POPE LEO XIII AND POPE LEO XIV, THE CHRISTIAN-HUMANIST AND REPUBLICAN-HUMANIST LINE
FRIENDS AND BENEFACTORS,
Our mission to recover the republican tradition takes us beyond the United States, but does not abandon it, and represents republicanism as the perennial, still-viable humanistic force against arbitrary power, insisting its deliberate reinvigoration is the best practical, intellectual and martial strategy for addressing oligarchic and other corruptions. Pope Leo XIII’s project, especially in Aeterni Patris (1879) and the social encyclicals that followed, was a deliberate recovery of a classical-Christian humanism: the re-centering of education and public life on the intellectual and moral capacities of the human person as understood through natural law, Aristotelian virtue, and the dignity of intermediate associations. He treated the erosion of that inheritance, by materialist ideologies, atomizing economic forces, and the neglect of philosophical formation, as a civilizational problem requiring active restoration, not accommodation.
In our time, Pope Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost), elected in May 2025 as the first American pontiff, deliberately took the name Leo to signal continuity with Leo XIII’s social teaching and its defense of human dignity amid industrial and economic upheaval. In his first year and a half he has repeatedly framed the contemporary task as a recovery of authentic humanism, explicitly “a vision open to the Creator” that fosters fraternal relationships, forms persons for public and political life understood as service to the common good and resists the reduction of the human being to measurable skills, algorithmic profiles, or passive consumers of technology.
His apostolic letter Drawing New Maps of Hope (October 2025), marking the sixtieth anniversary of Vatican II’s declaration on education, and subsequent addresses to schools, universities, and UNESCO insist that education must cultivate interior depth, critical engagement with artificial intelligence, and the capacity for reconciliation rather than mere technical competence. He has warned that uncritical technological and commercial trends can produce “loss of freedom” under the guise of progress and has called for educational communities to form “protagonists of a new way of inhabiting the world.” The parallel with a recovery of the American republican tradition is therefore not metaphorical: both diagnose a civilizational deficit in the formation of persons capable of ordered liberty and shared responsibility, both locate the remedy in the deliberate re-transmission of a thick account of human nature and practical virtue rather than in structural critique alone, and both treat intermediate associations and educational institutions as indispensable against atomizing forces, whether commercial spectacle or digital dehumanization. The theological horizon differs, yet the practical judgment about what has been lost, and what must be restored for self-government to remain possible, converges. There is currently no voice for the recovery of the American republican tradition as visible as the Pope for the Christian-humanist line, yet both represent the oldest voices for remedy. But due to the reach and power of the former, it still presents a problem for recovery of the republican-humanist line as remedy to the erosion of civic education. It is the soil of the secular order, and cannot be understood purely through a singular religious institution.
The modern tensions surrounding Pope Leo XIV’s June 2026 visit to Spain illustrate the persistence of these fault lines in concrete institutional form. As reported by ZENIT and other outlets, a boycott campaign under the slogan “I Do Not Wait for You,” organized principally by the Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia Foundation together with secularist and atheist associations, opposed the use of public resources and spaces for the papal journey and framed the event as an infringement on institutional neutrality. The campaign’s most prominent figure, Joan Francesc Pont Clemente, a university professor and high-ranking member of Spanish liberal Freemasonry (including former service as Grand Commander of the Supreme Council), made the initiative a visible instance of the long-standing antagonism between certain Masonic currents and the Church over religious relativism, the public role of faith, and the legitimacy of confessional presence in civic life. Parallel debates in Madrid over the symbolic language of official welcomes, and the participation of Catalan independentist and leftist groups, further showed how the visit became a proxy for deeper contests about whether a historically Christian society may still grant public recognition to its religious inheritance or must treat such recognition as an illicit privilege. These episodes do not resolve the older intellectual genealogy of republican-humanist, Masonic, Hermetic and associational currents, but they demonstrate that the Church’s anti-Masonic posture continues to meet organized resistance that treats any public Catholic assertion as an obstacle to a fully secular order.
The Church is unwilling to reconsider its longstanding prohibition on Catholic membership in Freemasonry, which rests on the claim that shared emphases on morality, charity, and fraternal bonds, together with documented instances of dual affiliation across centuries, outweigh historical incompatibilities and justify a fresh examination under a new pontificate. Past Master Brian Byrd in his email letter to Pope Leo XIV about Freemasonry treated the requirement of belief in a Supreme Being as sufficient common ground, while setting aside the Church’s objections to secrecy, religious relativism, and the absence of specifically Christian doctrine as secondary or outdated. In relation to the tensions already noted around the Spanish visit, this appeal tells us of a persistent pattern: organized efforts to normalize Masonic participation in public and religious life continue to meet the Church’s reaffirmation of incompatibility, even as some advocates present the conflict as a misunderstanding rather than a doctrinal one.
I do not agree that such efforts towards reconsidering is of priority, and the Church’s reaffirmation of incompatibility keeps alive the same binary that collapses Renaissance Hermetic and occult-philosophical currents into a single category of error, rather than distinguishing those earlier humanist resources for natural and political reflection from later institutional forms. Such a framing does not engage nor intends to engage the deeper republican-humanist lineage that predates both the Church’s medieval consolidations and its modern anti-Masonic stance. Wishes for the Church to reconsider its longstanding prohibition on Catholic membership in Freemasonry instead seeks accommodation within the existing terms of prohibition and counter-revolution.
The Church may not acknowledge anything any of us have to say, because, and people praise the Church for this, cares about its preservation, authority, and prestige. The fact that the republican-humanist lineage long predates the Church neither affects them, as the Christians have devised a painstaking categorical polemic against those it considers its foes. This is so, even despite the various lineages of hybridization of pagan revivalism and elements with Christianity in Europe or the Americas. No convergence is to be expected or deliberately conducted or advocated. Any convergence will occur naturally, and end, as I have stated before in the last letter, in fated conflict. It will occur naturally, because firstly, Europe and America, and perhaps the whole world, wherever the true cause of liberty (its philosophy, not the hypocrisy of national foreign policy) at its basis arose in the hearts of the multitudes, have forgotten what got us out of the boundaries of absolutism to a fragmented and materialist secular order. The latter was not the dream, but of particular lineages, but the failure of the present order leads to some exploiting, as they would have done in any age. This is the reality of the difficulty of the recovery, because it has many competitor suitors against it.
A republic can be established and the people well-acquainted in one age or another with its philosophy and principles may practice it largely, but one must anticipate and consider the strategies of its foes and what decays in time without vigilance. The lineage we seek to uphold in this day and recover brings with it a danger, because it depends on the quality and actions of those propagating it any point in time. The main danger is that challenges the Church’s authority, which needs the world to see its beauty and be blinded by it eternally as arbitrator or truth and justice. Mazzini saw this. It challenges entrenched and selfish power and teaches humanity to kneel to no singular or majoritarian will. The authority of the Church naturally and quickly disengages from any dialogue like a fox, if the chance to preach the redemptive gospel of Christ to you before then has not been seized upon.
Last year (2025), Dr. Chris Burgwald stated in Why can’t a Catholic belong to the Masons, that:
“As always, there are clear and rational reasons for the Church’s teaching. In this case, the core issue is Freemasonry’s philosophical foundation. While many Masons and their lodges may not pay much attention to it, the fact is that Freemasonry has a set of teachings, and to be a Mason is an (at least implicit) endorsement of those teachings.
Among other reasons, perhaps the most significant is this: the philosophical foundation of Freemasonry opposes Catholic doctrine at a fundamental level. For example, Masonic teachings promote a view of religion that says all faiths are equal paths to truth and that human reason alone reveals life’s purpose. This clashes with the reality that Jesus Christ is the Way, Truth and Life (cf. Jn 14:6) and that the Church is the means established by Jesus by which we encounter him and receive his teachings.”
This is the Church’s basic reason generally against such thinking. It masks a superficial front by the Church, showing it evades by reminding one of its authority and prestige, not by its establishment on historical facts and comparative theology. The history of the origins of the concept of Christos and Logos that the proto-orthodox Church adopted and adapted undermine its authority, and the history of the republican-humanist lineage, prior to the Stoic mixtures with Christianity, tell a different story from what the common man is taught, and the American Founders were relatively aware of this. While Americans praise Pope Leo XIV, the public do not take these complexities into account, sufficient to interest them in the history of our foundations, well beyond the encyclicals and speeches that Pope Leo XIV can provide, and honestly.
No person who is honest, who cares for the foundations, of no stature or station, can blot out the value and contribution of the associational traditions and Masonic republicanism to the American foundations. One can muster all the hatred for it, but it would be, as time has proven, like cutting half of one’s own body. The dishonest man will in the next breath, after learning the facts of the history, fall headlong into the rationale he has been taught, that instead of recovering the depths of these meanings of the cosmic and civic order, seek out and advocate a sharp replacement against it. This is what has happened with the modern integralists and Christian nationalists in the Protestant line, and their Calvinist ramblings. The conflict between the American Protestants and the American Pope does not cancel out the fact, that both are revisionists when it comes to being fully honest about and supportive of those foundations.
I invite you to look over the timeline again of the Crusades to Late Renaissance Occultism to Enlightenment Timeline (1075-1680).
A recovery of the republican-humanist line must not be equated with, or subordinated to, the Church’s longstanding Anti-Masonry or the counter-revolutionary posture that has repeatedly accompanied it. Classical republican thought predates the Church by centuries; and the Renaissance recovery of that inheritance, including its engagement with Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and occult-philosophical currents (Ficino, Pico, and related figures), formed part of a broader humanist project of restoring ancient learning rather than a demonological conspiracy. The Church’s reduction of these currents to occultism understood simply as demonic evil, a pattern continued by Leo XIV in his reiterated opposition to Freemasonry and related practices, collapses a complex intellectual lineage into a binary of orthodoxy versus subversion. That reduction differs sharply from the era of Leo III, whose papacy consolidated a medieval imperial-Christian order through the coronation of Charlemagne; it was not contending with the early-modern recovery of classical republican forms or the Hermetic materials that later humanists treated as resources for natural philosophy and political reflection. The republican-humanist tradition is older than the Church itself, and its modern reconstitution does not require the Church’s counter-revolutionary framing of Masonry or occult philosophy as the decisive antagonist; the decisive deficits remain those of civic formation, historical literacy, and the capacity for ordered liberty among the people.
These are written openly for all. The last letter, Letter of Introduction on Occult Philosophy, Ethics, and the Republican-Humanist Revival, which defends Occult Philosophy against transhumanism and accelerationist supersessionism, are for and of no cost to subscribers who took no less than three seconds to subscribe and support the effort and this project. Subscribing leads to the growth and awareness of the project, and sharing aids the cause, placing it visibly where it is most needed.
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