Controversies

The Roman Catholic Church has prohibited Catholic membership in Freemasonry since the 1738 bull In Eminenti, a position reaffirmed in 1983. Several Protestant denominations have issued similar prohibitions on doctrinal grounds.

The fraternity has periodically been the subject of forged exposés, the most consequential being the late nineteenth-century Taxil hoax, in which Léo Taxil fabricated lurid accounts of Masonic ritual and later publicly admitted the fraud. The P2 (“Propaganda Due”) affair in Italy in the 1980s, involving a lodge that operated outside the recognised Italian Grand Orient, remains a documented case of organised criminal conduct attached to a Masonic body.