At http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2014/05/masons-and-catholics/ is a good article that has more depth on what I discussed last week in why the Masons and Catholics don't like each other. A few quotes;

• "By 1917, a Catholic who joined a Masonic Lodge faced automatic excommunication"
• "Masons in various countries did become viscerally anti-Catholic and anti-clerical"
• "Freemasons and Catholics remained at odds over such issues as Catholic Emancipation, public education, and immigration. Masonic lodges tended to be anti-Catholic, and to be linked, explicitly or otherwise, to anti-Catholic mass movements"
• "Masons favored strict secularization in the public schools, as a bulwark against Catholic incursions. They also fought hard against foreign interventionism: Catholics, on the other side, were pushing for armed US intervention against the anti-clerical Masonic regime in Mexico"

To combat Masonry, the Vatican created the Knights of Columbus, an organization holding some similar fraternal characteristics as the Masons, but with a  Catholic bent instead of the universalist bent from the Masons.

The above link documents several issues that Masons and Catholics have disputed with each other about in politics and how that evolved over time.  One issue they missed was population control; Masons are big supporters of population reduction, the Vatican is strongly opposed to any type of population control.

As universalists, Masons take away from the Gospel by claiming there are multiple paths to God. (Click here for detail.)  Historically, the Catholic Church has done the opposite and ADDED to the Gospel, claiming that accepting Yeshua as the Son of God is not good enough, one must accept the Catholic Church as the path to Yeshua. (Click here)

Masons were a heavy influence in our Government in 1776.  Their influence seemed to have waned in the later 19th century, then picked back up during the FDR years.  They fought against Catholic immigration, but lost, and it seems that Catholics immigrated to the USA in heavy numbers during those periods where Masonic influence was low, then steadied off after FDR.

Shalom,

Joe