I think especially young men are going to be increasingly hungry for fraternal companionship and conversation revolving around the transcendent - ideals or values, such as the virtues - but, at the same time, feeling increasingly isolated or confused in or about those longing’s or desires’ specific objects. I think that will be a result of the corruption of institutions on one hand coupled with a culture that constantly glories in vanities, the superficial and what can only serve to jade us. I think groups that target this natural desire especially in young men will be just fine as modern society’s redefinition of progressivism results in deadening, indeed lifeless mentality of absolute relativism and scepticism. They will at least draw the best of men who have the character and conviction to draw others and weather a storm.
I think Masons should look to Plato’s dialogues and remember the effect that Socrates’ refutation of the Sophists had on the young pupil: he was reinvigorated and inspired by virtue. This is a perennial problem. Sceptics, sophists et al. are not - as Aristotle rightly pointed out - philosophers: they neither have nor actually love wisdom.
At the same time, I think the rise of homosexualism will be the test for any social organization’s future and long-term survival in how they choose to deal with it or manage it. Ecclesial organizations and communities that have embraced it are (nay, have) died the death. Accepting homosexualism without question will result in relativism, radical scepticism and the death of virtue as all truth and logic is ejected for the sake of the passions. It can and will of course also tend to corrupt proper social relationships, as between the mentor and his disciple or even simple brotherly love and concord.
I don’t think it’s because of the Church’s teaching that such groups have entered into tough times. I suspect its part and parcel of changing social mores. The temptation is to adapt by being incorporated into the seemingly irresistible tendency toward a relativistic and ultimately deeply materialistic and atheistic world-view where God is not given any room or authority in life - but it should be remembered that the enemy always appears invincible while he happens to be winning; but no man, or human ideology, is ever invincible.
Scientology, for example, likely was a product for its specific time and the reigning Zeitgeist and so will pass away as that fad does; Freemasonry, however, exercises a more perennial philosophy and appeal - that is, if Masons themselves are willing to appear counter-cultural in, e.g., talking about philosophy and man’s philosophical problems, which in a rampantly pragmatic culture will seem strange at best and ridiculous at worst.
