Catholic Church, Freemasonry 

Whereas before the war it was little known or discussed, Freemasonry today commands an ever-growing and informed audience which has called forth much serious literature and has even provoked television documentary films which have aroused widespread interest.

Freemasonry and the Vatican is the latest book dealing with an entirely new phase in the orientation of Masonry in the modern world. There is at present in Catholic circles a constant, subtle and determined campaign in favour of Freemasonry. It is directed by the progressive element which is currently enjoying a great influence in French and American church circles and beginning to show its hand in England too. Its avowed object is to obtain from the Vatican the revision or even the annulment of the various condemnations pronounced by the Popes upon the Craft since 1738. This element consists of a number of priests, including a Jesuit, Editors of Catholic newspapers and several writers of note.

In this new work, Vicomte de Poncins emphatically reinforces the Church's condemnations of Freemasonry, which, as he shows, have been renewed more than six times since the Second World War and he quotes from authoritative Masonic documents, hitherto unknown to the English reader. Although the author is mainly concerned with Grand Orient Freemasonry, he treats in some detail the question of Masonic Regularity and Irregularity and the oft-disputed relationship of the Anglo-Saxon with the Grand Orient Obediences, and brings to light startling and valuable new evidence on the origins of Anderson's Constitutions and the Grand Lodge of England.

The most important part of the book is concerned with Freemasonry's relationship to politics and in particular its connection, often quite unconscious, with Communism. The author shows the peculiar and disturbing nature of this role in the light of the highest Masonic authorities, and reveals its activity in the French Revolution, the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, the Cartel des Gauches in France in 1924 and then in the Spanish Civil War.

Freemasonry and the Vatican reveals for the first time that it was the Grand Orient Freemason, Dr. Benes of Czechoslovakia, who influenced President Roosevelt to place blind faith in Stalin with the disastrous results to Christian civilisation now known to the World. The reader will be appalled at the extent to which secret and Masonic forces influences such conferences as that at Yalta and are operating in international politics at the present time. Vicomte de Poncins quotes in full a document discovered by the Spanish Government - known as the 'Zabrousky Letter,' and written by Roosevelt to the Jewish liaison officer between himself and Stalin. Written in 1943, it reveals how Roosevelt declared his intention of abandoning virtually the whole of Europe and Asia to the Soviets.

Problems as profound as these are not readily capable of solution, and it is a mark of the author's success, that throughout the forty years he has studies them, the documents and authorities on which his conclusions are based have never been challenged and that he himself has won world wide renown for the penetrating depth of his knowledge. Freemasonry and the Vatican is his latest and perhaps the most brilliant and comprehensive study he has written.

Taken from the inside flaps.