The opposition: what the churches and the critics said

1738 — 1921

The anti-secret record is mostly a Catholic record, because the city was: The organized opposition to the secret world in South Bend was not a local invention — it was the Roman Catholic Church's standing law, applied in a city where Catholics were the largest single body of Christians. The Church had condemned Freemasonry by name since Clement XII's bull In Eminenti of 1738; Leo XIII's encyclical Humanum Genus of 1884 renewed the condemnation for the fraternal age; and the Church's 1917 Code of Canon Law, canon 2335, attached excommunication to Catholic membership in Masonic and similar societies. That is the documented reason the Catholic orders in this account exist at all: the K. of C., the Catholic Foresters and the Catholic Knights were built to give Catholic men the insurance and the lodge night without the prohibited room. The argument occasionally surfaced in print over a local order: when the Catholic Newark Monitor criticized the young Order of Owls in 1907, Supreme President John W. Talbot answered from South Bend that the order had been created by men of Catholic education and counted Catholics among its executives and trustees — a hometown order defending itself against the anti-secret charge in the year Howard was calling its growth phenomenal. Protestant opposition existed in the era's national literature, and the temperance orders in this account — the Good Templars, whose Guiding Star Lodge No. 371 Chapman records as chartered in 1866 — were themselves an answer of one kind of moral society to another. But no South Bend anti-Masonic organization, newspaper or campaign at the scale of the 1820s movement appears in the record reached; in this city the opposition wore a Roman collar and worked by substitution, not by attack.

Sources:

1. The Catholic Church's published record — In Eminenti (1738); Humanum Genus (1884); Code of Canon Law (1917), canon 2335; the chronology as also carried in the Notre Dame Observer's 2006 policy account.
2. Schmidt, Fraternal Organizations (1980), "Owls, Order of" — the Newark Monitor criticism of 1907 and Talbot's reply.
3. Chapman (1880), "Good Templars" — Guiding Star Lodge No. 371, chartered 1866.