Freemasons keen to open office in EU capital - 18.02.2010
Quibus_Licet
ANDREW RETTMAN
18.02.2010 @ 09:41 CET
A French freemason has said that part of the movement is keen to open
a bureau in Brussels to lobby against the rising influence of
religious organisations in the EU institutions.
"The masonic orders should practice politics in the positive sense of
the term: So that despite their own partisan divisions, they speak out
on the side of secularism and voice their disagreement with this or
that governmental or European decision," Jean-Michel Quillardet, the
former Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, told Belgian daily
Le Soir in an interview out on Wednesday (17 February).
The EU commission should be a secularist body, the freemasons say
(Photo: European Commission)
He said that masonic lodges in Europe remain divided on the subject,
with some more "shy" than others of attracting publicity by opening an
office in the EU capital.
But he added that practical problems are more important than the
divisions and sketched out an agenda for the future outfit.
"I think we will one day manage to create a general masonic
delegation, for the sake of free-thinking in the European
institutions. It's possible politically. It's less possible at the
financial level, as we have infinitely smaller resources than the
churches," Mr Quillardet explained.
The mason said that the Brussels bureau's first task would be to
promote the idea of citizenship:
"It is necessary to impose the universal idea of the Enlightenment,
which consists of the notion that people are citizens and European
citizens before being Jewish, black, Maghreb, homosexual,
heterosexual."
Mr Quillardet explained that the Grand Orient de France has already
created a cell which attempts to bring together all the lodges in
Europe.
In 2007 it organised a pan-European masonic congress in Strasbourg,
with subsequent meetings in 2008 and 2009 in Greece and Turkey. The
2010 event is to be in Portugal.
He added that in 2008 European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso for
the first time met with delegates from a group of lodges including his
own and in the same year wrote a letter to the international congress
in Athens.
"We told him that apart from its Christian roots, Europe owed much to
Greek and Roman philosophy, Renaissance humanism and the
Enlightenment. We obtained representation for masonic orders and for
groups which defend secularism in Bepa," he said, in reference to the
Bureau of European Policy Advisers, a high-level policy analysis unit
in the EU commission.
The Barroso letter was "for us a recognition on the intellectual
landscape," Mr Quillardet explained.
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