Which order is the enemy of Freemasonry?

Freemasonry has no single institutional enemy by definition, but historically its principal and most persistent opponent has been the Roman Catholic Church 12. Beginning with Pope Clement XII’s papal bull In Eminenti in 1738, the Papacy condemned the Fraternity for indiscriminately admitting men of all religions, requiring binding oaths of secrecy, and operating outside ecclesiastical control 1. Subsequent papal decrees—including those of Benedict XIV and Leo XIII's encyclical Humanum Genus—reaffirmed this stance, positioning the Latin Church in direct opposition to the Fraternity 12.

Beyond ecclesiastical opposition, anti-Masonic hostility has routinely arisen from political regimes and totalitarian movements whose ideologies conflict with Masonic principles of democracy, tolerance, and liberty of conscience 1. Authoritarian systems—including Nazism, Communism, and Phalangism—actively suppressed the Fraternity because its egalitarian philosophy directly contradicted state-enforced autocratic rule 1. Following the Congress of Vienna, Prince Metternich similarly dismantled or drove the Craft underground across continental Europe, laying down the principle that despotic governments could not tolerate an organization that refused to accept that the few were born to rule and the many to serve 1.