CONSPIRACY CLAIM #07

Let’s start with an honest admission: some Freemasons have broken the law. So have some plumbers, some priests, some police officers and some people in your local book club. Any organisation with millions of members will contain a few who go wrong. That isn’t the question.

The real question is whether Freemasonry encourages crime, tolerates it, or covers it up. And on that, Freemasonry’s own rule books are refreshingly blunt.

The door is checked on the way in

You can’t simply buy your way into a lodge. A candidate has to be proposed and seconded by members who know him, is usually interviewed, and must be accepted by the lodge. The standard goes back to the Old Charges of the Craft, which say that

“The persons made Masons, or admitted members of a lodge, must be good and true men—no immoral or scandalous men, but of good report.”

Albert G. Mackey, The Principles of Masonic Law (1856), quoting the Old Charges

Modern rules say the same thing in modern language. The United Grand Lodge of England, for example, requires that “Every candidate must be a free man, and in reputable circumstances.” Each Grand Lodge sets its own procedure, but the principle is common to them: a candidate’s past is not a secret from the lodge. In England, a candidate must declare any criminal conviction on his application, and the Grand Lodge decides whether he is suitable. Hiding one is itself a disciplinary offence that can catch up with him after he joins.

Break the law, break the rules

Here is the very first duty listed in the disciplinary rules of the United Grand Lodge of England:

“Every Brother has a duty not to: (a) commit an offence contrary to the criminal law of any jurisdiction to which he may for the time being be subject”

Book of Constitutions 2026, Schedule of Disciplinary Provisions

Not exactly the opening line of a criminal syndicate. It goes further. A Mason convicted of a sexual offence, or one involving dishonesty or violence, or any offence that brings a prison sentence or a community order, must report it to the Master of his lodge within 28 days. Until his case is decided he may not attend any lodge, and keeping quiet about it doesn’t lift that ban. The possible outcomes are an admonition, a suspension, being asked to resign, or expulsion.

This isn’t a modern public-relations makeover either. In 1876 John W. Simons, a Past Grand Master of New York, put it plainly:

“Violating the law of the land is necessarily a Masonic offence, because the offender in disgracing himself also disgraces the Fraternity, the whole Craft receiving blame for the acts of the individual.”

John W. Simons, A Familiar Treatise on the Principles and Practice of Masonic Jurisprudence (1876)

Twenty years earlier, Albert Mackey had described what happens when a Mason is convicted of larceny “or any other infamous crime”: “no lodge after such conviction would permit him to retain his membership, but, on the contrary, it would promptly and indignantly expel him from the Brotherhood.”

And the Old Charges themselves tell every Mason to be “a peaceable subject to the civil powers, wherever he resides or works, and is never to be concerned in plots and conspiracies against the peace and welfare of the nation”. Plots and conspiracies: explicitly ruled out, in writing, for about three hundred years.

“But what about P2?”

Fair question, and the most famous case there is. Propaganda Due, or “P2”, was an Italian lodge that, under Licio Gelli, became a secret network of politicians, officers and businessmen. Italy’s parliamentary commission later concluded that it was a secret criminal organisation.

Here’s the part that rarely gets mentioned. The Grand Orient of Italy withdrew P2’s Masonic charter in 1976, years before the scandal broke. Gelli kept it running anyway, outside regular Freemasonry. When police found its membership list at his house in Arezzo in March 1981, the Grand Orient expelled Gelli that October. Italy then banned the lodge by law in January 1982, and Gelli was later convicted in the Italian courts, including a 12-year sentence over the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano.

So the textbook “Masonic crime” story turns out to be a lodge Freemasonry had already disowned, run by a man it then expelled. That is the system working, not failing.

Conclusion: Individual Freemasons can do wrong, like members of any other group. Freemasonry itself requires its members to obey the law, checks their character before they join, and suspends or expels them when they don’t measure up. A brotherhood that writes “do not commit crimes” into its rule book, and enforces it, is a strange choice of villain.