Italian Freemasons

"(About the Italian Roman Catholic Church) [...] instead of asking the Church not to interfere, interfere yourselves! If not now, when?"

"Never before has there been such a need to return to working together. Can we really believe that this link between ethics and politics can be rebuilt without the political presence of Italian Catholics? No, that would be an illusion."

"[...] the Catholic contribution to democracy in Italy has been extraordinary. I am convinced that without returning to the myth of political unity among Catholics, it is possible, even in a pluralistic society, to achieve unity among Catholics at the ecclesial level as a fundamental component for the cohesion of the country."

"Storace's right wing enters the government: a sign of dialogue and openness, a good sign for moderates."

"At the dawn of Mussolini's government, there were 267 parliamentarians affiliated with Freemasonry: more of a lodge than a chamber. Freemasons of different rites were other important names in the history of Fascism: trade unionist Edmondo Rossoni, Grand Minister Araldo di Crollalanza, Jurist Alfredo De Marsico; Peppino Caradonna, Bernardo Barbiellini Amidei, Aldo Finzi, Balbino Giuliano, and Costanzo Ciano, father of Galeazzo, Alberto Beneduce, future head of IRI, and Giacomo Acerbo, author of the electoral law that bears his name; Ezio Maria Gray, who would later become a member of the MSI, Armando Casalini, and many others."

"When I read the warm greeting from Gustavo Raffi, the grand master of the Grand Orient of Italy, in 2013, I was certain that, more than a "welcome" to Pope Bergoglio [...], it was a "good riddance" to Pope Ratzinger!"

"The P2 Lodge, until its dissolution in 1982 due to the Anselmi-Spadolini law, was a regular lodge of the Grand Orient of Italy, as attested by extensive documentation that passed between the grand masters Gamberini, Salvini and Battelli on the one hand and Licio Gelli on the other."

"The Spanish Republic did not find itself free of obligations. For the most part the leaders were Freemasons. Before their duty to their country came their obligations to the Grand Orient. In my opinion, Freemasonry, with all its international influence, is the organization principally responsible for the political ruin of Spain, as well as the murder of Calvo Sotelo, who was executed in accordance with orders from the Grand Secretary of Freemasonry in Geneva."

"[It would be good to see] the end of this legend of secrecy, the poisoned fruit of the deeds of the Arezzo mattress maker, which has no reason to persist. But how can one - one gets heated - confuse the Grand Orient, school of ethics and ruling class, with the scoundrels who infest the country, even in false Masonic lodges? Fascism persecuted it, forcing the Freemasons to keep their organisation secret, but today we are a transparent institution that has returned to history. This is demonstrated by the dozens of our cultural conferences with participants of the calibre of Margherita Jack, Rita Levi Montalcini, Umberto Galimberti, Giuseppe Mussari, Ignazio Marino, Paolo Prodi, Gian Mario Cazzaniga and many other philosophers, historians and academics of renowned and distinguished science. Has the Democratic Party now realised that the left is also the daughter of Freemasonry? The names of those who fled to Paris during Fascism, the Partisan Brigades in Spain and the Constituent Assembly, where out of 75 members 8 were Freemasons, from Cipriano Facchinetti to Arturo Labriola and Meuccio Ruini, are proof of this."

"Ettore Loizzo, engineer of Cosenza, my deputy in the Goi, a person who for me was the highest representative of the Goi, during a meeting of the Council of the Grand Orient of Italy (a sort of Board of Directors of the Goi in which my successor Gustavo Raffi, current Grand Master of the Goi, was also present) that I urgently called in 1993 after the beginning of the investigation of Dr. Cordova on Freemasonry, said that he could state with certainty that in Calabria, out of 32 lodges, 28 were controlled by the 'ndrangheta. [Agostino] Cordova on Freemasonry, at my precise request, he said that he could state with certainty that in Calabria, out of 32 lodges, 28 were controlled by the 'ndrangheta. I jumped up in my chair. I immediately said to him: and what do you want to do in the face of this disaster? He replied: nothing. Even more astonished, I asked him why. He replied that he could do nothing because otherwise he and his family would risk serious reprisals."

"[The Grand Orient of Italy] is one of the most important ethical production agencies that has created the history of the Western world."

"Paolo Prodi. As quoted in Silvia Renzi, Grande Oriente: sottosegretario de Paoli, “Massoneria baluardo della difesa della libertà”. Gran Maestro Raffi, “Grande soddisfazione per questo riconoscimento”, Rimini (April 14, 2007)"

"In his latest encyclical Fratelli tutti published Oct. 3, Pope Francis expressed apertis verbis in an absolutely unprecedented key an idea of universal brotherhood, as a bond that unites all human beings beyond their faith, ideology, skin color, social background, language, culture and nation. It is a thought that is close to the ideals that have been the very foundation of Freemasonry since its origins. For more than 300 years the principle of brotherhood has been written indelibly in the Masonic trinomial placed in the East in the temples along with those of liberty and equality. And,the realization of a universal brotherhood, is from its origins the great mission and dream of Freemasonry."

"(on the Plato's andrgyn myth reported in the Symposium) Early humans belonged to three genders: the male, the female and the androgynous, provided with both reproductive organs. But the men angered the gods, and Jupiter decided to punish them by slicing them in two. Since then the androgyne has been wandering in search of his opposite-sex half. And the same thing is done - much to the monsignor's chagrin - by the halved male and female, who find peace only in reuniting with the missing half that is identical to them. The divine energy that moves the dance of all these halves is called love and is the same for everyone, straight and homosexual. Thus, perversions are not daughters of Jupiter's axe, but of the obsessive thoughts of certain men, mostly male and mostly bigoted."

"If a believer is absolutely sure that his or her own is the only way to salvation, then any other sacred book will be seen as a threat. If, on the other hand, we start from the idea that God is not the property of any one person and that everyone is searching for him, then we can understand that all religions have something to learn from each other. This is the wisest and most ancient point of view, because it unites us in the humble awareness of having to deal with mysteries that are too great, such as death, suffering or the soul. Those who assume this posture are happy with pluralism."

"Always let you work on your inner temple, therein lies great beauty."

"A voice like Pope Francis's, and before that the voice that was Cardinal Martini's in Milan, manages to touch chords that exist but that the everyday fails to prompt. Bergoglio's attention to the world of non-believers, for example, was the global dimension of something we had already seen with Martini and his chair of non-believers, that experiment in the Church that aroused much controversy from a part of the clergy and the faithful. It was an occasion, the one proposed by the cardinal of Milan, that was received with more attention precisely by the secular world than by the Church. With Pope Francis the same thing happened."

"The term theology is ill-suited to the thought and, I would even say, the life of Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Rather, another term needs to be coined to adequately illustrate his having spoken of God, his having represented him, his having been (to quote the famous definition of the Pope given by St Catherine of Siena) 'the sweet Christ on earth'. This neologism, not beautiful but in my opinion effective, is the following: theopathy. Not theo-logy, but theo-pathy. Just as one speaks of sympathy and empathy to mark the resonance of emotion when faced with another human being or a life situation, so, for the thought of God expressed by Pope Francis his writings and especially in his life, one must speak of theo-pathy. He did not think God, he suffered him. It was not logic, it was rather passion that constituted the seal of his encounter with the Mystery of the world capable of producing Love to which we traditionally refer by saying God."

"In every human being there is a divine dimension. There is a heart within a heart, [which is] the thought that precedes the words."

"The demand for justice, rising from the families of the victims of paedophile priests in America and beyond, must be answered. And the Church itself in the past has not done everything possible to punish and prevent, sometimes preferring to hush up and cut short. But if there is one Pope who has not hidden in silence and embarrassment, but has strongly denounced crimes and omertà, it is Pope Benedict XVI. His ‘Letter to the Catholics of Ireland' is the most courageous document the Vatican has produced on the subject in its history."

"(About Jeanne Calment) Born in 1875, she was already a wife at the time of the Dreyfus affair, a mother when General De Gaulle was in primary school, a grandmother before the 1929 crisis. She had evidently taken a liking to it, got into the part: she told of having been at Victor Hugo's funeral, of having known Van Gogh - 'dirty and sickly' -, of having danced with Joséphine Baker. She was given a solemn funeral. The President of the Republic, who was then Jacques Chirac, had sad words for the 'grandmother of the fatherland'."

"Talking about the Bible today is an act of resistance that is also incumbent on the laity. The most formidable of novels."

"We all have to face death sooner or later. And you are never prepared. I started reading the Bible at my father's bedside. Reading it, I did not regain my faith, but the more I think about it, the more hope comes to me. It is not only the sacred text of two religions, Christianity and Judaism, and a very important text for Islam as well. Especially in the part of Ezekiel, in the book of Wisdom, there are words of a beauty that send shivers down your spine. And, although it is true that the picture of man that comes out of the Bible is terrible, from fratricide to sexual violence, civil war, incest, there are also the roots of hope, of love, of resurrection."

"I know Naples well . I frequent it because I like it. It is a city with a very strong identity. On Saturday I was in the historic centre, I visited that marvel of the Veiled Christ for the umpteenth time. But I want to point out a danger: we must be careful not to turn that area of Naples into a showroom, a tourist salon. I do not like oleography, but identity is one thing and oleography another. The historic centre of Naples has its charm because the people are still there. Without the people, it becomes something else. Naples must not lose its soul, it is a danger that I see."

"The best of Italy are the young people who do not whine, get involved, go abroad, learn other languages, study, win scholarships, work. Fabrizia Di Lorenzo's path was interrupted by Islamist terrorism in Berlin; that of another girl of her generation, Valeria Solesin, was broken a year earlier at the Bataclan. But many other Italians will follow their example. Instead of denigrating them, the government would do well to create the conditions for those who wish to do so to return home."

"The truth must be told whatever the cost."

"There is in Italy a fourth Party, which may not have many voters, but which is capable of paralysing and rendering futile all our efforts, by organising the sabotage of loans and the flight of capital, price increases or scandal campaigns. Experience has convinced me that Italy cannot be governed today without attracting into the new formation of government, in one form or another, representatives of this fourth party, of the party of those who have the money and economic strength."

"It is true that the functioning of economic democracy demands disinterestedness, just as that of political democracy supposes the virtue of character. The work of renewal will fail if in all categories, in all centres, there do not arise selfless men, ready to toil and sacrifice for the common good."

"When I see that while Hitler and Mussolini persecuted men because of their race, and invented the appalling anti-Jewish legislation that we know, and I see at the same time the Russians made up of 160 races seeking the fusion of these races by overcoming the differences existing between Asia and Europe, this attempt, this effort towards the unification of human consortium, let me say: this is Christian, this is eminently universalistic in the sense of Catholicism."

"Communism as implemented in the USSR is at the antipodes of Nazism: communism is imbued with Christian brotherhood and is therefore anti-racist par excellence, while Nazism and Fascism are essentially and primarily racist. Thus two irreconcilable and opposite phenomena Communism and Nazism."

"There are many who only make a small excursion into politics, as amateurs, and others who regard it, and it is for them, as an accessory of secondary importance. But for me, ever since I was a boy, it was my career, my mission."

"I take the floor in this world assembly and I feel that everything, except your personal courtesy, is against me: it is above all my qualification as a former enemy, which makes me feel like an accused person, that I have arrived here after the most influential among you have already formulated their conclusions in a long and laborious elaboration.[... ] I have the duty before the conscience of my country and to defend the vitality of my people to speak as an Italian, but I feel the responsibility and the right to speak also as an anti-fascist democrat, as a representative of the new Republic that, harmonising in itself the humanitarian aspirations of Giuseppe Mazzini ([an Italian 33rd degree Scottish Rite Freemason]), the universalist conceptions of Christianity and the internationalist hopes of the workers, is all directed towards that lasting and reconstructive peace that you seek and towards that cooperation between peoples that you have the task of establishing."

"The theory of evolution by Darwin does not explain how this transition occurred, from inert matter to living matter and then to the only form of living matter endowed with reason, which is man. It is not scientifically rigorous. A rigorous scientific theory meets the requirements of scientific rigor of Galileo, who was the father of science: mathematical description and experimental reproducibility. Requirements that evolutionary theory does not meet, precisely because it cannot describe nor even less reproduce the transition from nonliving matter to living species, plant and animal. It cannot answer the question of why among millions of species, only one, the human being, is endowed with reason. The science of life has not figured out how life arises; it is not an exact science."

"Over the course of ten thousand years, from the dawn of civilization to the 16th century, all cultures had deluded themselves into thinking they knew how to decipher the Book of Nature without ever posing a single question to Its Author. That is why no culture had been given the privilege of discovering a fundamental Law of Nature."

"How does the world recognizes England, the United Kingdom, as the country that gave birth to the modern age? It was not Newton but Galilei who opened the Moderna age."

"Certainly heaven is something we all need, however, we should not imagine it anthropomorphically. [...] I believe that we certainly cannot rule out the possibility of an existence outside of space and time, mass, energies and charges. In heaven there can be anything but that."

"If I deny the existence of the transcendental sphere, then everything is exhausted in the immanent and the most rigorous component of logic, thus the mathematical structure, should prove the theorem of the denial of God [...]. Why can science never discover God? Because, if science discovered God, God would be the greatest discovery of all time, but it would not be God, because God is everything; science can only discover the fundamental components of immanent reality. [...] Since science discovers that there is a rigorous logic that governs the world from its smallest structures, such as the structure of the proton [...], at the boundaries of the cosmos, if there is a rigorous logic, it is legitimate to ask, "Will there be an author of this logic?"."

"As a believing scientist [...] it is my deep conviction that it is our task to search nature and the universe, as Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science, did, for the footprints of God."

"Science and faith are not in conflict; they are expressions of the two components of which we are made: the transcendent and the immanent."

"In Western Culture, starting from Phidias and the Parthenon, the Golden Section and the Golden Number are present, consciously or unconsciously, in very famous works. In the Renaissance, after the rediscovery of Fibonacci, it was a symbol of aesthetic perfection to be used in architecture and art with, among others, Leonardo da Vinci (1542-1519) and Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). The Golden Number is in many geometric figures making them Golden. We have it among other things in the octagonal architecture of Castel del Monte. The Golden ratio enters the pentagon which is Golden because the side of the star and the side of the pentagon are in the ratio of 38% and 62%, as required by the Golden Number."

"Golden beauty is not just art. It is pure geometry. It is visual physics. It is found in the regular pentagon, where the ratio of the side of the inscribed star to the side of the pentagon is exactly 62% and 38%: the two segments of a line divided according to the golden section."

"When I met John Paul II, I felt that history was offering us a unique opportunity: to heal a rift that had divided science and faith for centuries."

"When it comes to the Big Bang, many believe that simply evoking that primordial explosion is enough to explain the origin of the world. But the issue is much deeper than that. Before the Big Bang, the fundamental laws of Nature had to be created: space, time, mass, energy, charges."

"The theory of evolution, as formulated by Darwin, is an important contribution to our understanding of the variety of the living world. However, it must be clearly stated that this theory is not scientifically rigorous in the Galilean sense of the term. True science - the kind that Galileo made great - is based on two fundamental requirements: mathematical description and experimental reproducibility."

"Pope Francis was a pontiff who knew how to speak to the heart of humanity with the strength of simplicity, reminding us that the Creator of Heaven and Earth is not distant from our frailties, but walks with us."

"When we speak of "paradise," we must not fall into the trap of imagining it as a physical place with human or earthly characteristics. Paradise is not a place we can describe using the categories we use for our world, such as space, time, matter or energy. These are dimensions of reality that we know and study with science, but paradise goes beyond these limits. Science teaches us that the universe is governed by physical laws that regulate space, time, mass, energy and electrical charges. But what if there is a dimension or reality beyond these laws? We cannot rule out the possibility that a reality might exist outside the co-ordinates of space and time, a reality in which the notions of matter and energy, as we understand them, have no meaning. In the context of this reflection, paradise can be conceived as a reality that transcends all the physical laws of the universe. A reality that is not subject to the limitations of our earthly experience and that cannot be represented with human images or concepts. It is a dimension of existence that, by its very nature, is totally different from everything we know, and for this very reason we cannot imagine it as something anthropomorphic, that is, in our likeness."

"Man is not just another animal. Our species possesses something unique, a privilege that distinguishes us from all other life forms: Reason."

"Official Facebook profile (in Italian; September 13, 2024)"

"Biological evolutionism claims to be considered a science. However, we must ask: What is the hard evidence that supports it? In laboratories around the world, some even secret, attempts are being made to answer fundamental questions such as the transition from inert matter to living matter, but definitive answers still do not exist.Evolutionism tells us about processes that take millions of years, but without a rigorous mathematical basis or reproducible experiments, we cannot consider it a Galilean science. True scientific rigor requires tangible evidence, not just words. It is crucial for human progress to distinguish between what is science and what is unproven theory."

"If we were children of chaos, the fundamental laws of nature could not exist."