter a dark-fantastical character conjured up during the Diana Vaughan hoax). According to Ratton, Freemasonry was Satanic, and the “Bnai-Bérith,” whose goal he suggested was the domination of Freemasonry and the reestablishment of King Solomon’s Temple, was a branch of Freemasonry closed to non-Jews with the exception of visits by the “Inspectors General of the Palladium.” And in a four-part article published in the Catholic Times in 1920, Canon Dr William Barry, a senior priest in the archdiocese of Birmingham, and prolific author and theologian, explicitly cited and intertwined Manning’s narrative about the Jewish Antichrist, which he treated as an almost prophetic forecast, with his own antisemitic myths and stereotypes. According to Barry, “the long-drawn anti-Christian movement, centuries old, quickened by victory after victory … is advancing, it may well appear, to universal dominion.” Barry asked, “was no warning given?” He concluded that it was, in “Dr. Manning’s forecast of 1860.” Repeatedly quoting from Manning’s lectures, Barry asserted that the Antichrist would be of Jewish blood, an arch-medium, a revolutionist, a protector of the Jews who would be hailed by them as their saviour. Barry stated that it is clear from “St. Paul’s doctrine of their destiny, and with what St. John and the Fathers have left us concerning the Antichrist,” that the question of the Jew’s role in the fate of Europe will be the “most vital and most decisive of all.” Again citing Manning’s lectures, Barry argued that “the Catholic spirit and the Hebrew genius” are “deadly and changeless antagonists,” locked in conflict as a result of “Israel’s rejection of the Gospel.” “Israel,” he informed his readers, “did surely fulfil the prophets when it gave birth to Christ.” It is doing so yet again, Barry concluded, but this time “in whatever degree it has paved the way for Antichrist.” Barry returned to this subject in the Catholic Times in April 1923. He stated that the prophecy that Israel would “rise to power in Christendom,” in alliance with “the ‘Man of Sin,’ who will … be himself a Jew, though most likely a renegade from his faith and tribe,” was an amazing “stroke of divination.” According to Barry, Cardinal Manning regarded “the Revolution,” “the evil elements in emancipated Judaism,” and “the assailants of Papal Rome,” to be “associated in a common Unholy Alliance.” In June 1923, an editorial in the Month, the periodical of the British Jesuits, referred to Barry’s “notable article” on the Antichrist, and concluded that “in Soviet Russia Manning’s prophecy has actually been realised.” The editorial stated that “Antichrist, in the person of those apostate Jews, is already in power,” and “Marx, another apostate Jew, is his evangelist, and Christianity, especially the Catholicism of Rome, is the object of his bitterest hatred.” See See James Ratton [A. Cowan, pseud.], X-Rays in Freemasonry (London: Effingham Wilson, 1901); James Ratton [A. Cowan, pseud.], X-Rays in Freemasonry (London: Effingham Wilson, 1904); William Barry, “Sign of the Times,” Catholic Times: 30 October 1920, 7; 6 November 1920, 7; 13 November 1920, 7; 20 November 1920, 7; William Barry, “Against God and his Christ,” Catholic Times, 28 April 1923, 9; “Antichrist in Russia,” Topics of the Month, Month CXLI (June 1923), 552-553.
Canon William Barry (1849-1930)
For more on representations of “the Antichrist” in English Catholic discourses, please see pages 50-56 of my article in volume 8 of Melilah: “From the Christ-Killer to the Luciferian: The Mythologized Jew and Freemason in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century English Catholic Discourse” (link to Melilah, volume 8).
The Mythicized Jew and Freemason in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century English Catholic Discourses
Conventional wisdom in studies of English antisemitism has tended to suggest that by the nineteenth century religious prejudice had largely been secularised or replaced by modern socio-political and racial forms of hostility. This may have been the case in the general English discourse, but in English Catholic discourses at the turn of the twentieth century, traditional pre-modern myths, with their cast of Jewish and Masonic diabolists, were still a pervasive feature. My recent PhD investigation, funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, examined a range of sources, including the published works of prominent and obscure authors; the pastoral letters and sermons of cardinals, bishops and priests; articles and editorials in newspapers and periodicals; letters; and a small number of oral testimonies, in order to bring to light English Catholic discourses which have largely gone unexamined. Prominent mythological/imaginary villains in these discourses during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century included “the Pharisee,” “the Christ-Killer,” “the Ritual Murderer,” “the Sorcerer,” “the Antichrist” and “the Luciferian.” Jews and Freemasons were often assigned one or more of these mythological roles. In some cases the language used to describe the Jew and the Freemason drew upon a vocabulary which suggested an apocalyptic war between the forces of good and evil.
For more on this, please see the following article which was published in volume 8 of Melilah (the open access peer-reviewed journal of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester): From the Christ-Killer to the Luciferian: The Mythologized Jew and Freemason in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century English Catholic Discourse
“Miss Diana Vaughan” and the myth of “Luciferian Freemasonry” in English Catholic newspapers (1894-1897) and The Prague Cemetery (2010)
The following is a revised version (with new material added) of an essay published in the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, volume 5, issue 1 (2013).
In a lecture delivered on 15 May 2008 at Bologna University, and recently published in a new volume of essays, Umberto Eco explains that the process of “inventing the enemy” has featured in almost all cultures. In this lecture, “inventing the enemy” takes on an almost ontological significance, “important not only to define our identity but also to provide us with an obstacle against which to measure our system of values and, in seeking to overcome it, to demonstrate our own worth.” We are, Eco suggests, “beings who need an enemy.” Consequently, “when there is no enemy, we have to invent one.” Eco drew upon a wide range of examples from across history, such as Saint Augustine’s condemnation of the pagans, the diabolisation of prostitutes, lepers, gypsies, lesbians, witches and “the Negro,” the ancient theological myth of the Jewish Antichrist, and Hitler’s construction of “the Jewish mongrel.” He was justifiably disturbed by this process, and the prospect that “our moral sense” may be “impotent when faced with the age-old need for enemies.” I believe it was this widespread cultural cultivation of the so-called “enemy” that Umberto Eco had in mind when he wrote The Prague Cemetery [1].
The narratives in The Prague Cemetery are often challenging and fantastic, but little more so than some of the episodes and texts upon which they are based. For example, whilst Eco embellished the narratives about Miss Diana Vaughan (in chapter 22 of the Prague Cemetery), they were already in the 1890s, as a sceptical English Catholic critic pointed out in a letter to the Tablet in April 1897, a “preposterous extravagance,” with tales of “the embracing of the chaste Diana by the beautiful demon Asmodeus, the flying through the air on the back of monster eagles down the mouths of volcanoes in full eruption, the profanation of hosts, the blasphemous parodies of Masses and devotions … and the lion’s tail animated by the devil to make a necklace for Diana.” [2] According to the Diana Vaughan narratives, Lucifer and a veritable cast of demons and monsters were regularly summoned by the “Palladian” Freemasons.
Diana Vaughan began her “existence” as a textual invention in a number of discourses in 1894. Léo Taxil (formerly Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès), a French writer and ex-Freemason, whose writings contained anti-Catholicism and anti-Masonry, constructed the character of Diana Vaughan as a fictitious female apostate from so-called “Palladian” Freemasonry. According to Diana Vaughan’s so-called memories (fabricated by Taxil in a series of instalments from July 1895 through to April 1897), she was a noble-minded lady who abandoned the misguided worship of Lucifer, converted to Roman Catholicism, and revealed the secret satanic inner workings of Freemasonry. In the Prague Cemetery, Eco removed the linear development from “Palladian” Freemason to Roman Catholic, thereby introducing a disassociate identity disorder to an already fantastic construction, with the “good” Diana being a virtuous Christian, and the “bad” Diana a sexually depraved Masonic Luciferian. Eco thus added creative flourishes to an already fantastic creation [3].
In addition to Diana Vaughan’s extravagant memoirs, Taxil also wrote other elaborate stories about devil worship and sinister rituals in Masonic lodges, some of which were published under pseudonyms. These tales included bizarre accounts of Host desecration, Satanic magic, murder, the Antichrist, and the manifestations of Lucifer and Asmodeus. Whilst Taxil was the original inventor of Diana Vaughan, his construction took on a life of its own in a number of discourses outside of his immediate control. When Diana Vaughan is discussed, it is usually in the context of French discourse. What is generally unknown is that the Diana Vaughan narratives played an important role in constructing “the enemy” (i.e. “the Jew” and “the Freemason”) in English Catholic discourses during the late nineteenth century.
The English Catholic newspaper in which Diana Vaughan was most frequently discussed was the Tablet, which was owned by Herbert Vaughan, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and head of the English Catholic hierarchy (the shared surname with Diana being coincidental). The veracity of Diana Vaughan’s (which is to say Léo Taxil’s) tales about “Luciferian” Freemasonry were accepted by the editor of the Tablet and several of its readers. Diana Vaughan made her first appearance in the Tablet in a report celebrating the inauguration of the international Anti-Masonic Congress in August 1895. According to the report, the Anti-Masonic Congress aimed to fights the evils of freemasonry and was a “most hopeful augury” for the future. Taking Taxil’s lurid narratives at face value, the Tablet reported that prior to her conversion to Catholicism, Diana Vaughan, “ex-Grand Mistress of the Luciferians or Palladians,” had tried to set up a more moderate “reformed” sect of Palladium Freemasonry, because despite “the strange perversion of mind by which an intelligent and high-souled woman dedicated herself to the worship of Lucifer,” she was not blind to the “degrading character of the rites practised by her fellow-worshippers” [4]. A year later, in October 1896, the Tablet reported that the Anti-Masonic Congress had set up a “special committee” to deal with the “burning questions” relating to Diana Vaughan. According to the report: “That there is in France a sect devoted to the worship of Lucifer, as the champion of rebellious humanity, is, we believe, a well-attested fact, and the propagation of this diabolical creed has been ascribed by M. Taxil and M. Ricoux to an inner ring of the Masonic body called Palladic Masonry.” The Tablet concluded that a book by Arthur Waite on the myth of Satanism “traverses and impugns these statements, but without any conclusive refutation of their general drift” [5].
A number of antisemitic and anti-Masonic articles in the Tablet during the 1890s suggested that Jews and Freemasons were working together to undermine the Church [6]. One clerical contributor to the Tablet, Father Norbert Jones, argued that the Jews were helping the Freemasons by dismissing the evidence proving the existence of Miss Diana Vaughan. According to Father Jones, a member of the Canons Regular of the Lateran, Jews and Freemasons were working together to discredit Diana Vaughan’s damaging revelations of Masonic devil worship. According to Jones, those that “talk of deception in the matter are themselves the real dupes of Jew Masons” [7]. The Diana Vaughan tales were also accepted by Baroness Mary Elizabeth Herbert, a close friend and colleague of Cardinal Vaughan, in the pages of the Dublin Review (despite its name, the Dublin Review was a London based Catholic periodical). Baroness Herbert accepted with enthusiasm Domenico Margiotta’s account of the “noble and generous character” of Diana Vaughan and his claims that Adriano Lemmi was a Jew convert and a Satanist [8].
The Tablet and Dublin Review were not the only English Catholic periodicals to give credence to the Diana Vaughan hoax. On 30 April 1897, a Paris correspondent for the Catholic Herald vented his frustration at “a certain class of Catholic clergymen and the Catholic press, especially in Paris,” who had lapped up the “ridiculous and grotesque stories” about Palladian Freemasonry. He reported that every absurd story about Diana Vaughan was raised “to the height of a dogma” and Catholics who refused to accept them had been branded as “a traitor to the Church and perhaps nearly a Freemason, too” [9]. However, in 1894, the Catholic Herald – a London based Catholic newspaper, owned by the maverick Irish Catholic proprietor-editor Charles Diamond [10] – was among those newspapers that had entertained the reports of Luciferian Freemasonry. On 27 April 1894, the paper reported that according to one of its Paris correspondents, “a recent sacrilegious theft at Notre Dame has been traced to an extraordinary sect known as ‘Luciferians,’ or worshippers of Satan.” According to the report, female Luciferians were stealing consecrated hosts from churches in order to profane in Black Masses. On 11 May 1894, the paper reported that: “the election of Adrian Lemmi as Pontiff of Freemasonry on the Continent has caused a split in the camp. The Perfect Triangle of New York has entered a strong dissent, and Miss Diana Vaughan, who is Grand Mistress of the Perfect Triangle of New York, has given in her resignation, and severed her connection with Freemasonry. In a letter assigning the course of her act, she [Miss Diana Vaughan] states that Lemmi was on the 22nd March, 1844, condemned by the Criminal Court at Marseilles to a year and a day’s imprisonment for theft, and to five years’ police surveillance on his liberation. After quitting prison, however, he made his way furtively to Turkey, and afterwards to Italy, where, joining the Freemasons, he has been raised by them to the supreme position in their body. Such is the head of Continental Freemasonry, whose election has led the Grandmistress of the Order in America to exclaim – ‘How can Masonry ever survive from this corruption and treason?’” [11]
A Sketch of Charles Diamond (1892)
On 19 April 1897, a large audience, consisting largely of Catholics and Freemasons, gathered in the auditorium of the Société Géographique in Paris in order to finally meet Diana Vaughan. The audience was consequently stunned when Taxil rather than Diana Vaughan appeared on the stage and announced that the whole tale of Palladian Freemasonry was a hoax. Diana Vaughan, the illusive ex-Grand Mistress of the Luciferians, did not exist. Taxil thanked the Catholic bishops and editors who had encouraged his exposés of Satanic Freemasonry. After Taxil’s announcement that Diana Vaughan and Palladian Freemasonry never existed and that the whole affair had been a hoax, narratives about Palladian and Satanic Freemasonry became less frequent in English Catholic discourses (though other anti-Masonic and antisemitic accusations, including narratives about the arrival of a “Jewish Antichrist“, continued unabated).
The accusations of Satanic Freemasonry – sometimes linked to the narrative about the so-called “Jewish Antichrist” – did not however completely disappear. Colonel James Ratton, an English Catholic, retired army doctor and author, helped to keep them alive. In 1901, he published his book, X-Rays in Freemasonry. This repeated traditional stereotypes about the anti-Christian nature of Freemasonry and its alleged war against the Church. It repeatedly emphasised Jewish involvement in Freemasonry and informed readers that the Jews killed Christ and have clung onto their “anti-Christian” principles and ideals ever since. According to Ratton, these ideals include “the expectation of another Messiah, who, we know, will be Antichrist.” He argued that Freemasonry was Satanic, and that the B’nai B’rith, whose goal he suggested was to dominate all forms of Freemasonry and re-establish King Solomon’s Temple, was a branch of Jewish Freemasonry closed to non-Jews with the exception of visits by the “Inspectors General of the Palladium” (in reality the B’nai B’rith is a Jewish advocacy, communal service and philanthropic society, and not a branch of Freemasonry, though a small handful of its early members, such as Henry Jones and Isaac Rosenbourg, may have been Freemasons). Ratton added new material when he republished X-Rays in 1904. He argued that Zionism is of interest because it has been prophesised that when the Jews return to Jerusalem, “anti-Christ will appear in their midst.” According to Ratton, Freemasonry, guided by the Jews, is preparing to move its headquarters to Jerusalem, and when the B’nai B’rith joins them, “then will anti-Christ appear in alliance with the Sovereign Pontiff of Freemasonry, and incite the international Masonic forces to persecute the Church in such fashion as has never been before” [12]. Montague Summers, an eccentric convert to Catholicism, continued to argue in 1926 that Albert Pike, the alleged founder of Palladian Freemasonry, had been the Grand Master of “societies practising Satanism” [13]. Father Cahill, an Irish Jesuit, argued in Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement (1929), that Freemasonry is associated with occultism, Satanism, the Antichrist, Judaism, Jewish rites, the Cabala and a Judaeo-Masonic anti-Christian movement. He suggested that the Diana Vaughan hoax was probably a Masonic plot to discredit the (supposed) “evidence” that Freemasonry is associated with Satanism. According to the Catholic Times (another English Catholic newspaper), Father Cahill, unlike prominent Freemasons, does not expect readers to accept “even a single point” from his book on faith, for he “proves everything” [14].
Umberto Eco has suggested that the process of “inventing the enemy,” whether that role was assigned to pagans, Jews, Freemasons, gypsies, or another outsider group, has been a deplorable but pervasive feature of civilization. He suggested that cultures require an enemy, and when there is no genuine external threat, an internal one is usually invented in compensation. Eco observed that stereotypes can be destroyed when a genuine effort is made to understand other people without denying or disrespecting their distinctiveness. He seemed, however, far from sanguine about the possibility, implying that the natural human impulse was not inclined towards the dismantling of such myths and stereotypes [15]. The Diana Vaughan narratives in English Catholic newspapers demonstrate the power of discourse to construct a protean reality that is readily accepted, repeated, and adapted by newspaper editor and reader alike. The Diana Vaughan narratives in these newspapers, though in some respects more creative, were by no means particularly exceptional. Similar antisemitic and anti-Masonic themes can also be found in their reporting of other episodes, such as the election of Karl Lueger as mayor of Austria and the Dreyfus Affair. Constructions of “the Jew” and “the Freemason,” blending contemporary stereotypes of greed, cowardice, disloyalty and secrecy with religious myths about deicide, ritual murder, sorcery, devil worship and the Antichrist, were a pervasive theme in a range of English Catholic discourses during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [16]. And as plenty of other studies have shown, such images were certainly by no means confined to Catholic discourses. The portrayal of “the other” as Satanic and diabolically conspiratorial can be found in a myriad of religious and non-religious discourses, from the middle ages, throughout the twentieth century, and into the present century. It was often the wider cultural consciousness, rather than just disturbed or bitter individuals, that was willing to accept bizarre myths, stereotypes, caricatures and fairy tales about Jews and Freemasons as fact. One can only hope that Eco was being overly pessimistic about the prospects of de-inventing “the enemy”.
Notes
[1] See Umberto Eco, “Inventing the Enemy,” in Inventing the Enemy and Other Occasional Writings, trans. Richard Dixon (London: Harvill Seeker, 2012), 1-21, and Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery, trans. Richard Dixon (London: Vintage, 2012). The Prague Cemetery was originally published in 2010 and translated into English in 2012. Umberto Eco’s depiction of cultural obsessions with constructed “enemies” (such as “the Jew,” “the Freemason,” “the negro,” “the gypsy,” “the homosexual,” “the witch” and other so-called villains) is disturbing but persuasive.
[2] In this letter to the Tablet, as well as in the Month (the periodical of the British Jesuits), the anonymous critic lamented that “respected ecclesiastics” were found defending the cause of so-called Diana Vaughan. See Letters to the Editor, Tablet, 17 April 1897, 617-618 and “The Diana Vaughan Hoax,” Month 89 (April 1897), 442. It is possible that the anonymous critic was the British Jesuit scholar Herbert Thurston. Thurston was no friend of Freemasonry, which he vehemently criticised in a number of books and articles. Nevertheless, he wrote a letter to the Tablet in January 1897 in which he suggested that the Diana Vaughan revelations were “an exploded myth.” And in 1898, in an article about the antisemitic blood libel accusation, he concluded that the end of the anti-Masonic Diana Vaughan episode, the “disappearance into thin air of the impalpable ‘luciferians,’” seems only to have “added new zest to the pursuit of the unquestionably very real and substantial Israelites.” Herbert Thurston, Letters to the Editor, Tablet, 2 January 1897, 22-23; Herbert Thurston, “Anti-Semitism and the Charge of Ritual Murder,” Month 91 (June 1898), 562. Thurston equivocally defended Jews on a number of occasions from the ritual murder accusation. This is discussed in Simon Mayers, “From the Christ-Killer to the Luciferian: The Mythologized Jew and Freemason in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century English Catholic Discourse,” Melilah 8 (2011), 41-48 (link to volume 8 of the online edition of Melilah).
[3] Léo Taxil [Miss Diana Vaughan, pseud.], Mémoires d’une Ex-Palladiste (Paris, 1895-1897); Eco, The Prague Cemetery, chap. 22.
[4] “The Anti-Masonic Congress,” Tablet, 17 August 1895, 250-251. In an earlier version of this essay (which focused on the Tablet), published in the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, I mistakenly stated that this report in the Tablet contained the first encounter with Diana Vaughan in the English Catholic newspapers. See Simon Mayers, “From The Tablet to The Prague Cemetery: The Jew, The Freemason, and the Diana Vaughan Hoax,” Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, volume 5, issue 1 (2013), 242. I have since found that the Catholic Herald contained a number of reports discussing Diana Vaughan in 1894.
[5] “Report of the Anti-Masonic Congress,” Tablet, 10 October 1896, 565-566.
[6] See for example: “Notes from Paris,” Tablet, 12 January 1895, 58; “Antisemitism in the Austrian Election,” Tablet, 27 March 1897, 481-482; “Captain Dreyfus and His Champions,” Tablet, 12 February 1898, 238.
[7] See Norbert Jones, C.R.L., Letters to the Editor, Tablet, 23 January 1897, 138-139. For other letters by Father Jones C.R.L., see the Tablet: 7 November 1896, 741-742 and 10 April 1897, 577. Father Jones was a priest and a member of the Canons Regular of the Lateran. He was appointed to provide Sunday Mass at the Catholic Church at Truro, Cornwell, in 1891. According to reports, his services were popular with both Catholics and Protestants. See “News from the Diocese,” Tablet, 5 August 1893, 236.
[8] Mary Elizabeth Herbert, review of Adriano Lemmi: Supreme Head of the Freemasons and Le Palladisme; Or the Worship of Lucifer, both books by Domenico Margiotta, Dublin Review 118 (January 1896), 192-201.
[9] Paris Correspondent, Our Paris Letter, Catholic Herald, 30 April 1897.
[10] Charles Diamond (1858-1934) was born in Ireland in 1858. He was M.P. for North Monaghan from 1892-1895. He also contested districts of London for the Labour Party in 1918, 1922 and 1924. Diamond was a maverick who frequently got into trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities. He was repeatedly criticised by English Catholic bishops, not for his hostile articles about Jews and Freemasons, but because he tended to disrespect and undermine their ecclesiastical authority.
[11] “A Fiendish Sect,” Catholic Herald, 27 April 1894, and “A Masonic Split,” Catholic Herald, 11 May 1894. See also “Masonic Sacrilege: The Outrage of the Blessed Sacrament: The Worship of Lucifer,” Catholic Herald, 6 July 1894, and “Freemasonry Abjured,” Catholic Herald, 21 September 1894.
[12] James Ratton [A. Cowan, pseud.], X-Rays in Freemasonry (London: Effingham Wilson, 1901); James Ratton [A. Cowan, pseud.], X-Rays in Freemasonry, revised edition (London: Effingham Wilson, 1904). Though published using a pseudonym, Ratton later took credit for X-Rays in Freemasonry in James Ratton, Antichrist: An Historical Review (London: Burns and Oates, 1917).
[13] Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926), 8.
[14] Edward Cahill, Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement, 2nd ed. (Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1930), 67-95; “Eminent Jesuit’s Book Evokes Wide Public Interest,” Catholic Times, 8 November 1929, 6. The first edition of Freemasonry and the Anti-Christian Movement was published in 1929. According to Cahill: “The real motives and genesis of the [Diana Vaughan] conspiracy still remain shrouded in mystery. Some (including Masonic writers, who repudiate all connection of the Masonic Order with it) accept Taxil’s explanation at its face-value. Many, probably the majority of non-Masonic authorities, hold that the affair was a colossal Masonic conspiracy organized to throw discredit and ridicule upon the evidence that Satanism and obscenity were associated with certain sections of Freemasonry. … Whatever be the genesis of the affair it is certain that the too-ready credence given to the fantastic inventions which Taxil’s writings contained helped to discredit many things of which there was otherwise reliable evidence” (70-71).
[15] Umberto Eco, “Inventing the Enemy,” 1-21.
[16] This was examined in my PhD thesis.
Religious Histories and Discourses 