Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley testifies to Senate Armed Services Committee about the budget, Wednesday, March 4, 2020, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

George Washington, the father of our country, warned against many different threats to America. Of utmost importance at the time, he warned of the Illuminati, a subversive force that infiltrated the Masonic lodges of Europe and which today is the subject of what the media call “conspiracy theories.” But it was a real organization, and Washington knew it. He wrote about it in several letters to clergymen.

Washington was a member of a Masonic Lodge in Virginia who was also a Christian and he made sure those dangerous tendencies in the Masonic lodges of Europe were excluded from the structures of the new nation.

What’s important to know is that Washington acknowledged the existence of evil forces that could undermine the American experiment. He was not only a great general, who led our military forces to victory, but was aware of evil ideologies that undermined the Christian morality he depended on for guidance.

Responding to a letter from a citizen, Washington declared: “It was not my intention to doubt that, the Doctrines of the Illuminati, and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am.” But he insisted that “none of the [Masonic] Lodges in this Country are contaminated with the principles ascribed to the Society of the Illuminati.” He made it one of his purposes in the life of the young nation to make sure America didn’t turn out like Europe.

The impact of the Illuminati has become a bogeyman for Catholics, some of whom think George Washington was somehow tainted by his membership in a Virginia lodge. They cite the opposition of the Catholic Church to Freemasonry. What they don’t understand is the major break which occurred between the lodges in Europe and America. Washington personified that break.

These Catholics tend to believe in the kind of state church that the American revolutionaries fought to depose. That’s why so few Catholics were among the founders. They also find it objectionable that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, put together the “Jefferson Bible” of the moral teachings of Jesus Christ and excluded references to his divine nature. This was Jefferson’s way of trying to reach Americans of different religions with a moral message that could unite them.

Our founders looked for ways to unite Americans of different faiths and outlooks behind the American nation. It worked. It was a great success.

What Catholics and non-Catholics alike have to realize is that our founders, most of whom were Masons, objected to a state church based in England or the Vatican in Rome. In that sense, they were humanist or even secular. They wrote into the Constitution a ban on a religious test for public office. They believed passionately in religious liberty.