I did not know that. So does that mean the Scottish Rite, York Rite and Shrine [not heard of that one], are not freemasonry?
But surely the concern of the Sacred Congregation towards freemasonry must include these orders or fraternities or not?
My understanding of freemasonry is that the symbolic degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master Mason, [as conferred in the United States], are degrees of the York Rite. York Masonry is as far as I can ascertain [from friends who are masons] the oldest and best known of all Masonic Rites. I think it takes its name from York, England, where the earliest known record of Masonry exists, which unlike all other masonry which is less than 500-years old, York Rite dates and can trace its origins from about A.D. 950.
Anyone know what the Orthodox view is in respect of freemasonry?
Blessings.
In order to belong to an appendant order of Freemasonry one must belong first to a Masonic Lodge. That is, to be a York Rite or Scottish Rite Mason, one must first be a Master Mason, or 3rd-Degree Mason. To be a Shriner one in addition had to be either a Scottish Rite Mason or a York Rite Mason. (The Shriners may have loosened their membership requirements since I last knew of them). Since one has to be a Mason to be a member of the appendant bodies, the proscription applies equally to them.
The degrees you described are the degrees of Freemasonry proper–the first three degrees of the ‘Blue Lodge’ or what is normally understood as Freemasonry. The Knights Templar confers 15 additional ‘honorary’ degrees on members. The Scottish rite confers 29 additional ‘honorary’ degrees above the level of Master Mason. In addition, the 33rd Degree may be conferred on any man, Freemason or not, for outstanding service to the cause of Masonry or of service to humankind. I don’t know how many degrees the Shriners might confer.
Any degrees received in an appendant body are considered ‘honorary’, so that a 32nd-Degree Scottish Rite Mason or a 12th-degree Knight Templar in the York Rite is really only a 3rd Degree Master Mason. Even in the appendant orders, the ‘extra’ degrees are not given any serious weight: one earns all of the degrees of an appendant order in a single day, over the course of six to eight hours of observing allegorical rituals enacted on one’s behalf.
Some of those allegories are quite vivid, but remember that the interpretations lent to those allegories are purely up to the individual, except to whatever measure the varying rituals interpret themselves. For example, in one degree in both the York and the Scottish Rite, one drinks from a cup fashioned as a skull; in some cases a real skull is used, donated by some former Mason who had no further use for it himself. The Ritual tells you to drink from this cup remembering that you will one day come to the end of your life, and that this life should be a preparation for the next life.
This may be a morbid thought, but no more morbid than St. Francis Liguori’s book “Preparation For Death”, wherein the reader is likewise treated to grim discussions of what will happen to one’s body after death and then encouraged likewise to reflect on the need to treat this life as preparatory for the next. And, by the way, one can find Protestant evangelists who have dwelt on the same subject to the same end. I have personally sat under the teaching of one or two such evangelists. There is nothing deliberately macabre about the allegory and certainly nothing Satanic–in the York Rite, the ritual for this degree is explicitly Christian, since the York Rite itself considers itself a Christian fraternity.
For the view of Orthodoxy see the following:
orthodoxfaith.com/ecumenism_masonry_councils.html
Hope this helps!