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In this piece we study the commentary on Italian Freemasonry and the figure of the king Victor Emmanuel II by one of the Catholic press organs of the 19th century, the newspaper Catholic Unitydirected by José María Quadrado.
The director of the aforementioned newspaper, José María Quadrado (1819-1896) was a journalist, writer and historian of the Spanish neo-Catholic group, born in Ciudadela. He was a very active activist of Catholicism, and promoted different campaigns in this regard, in the Palma Diary in 1855, and another against freedom of religion in 1868. He even organized a collection of signatures in the Balearic Islands. He founded and directed the newspaper during the six-year period The Catholic Unity, organ of the Catholic associations of the Balearic Islands. Furthermore, he introduced in Mallorca the Lectures of Saint Vincent de Paul. Furthermore, in the eighties he was part of the Catholic Union of the Pidal brothers.
The Balearic newspaper continued to ironize the issue, pitying the monarch because the votes of the Masonic lodges had gone to Mazzini and Garibaldi and not to him.
Well, in this sense we collect a text that was published in Quadrado’s newspaper in the issue of August 1, 1869. It is unsigned, but it could be by Quadrado himself, and under the title of “masonic lodges”, it was about the situation of Italian Freemasonry in 1869, in the final process of unification, but also about French and Spanish Freemasonry, matters that we leave for another occasion. The text distills the usual anti-Masonism of nineteenth-century Spanish Catholicism, also just when Freemasonry was beginning to come to light in Spain following the Revolution of 1868.
The article stated that an extraordinary movement had been observed in Freemasonry for a long time. In that sense, it was alluded to that from May 30 to June 20 of that same year, 1869, a general assembly of the Italian Freemasons had taken place with a banquet attended by Federico Campanella, the “alter ego” of Mazziniand director of the Milanese republican newspaper, L’Unitá Italiana. The author of the column was very interested in reviewing the toasts that had taken place at said agape. Apparently, one had been made for the union of all “honest men” to save Italy, and another for Garibaldi and Mazzini. The Florentine government, the text warned, had not only not opposed the meeting, but would have allowed the official agency to report the news. What’s more, the judiciary, the army and the navy, among other institutions, had been represented at the event, with the particularity that the majority of these authorities had been former servants of the dethroned princes. The text was ironic about the event and warned King Victor Emmanuel about the danger that could await him, but this was described as “very fair espionage.”
Apparently, the issue of toasts would have generated some controversy in Italy because a newspaper, The Riforma of Florence had published that the one offered to Garibaldi and Mazzini had also included King Victor Emmanuel, but Campanella had replied in a letter that this was not true. The Balearic newspaper continued to ironize the issue, pitying the monarch because the votes of the Masonic lodges had gone to Mazzini and Garibaldi and not to him. The monarch had put himself at the service of the revolution, believing that he could turn it to his advantage, sacrificing everything, and now the revolution looked at him as an obstacle.
We must not forget the animosity that Spanish Catholicism felt for the Savoy dynasty for its leading role in the unifying process against the pope and its temporal power, as would be seen immediately with the arrival in Spain of Amadeo of Savoy.
The Italian experiencelike the French and Spanish ones, with which the article was completed, made the newspaper affirm that nothing could be expected from the governments to put a stop to Freemasonry, but from the union of Catholics to resist the attacks of the societies secrets and defeat them. The organization of evil, that is, Freemasonry, had to be opposed to the organization of good. The Catholic who did not act in this sense was not worthy of being considered a Christian.
#Balearic #Catholicism #Italian #Freemasonry
