L’Osservatore Romano Releases Stunning Unpublished Note on 1903 Conclave

In our 1976, Saint Pius X Fall issue, of From the Housetops, the allegation by Monsignor Jouin, a well-respected authority on International Secret Societies, that Cardinal Mariano Rampolla was linked to freemasonry was included in the saint’s biography. Cardinal Puzyna’s notes do not mention masonry explicitly but they are severely critical of Rampolla. Jouin shared his information on Rampolla with Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary asking him to execute his veto power over that cardinal’s likely election to the papacy in 1903. The emperor did just that, and the notes just released confirm this much. It is also a fact that a scholar of the Order of the Eastern Lodge (Ordo Templi Orientis), Peter Koenig, affirmed, based on the Order’s own Manifesto of 1919, that Cardinal Rampolla’s name is listed as a member of the Order. Furthermore, the Order itself, in the November, 1999 newsletter for Thelema Lodge in Berkeley, California, acknowledges that Msgr. Jouin accused Cardinal Rampolla of being a member. (See Wikipedia article on Mariano Rampolla) Monsignor Jouin was honored for his work with Pope Benedict XV’s Apostolic Blessing and a personal letter signed by the Pope’s Secretary of State Cardinal Gasparri who, ironically, was a close disciple of Rampolla. Gasparri, in fact, had been highly critical of Pope Pius X for establishing a committee for uncovering modernists in the clergy and hierarchy

“Many cardinals [are] vile creatures of Rampolla, by his appointment– dreadful personages,” Cardinal Puzyna wrote in the recently published notes on the conclave.

Catholic Culture: L’Osservatore Romano has printed a previously unpublished note in which Cardinal Jan Puzyna recorded the events of the five-day conclave of 1903. Cardinal Puzyna, the bishop of Kraków, had been created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII only one year earlier.

“2014 marks the centenary of the death of St. Pius X, who was elected in 1903. On June 9, Father Bernard Ardura, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, said that the note had recently been discovered in the archives of the Archdiocese of Kraków.” Read more here with links