The National Catholic Register (July 4, 2026) publishes a hagiographic feature by Matthew McDonald celebrating how Benjamin Franklin—a self-confessed doubter of Christ’s Divinity and a Freemason—maneuvered the appointment of John Carroll as the first Catholic bishop in the United States, framing this collusion between a deist revolutionary and a cleric as a providential triumph for religious liberty.
The Naturalistic Foundation of the American Hierarchy
The cited article relates with undisguised admiration the mechanism by which the first episcopal see in the Thirteen Colonies was secured: not by the rights of the Church, not by the freedom of the clergy, but by the personal recommendation of a Freemason and avowed enemy of the Incarnation. Benjamin Franklin, described in the text as a “lapsed Congregationalist” who expressed “some Doubts” as to whether Jesus is God, is presented as the decisive agent in the erection of the American hierarchy. The papal nuncio, Archbishop Giuseppe Doria Pamphili, is reported to have told Franklin that “the Pope had, on my recommendation, appointed Mr. John Carroll superior of the Catholic clergy in America.”
This is not the libertas Ecclesiae; this is caesaropapism in its most insidious form—the secular power dictating the sacred ministry. Pope Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus Errorum (Error 20) the proposition that “The ecclesiastical power ought not to exercise its authority without the permission and assent of the civil government,” and (Error 41) that “The civil government… has a right to an indirect negative power over religious affairs.” Here, the civil power—embodied in Franklin, a private citizen holding no ecclesiastical office—exercised a positive power of nomination, and Rome submitted. The article quotes a modern “historian,” “Father” James Garneau, stating blasphemously: “But Rome’s used to dealing with pagans and heretics.” This admission reveals the conciliar mentality: the Holy See is reduced to a diplomatic actor negotiating with infidels, rather than the Mater et Magistra imposing the Kingship of Christ.
Religious Liberty as the Organizing Principle
The article praises Carroll for “respecting America’s religious freedom and pluralism” and for crafting “a church that thrived in a democracy without being democratic.” This is the heresy of Americanism, condemned by Leo XIII in Testem Benevolentiae (1899), which sought to accommodate the Church to the novus ordo saeculorum. The Syllabus (Error 55) anathematizes: “The Church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the Church.” Error 77 condemns the view that “it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State.” The article’s celebration of Carroll’s “adroit management of Rome and of American perceptions” exposes the subversion of the Social Kingship of Christ taught by Pius XI in Quas Primas: “Peace is only possible in the kingdom of Christ… When God and Jesus Christ were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The American hierarchy was founded on the explicit rejection of this Kingship; its first bishop was chosen by a man who denied the King.
The Carrollist Compromise: Episcopacy Without the Faith
John Carroll is portrayed as a model of pastoral prudence. The article omits—suppresses—the theological cost of this “success.” Carroll’s tenure saw the introduction of trusteeism, the lay control of Church property, and a clergy trained in the spirit of the Enlightenment. The article notes he was a slaveowner, a fact dropped as a mere moral blemish, but it fails to connect this to the naturalistic anthropology underlying the American project. A bishop appointed by a deist, confirmed by a nuncio negotiating with a deist, governing a flock in a Masonic republic: this is the ab initio defect of the American Church. St. Robert Bellarmine teaches (De Romano Pontifice) that jurisdiction comes from Christ through the Pope, not from the recommendation of a paganus. The Cum ex Apostolatus Officio of Paul IV declares that any promotion “even if it shall have been uncontested and by the unanimous assent of all the Cardinals, shall be null, void, and of no effect” if the person has “defected from the Catholic Faith.” While Carroll himself may not have been a formal heretic, the modus operandi of his elevation—dependence on a heretic’s favor—vitiated the libertas Ecclesiae from the start.
The Symptomatic Silence on the Supernatural
Read the article closely. There is no mention of the salvation of souls, the Missa Propitiatoria, the Sacraments as channels of grace, the Final Judgment, or the rights of Christ the King. The vocabulary is entirely secular: “diplomacy,” “political independence,” “stability and growth,” “loyal Americans,” “democracy,” “pluralism.” This is the lingua novus ordi. St. Pius X in Lamentabili Sane Exitu condemned the modernist error (Prop. 26) that “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief.” The article treats the episcopacy as an administrative office for “guiding it through uncertainty and irrelevance to stability and growth”—a corporate CEO metric. The “Father Garneau” quoted reduces the papacy to a bureaucratic entity “used to dealing with pagans.” This is the kenosis of the sacred, the reduction of the Church to an NGO.
The Masonic Thread: Franklin and the Architecture of the Anti-Church
The article treats Franklin’s Freemasonry as a biographical curiosity. From the perspective of integral Tradition, it is the causa formalis of the American hierarchy. The dates align with the Masonic ritualism noted in the analysis of false apparitions: 1717 (founding of Freemasonry), 1776 (American Revolution, Franklin’s mission), 1789 (French Revolution, Carroll’s appointment as bishop). Franklin, Grand Master of the Nine Sisters Lodge in Paris, architect of the secular republic, places his creature Carroll at the head of the Church in America. The “bond fused by shared suffering” on the road from Canada is a Masonic fraternization, a parody of Christian charity. The article’s publication on July 4, 2026—the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—by the “Register,” an organ of the conciliar sect, is a deliberate liturgical act in the civic religion of the Novus Ordo. It canonizes the Masonic founding myth.
Conclusion: The Poisoned Root Bears the Conciliar Fruit
The trajectory from Franklin’s recommendation to the “Church of the New Advent” is direct and unbroken. The American hierarchy, born of caesaropapism and religious indifferentism, became the engine of the Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes. John Carroll’s “church that thrived in a democracy” is the prototype of the conciliar church that thrives in apostasy. The “Register” celebrates this genealogy because it legitimizes the current usurpation: if a deist Mason could pick a bishop in 1784, why cannot a manifest heretic like “Pope” Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) occupy the Chair of Peter in 2026? The principle is the same: the rights of God yield to the rights of man. Non est in eo veritas. The only remedy is the total rejection of the Americanist compromise and the restoration of the Regnum Christi in its integral purity—Instaurare omnia in Christo.
Source:
How Benjamin Franklin Picked America’s First Catholic Bishop (ncregister.com)
Date: 04.07.2026