Posted on 10/14/2026 11:36:14 AM PDT by ebb tide
Of the two-hour conversation that Father Charles Theodore Murr held with Pedro Buerbaum on WORLDCA$T, which InfoVaticana already reported in its chronicle on the death of John Paul I, there is a passage that deserves separate reading. It is the one dedicated to Monsignor Annibale Bugnini, the Vincentian religious who designed the post-conciliar liturgical reform and who, according to the testimony of the former collaborator of Archbishop Édouard Gagnon, was the spark that ignited Paul VI’s major investigation into Freemasonry in the Curia.
Murr places the origin in 1974. A priest, whose name he himself claims not to know, appeared before Cardinal Dino Staffa, Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, with a folder of documents pointing to Bugnini as a member of Italian Freemasonry.
«Someone arrived with some documents, very serious documents. They were handed to Cardinal Staffa accusing someone in particular: Annibale Bugnini, a bishop in charge of the reform of the Mass and the sacraments. Remember, we are in the post-conciliar years, when everything began to change. Well, the architect of all that was Bugnini. He arrived, supposedly a priest, with documents that said Bugnini was a Mason».
Staffa, a first-rate canonist and supreme judge of the Church, did not trust his first impression.
«Cardinal Staffa, who was no fool, called Interpol and various investigative bodies to see whether the documents were true or not, authentic or not. And yes, they were authentic. Then he and another cardinal, Cardinal Oddi, went to see Paul VI with the documents to tell him: “Look, Your Holiness, you have a Mason at the head of the new liturgy and of all the sacraments”».
The Substitute of the Secretariat of State, Giovanni Benelli, a man of full confidence to the Pope, examined the documentation again. From that review came the decision to inspect the Curia from top to bottom, nearly a thousand men, under the direction of Gagnon.
The gravity of the matter, Murr insists, lay in the position held by the accused: nothing less than the office from which the prayer of the entire Church was being rewritten.
«Think what that means. If it were true that he was a Mason, if it were true that the documents were authentic, it means that the one who was inventing the new Mass was more Mason than Catholic. His philosophy, his motivation behind all the changes was liberty, equality, fraternity, instead of Christ, of Jesus Christ and the Gospel. I don’t say instead of, but certainly very much in the background. It was rather a free expression, which we still see today in liturgical matters. And in my personal opinion, the reason why many, most of our churches are empty is because we have lost the sense of the sacred».
To help the interviewer, a young man born in 1995, grasp the scale of the scandal, the priest resorted to a domestic comparison that is not easily forgotten.
«It would be as if you found out that there is a man visiting your wife. To know that in the Vatican there was someone who was a member of Freemasonry. Freemasonry condemned, and everyone who entered Freemasonry, excommunicated ipso facto. And an archbishop, and the archbishop in charge of how we are going to pray. It was an enormously serious matter».
Murr links the Bugnini file to a purpose he attributes to the Freemasonry of those years: to empty the Church of its faith without tearing down the building, to keep the network and inherit the structure. And he points to the liturgy as the place where that purpose has triumphed most clearly.
«They wanted to destroy the Church, but not to demolish it. They wanted to replace the faith with their liberal doctrine, but to maintain the system, the network. What must be destroyed is the faith. And to a great extent they have succeeded. Much, very much of the sense of the sacred has been lost. An example: the Mass is no longer a sacrifice, the holy sacrifice of the Mass. No, no, no. It is a gathering with the brethren. There is no altar, there is a table. The table does not face God, it faces the people; the priest, with his back to God, usually looking at the people».
«The high point of the Mass has always been the consecration of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ. We believe that. You may agree or not, it makes no difference to me. What I am saying is that we do believe it and we defend it to the death. That is no longer so important. Do you know what is important? The sign of peace, which in some parishes I have seen last ten, fifteen minutes. Hello, So-and-so. What peace? This is absurd. The liberals are delighted with all this. And that is what they were looking for. And it began with Bugnini, who was a Mason».
Bugnini’s departure, in Murr’s account, followed the old curial method of rewarding the inconvenient person in order to remove him.
«They removed him from the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments and sent him as nuncio to Iran. Nuncio in Iran: he must have been very good at playing cards, because during the day there is nothing to do. The Catholics in Iran are very good, very pious, but not very numerous. That is a philosophy the Vatican has, and that all governments have had with their high officials: they did not kill them, they did not simply strip them of their power, they promoted them in order to eliminate them. It was a promotion to get him out of the Vatican. They took him out of the game».
The documented facts fit this pattern. In July 1975 Paul VI merged the Congregations of Divine Worship and of the Sacraments, and Bugnini, who had been secretary of the Consilium since 1964 and of the Congregation for Divine Worship since 1969, was left without a post. In January 1976 he was appointed pronuncio in Tehran, a posting that over the years became synonymous with ecclesiastical exile, as InfoVaticana recalled when reporting that the mythical posting of Bugnini had become vacant. He died in Rome on 3 July 1982.
Bugnini always denied any link with Freemasonry, and in his memoirs on the reform he attributed his fall to an anonymous dossier brought to the Pope. His name, however, appeared on the famous list of alleged ecclesiastical Masons that journalist Mino Pecorelli published in 1978, and the shadow of that accusation never faded. Nor did his way of working: Paul VI himself, according to the diaries of the master of ceremonies Virgilio Noè collected by Sandro Magister, approved the reform, but liked it little, and eventually understood the falsehood of the “the Pope wants it” with which his secretary silenced experts who disagreed.
For Murr, the Bugnini file illuminates the present. The man whom Staffa and Oddi denounced before Paul VI left the Vatican half a century ago, but his work continues to be celebrated every Sunday in almost every parish in the world, and the American priest, who today celebrates his daily Mass in a corner of Andalusia, does not hide what he thinks of it: a liturgy that has lost the sense of the sacred and that has emptied the churches.
The Gagnon report, which was meant to clarify these and other infiltrations, was delivered to three Popes and has never been published. Murr hinted at this with a weary smile when speaking of the copy that John Paul I received: «Many things mysteriously disappear like that».
Anyone who wishes to know in depth the figure of Bugnini now has in Spanish the biography dedicated to him by the French historian Yves Chiron, author of the lives of Pius IX, St. Pius X, John XXIII and Paul VI: Annibale Bugnini. Reformador de la liturgia, published by Homo Legens. Chiron reconstructs, document by document, with the archives of his congregation, his private correspondence and the acts of the Consilium, the twelve years in which that Vincentian from Umbria changed the way the Church prays. He recounts how he pressed on when the 1967 synod denied him the two-thirds majority, when two cardinals asked the Pope to abrogate the new rite and when 1,233 bishops voted against communion in the hand, and how he was dismissed in July 1975, on a summer Sunday in a deserted Vatican, with a farewell that says it all: «It is better that he go far away, so we will not see him again».
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Why are bishops such hopeless chumps? And that’s the best of them.
“If it were true that he was a Mason, if it were true that the documents were authentic, it means that the one who was inventing the new Mass was more Mason than Catholic. His philosophy, his motivation behind all the changes was liberty, equality, fraternity, instead of Christ, of Jesus Christ and the Gospel. I don’t say instead of, but certainly very much in the background. It was rather a free expression, which we still see today in liturgical matters. And in my personal opinion, the reason why many, most of our churches are empty is because we have lost the sense of the sacred.”
So who’s on the attack here and using blame shifting to justify their agenda. I find it a bit recognizing when a group denies the recognition of another group when the other group welcomes the first with open arms. Freemasons don’t care what your religion is as long as it has a diety and doesn’t harm man on purpose. Seems it’s not been the same for the Cathilic church for centuries. They appear to discriminate.
wy69
1. Bugnini denied he was a freemason.
2. There is no “Freemason list” produced or published by the Vatican establishing that Bugnini, or anyone else during the relevant period of time, was a freemason.
3. Bugnini’s author/historian, Chiron, does not claim to have found that Bugnini was a freemason, in fact he doubts it, saying it is inconclusive and that he gives Bugnini the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t a freemason.
4. The publisher of this yet to be released book (I believe the article says the book is released) states (an English translation of Spanish) of Bugnini: “The man who emerged from those archives is neither the brilliant reformer whom some venerate nor the conspirator whom others denounced. He is a formidable organizer whom a cardinal who worked alongside him criticized, in writing, for ‘a lack of training and theological sense.’”
No more, no less, no grand conspiracy.
You’re right oystir.
Ebb, don’t you think it is a new low to post a thread which is just linking a podcast interview where Fr. Charles Murr recycles a decades-old, unproven rumor ?
Ebb tide don’t you think you ought to engage with actual Church documents and not sensationalist internet gossip?
If your defense of the faith relies on fringe media rumor instead of the Catechism, Sacred Scripture, and official Church teaching, you’ve already lost the argument.
Bugnini’s Briefcase
Marshall then turns his focus on Bugnini, Freemasonry and the liturgical reforms of the mid-twentieth century. He begins by discussing the famous “briefcase story.”
According to this story, in the mid-1970s, the Archbishop is said to have unwittingly left behind a briefcase in a meeting room in one of the curial departments of the Vatican. The case was discovered by a priest who opened it to determine its owner. Inside the briefcase were documents that implicated Bugnini either as a Freemason or at least demonstrating some association with the Freemasons.3 The documents were duly brought to Pope St Paul VI and shortly thereafter, Bugnini left the Roman Curia bound for Tehran as Iran’s new Papal Nuncio.
Marshall quotes a “Letter to the Editor” written by Fr Brian Harrison, OS, in 1989 for the publication AD 2000.4 Fr Harrison, then in Rome, was responding to an article written by the respected traditionalist writer Michael Davies in AD 2000 that discusses, in part, the matter of Bugnini and Freemasonry.
Marshall quotes the very last sentence, “An internationally known churchman of unimpeachable integrity has also told me that he heard the account of the discovery of the evidence against Bugnini directly from the Roman priest who found it in a briefcase which Bugnini had inadvertently left in a Vatican conference room after a meeting.” Marshall then proceeds to reference a list of alleged Freemasons that was released by Italian Freemasonry in 1976. It says that Bugnini joined Freemasonry on April 23, 1963 and that his codename was “Buan.”
Since when is the oystir's reference to Yves Chiron book an actual "church document"?
Pot meet kettle.
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