Mark Twain was a anti-Catholic Freemason

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Good thing I am not a fan of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
 
Inquiringperson said:
Can you provide credible proof?
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If Wikipedia can be trusted, he was initiated into the Polar Star Masonic Lodge in St. Louis in 1861.

[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain)

According to the Catholic Assumption College's website:
Twain unleashes a tremendous attack against the Catholic church in Connecticut Yankee.
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 [www1.assumption.edu/users/lknoles/twain.html](http://www1.assumption.edu/users/lknoles/twain.html)

Personally, I really enjoyed Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn and another work he wrote called Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.
 
I wonder if this is why I never read one Mark Twain book while attending Catholic school back in the '60’s & 70’s?? Actually I never read any after school either!!😃
 
I think it would be easier to list the things Mark Twain was for rather than against. Muuuuuuch shorter list 🙂

Also, it’s not really surprising. Anti-Catholic teachings in the early U.S. is incredibly pervasive. It’s actually still around. Look at the way world history is structured sometime, and you can find a lot of sentiment painting Martin Luther as a hero of rational thought against the superstitious Catholic Church. And that’s in today’s textbooks. I kinda worry what they were like in Twain’s times…
 
First of all, not all Masons are anti-Catholic.

Samuel Clemmons was not a Catholic. So, what is so remarkable about his being a Mason?

I read his books in Catholic Schools (both Grade School and High School) pre-Vatican II.

Lots of people don’t read him today because he uses the word “******” in Huck Finn repeatedly. They don’t know what the book is about, just that he uses that word and therefore it is horrible.

Schools bar his works out of political correctness and out of totally and complete ignorance about what his stories (ESPECIALLY Huckleberry Finn) are really all about.

What they DO NOT realize is the Jim, the runaway slave, is the primary person in that book that teaches Huck (a completely unschooled child) about humanity. It is Jim that show real love for Huck; Jim that shows by example that anyone can be a good example; and it is Jim that Huck ends up working hard (and betraying his entire upbringing) to see that Jim goes free.

Twain uses the vernacular of that era in his books. And his books expose the prejudices of his era, and show just how ridiculous those prejudices really were.
 
sistermouse said:
I wonder if this is why I never read one Mark Twain book while attending Catholic school back in the '60’s & 70’s?? Actually I never read any after school either!!😃
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This surprises me. It used to be that Twain’s works were commonly taught in literature classes at both the high school and college level.

Later, his most famous novel, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, was virtually banned because of its use of the N word. There have been some sanitized versions which came out replace each use of the N word with “slave.” I saw a prominent black academic in a TV interview who scoffed at such efforts, saying the book should be read as written.

Twain didn’t have much use for religion, but mainly tried to keep his heretical opinions to himself. But if you read his book “The Mysterious Stranger” you get a feel for his attitude toward religion.

Anyone who would like to get the flavor of Mississippi river life in the heyday of the steamboat will like “Life on the Mississippi,” especially the part about the pilot’s union. If you ignore the boring parts and the beginning and the end, the middle is pretty fascinating.
 
I did a paper in college entitled “Between the Church and Mark Twain” in which I examined his view of the Church in his writings. Twain was disgusted by the amount of poverty in Rome (and the Papal States) in such close proximity to the opulance and riches of the churches. He couldn’t understand why the poor didn’t simply raid the churches and felt there was a level of hypocrisy in a Church which claimed to follow Christ and yet allowed such poverty to exist in a State wholly controlled by the Church. At the same time, he had great praise for the spiritual message of the Church. I believe his daughter was a convert to the Church. He also stated that though he wasn’t Catholic, if he was Catholic, there was nothing which would ever tear him away from the beauty and elegance of the faith and he felt that Catholics were very fortunate to belong to a faith which imparted such a strong identity, Twain seemed to draw a distinction between the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church as represented by its governance of the Papal States and it’s political leaning against the rise of liberal democracy. He also seemed to feel that the Catholic Church in America was more representative of the Christian message than the Church in Europe and praised the American Church for her work with immigrants and the poor. In short, his relationship with the Church was a complicated one, with both positive and negative views. His books should be read by Catholics, despite some of his opinions concerning the Church, because they basically contain a view of the human person which corresponds to the basic message of human dignity long promoted by the Church.
 
Absolutely. Mark Twain was a wonderful writer, and very amusing. I think he did poke fun at organized religion, (and other institutions) but not particularily the Catholic Church. Fundamentalism was high on his list of satire (see Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn), and don’t forget what he wrote about the Mormons in “Roughing It”. He was definitely satirical. One of his cutest works was about Adam and Eve , called “The Diaries of Adam and Eve”. classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/mtwain/bl-mtwain-exadam-1.htm
 
Mark Twain had his wife read all his manuscripts before they got to the publisher. She would not allow them to have any profanity or cursing.

An English professor, John Seeleye, took it upon himself to rewrite Huck Finn, inserting all the curse words and profanity in Huck’s narrative in the places where he figured it would naturally have occurred with a person of Huck’s character. It was called “The TRUE Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

I somehow think that Twain would have liked it.
 
Don’t have much to contribute in regards to Twain’s anti RCC views or his take on Christianity as a whole. But one of his quotes as always rung true with me and has stuck.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
Mark Twain
 
The_Old_Medic said:
I read his books in Catholic Schools (both Grade School and High School) pre-Vatican II.
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We read Huck Finn in Catholic high school in the 1980s. I remember our teacher (a Dominican nun) discussing race and 19th century America in the book, but never any anti-Catholic sentiment.
 
A few years before crossing the Tiber, I was the master of a masonic lodge. Never once did I hear or see anything anti-Catholic in a lodge. There is no such thing as a universal freemasonry, so some, perhaps in other countries, are anti-Catholic. I’ve just never seen it.

Were there any references to the Church in Twain’s writings? I remember nothing along that line.
 
I don’t recall where I saw it, but Twain commented at one time, with regard to religion, that he couldn’t understand why Christians excluded from heaven all things they found most enjoyable in this life: sex, whiskey, and tobacco.
 
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