RE: The Papal Award To President Kufuor ...

I write to praise Mr Dominic Sagoe and not to lambaste him as Yaw Martin Agyeman Badu has just done. The hypocrites must bow their heads in shame and stop pretending that all is well within the Catholic Church. No one doubts the contribution of President Kufour considering the fact that he is a former president of Ghana. For those who are not Catholics and are ignorant of the canon law, please spare us. For those who are oblivious about knighthood, please be mute. I will be surprised if Yaw Martin Agyeman Badu is a practicing Catholic because he sounds like a freemason and he is very ignorant of the 1983 canon which is the most recent law within the Catholic Church.

The order of St Gregory the great is one of the five orders of knighthood of the Holy See. The order is bestowed on Catholic men and women and in rare cases, non-Catholic men in recognition of their personal service to the Holy See and the Church, unusual labours, support of the Holy See, and the good example set in their communities and country. I wish to state that the Freemasonry is incompatible with the Catholic faith. Freemasonry teaches a naturalistic religion that espouses indifferentism, the position that a person can be equally pleasing to God while remaining in any religion.

We all know that masonry is a parallel religion to Christianity. It is also evident that freemasonry displays all the elements of religion, and as such it becomes a rival to the religion of the Gospel. It includes temples and altars, prayers, a moral code, worship, vestments, feast days, the promise of reward and punishment in the afterlife, a hierarchy, and initiative and burial rites.

Nobody can doubt the fact that masonry is also a secret society. Its initiates subscribe to secret blood oaths that are contrary to Christian morals. The prospective mason swears that if he ever reveals the secrets of Masonry, secrets which are trivial and already well-known, he wills to be subject to self-mutilation or to gruesome execution. The point is that, most masons, admittedly, never would dream of carrying out these punishments on themselves or on an errant member.

It is on record that, one of masonry's primary objectives has been the destruction of the Catholic Church; this is especially true of freemasonry as it has existed in certain European countries. The Catholic Church has imposed the penalty of excommunication on Catholics who become freemasons. The penalty of excommunication for joining the Masonic Lodge was explicit in the 1917 code of canon law (canon 2335), and it is implicit in the 1983 code (canon 1374). It is therefore not true that there is no punishment for Catholics who become freemasons as suggested by Yaw Martin Agyeman Badu.

My point is that, if it has been proven beyond reasonable doubts by Bro. Sagoe and others that former President Kufour is a freemason, why should anyone think that he deserves the highest award of the church? If former president Kufour is not a freemason, why has he not come out to deny his association? If this is not deception, then someone should tell me what it is. Freemasons like Yaw Martin Agyeman Badu must understand that as Knights of the Noble Order, our utmost duty is to defend the Catholic Church at all times. We will not sit down for such wrongs to go on in the church. We will reject any attempt by Yaw Martin Agyeman Badu and his cohorts to preach freemasonry as an accepted practice in the church. We will certainly fight on until the right thing is done. ‘’Fortitudine Vincimus’’. Long Live the Pope; Long Live the Roman Catholic Church.
I rest my case!

Bro. S.P.K. Ackon
St. Michael’s Parish, 37, Accra