[blackie]

Back in the day when catholics were burning folks at the stake, they may have gotten a Mason inadvertently and started all of this silliness. >:-}

Two Catholics were members of my Masonic Lodge when I lived in SF Bay Area.

[BlackElk]

Actually, King Philip the Fair of France, at the request of the pope of his era, besieged a castle in which Jacques DeMolay and some fellow Knights Templar were residing, defeated them and burned them at the stake. This probably had more to do with internationalist Templar behavior in competition with the genuine internationalism of the universal Catholic Church and the inferred disloyalty of knights to their temporal, national, liege lord (Philip the Fair) than with doctrine. The GAOTU stuff came much later.

BTW, those "Catholics" who joined your lodge in SF Bay area ceased to be Catholics by Church law on the occasion of their becoming Masons. Again, this is not my criticism of Masonry but Catholic Church law as to its own membership.

We Catholics were not alone in burning folks at the stake. The proprietors and leaders of Massachusetts Bay colony were Puritans and not Catholics when they burned witches at the stake. It was all the rage as a form of religious punishment in those days and quite non-denominational.