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Suspicions and insinuations have been circulating for years, and in recent days they have ceased to be background noise to create a problem that intoxicates the public debate. Are brotherhoods founded on principles of faith or creeds of a philosophical and political nature, such as Opus Dei or Freemasonry, only spaces for exchange and communion of ideas, values and experiences? Or, in this context, did they build a network of complicities and influences that promotes nepotism and erodes democracy? Its members will never tire of proclaiming that there is nothing harmful in their organizations. But, even if it is the purest of truths, it is indisputable that part of the citizenry sees them as temples where compadres converge to, protected by good principles, discretion or secrecy, protect and favor each other.
Therefore, we have reached a dangerous moment. It is even more dangerous because there are no recipes to overcome it. Asking for publicity for the secret rite is like playing blind goat without a blindfold: it’s not funny. To believe that, as proposed by the PAN, the problem would be solved by promoting a voluntary declaration of belonging to Freemasonry is pure innocence. Worse still is to think, as the PSD affirms, that a deputy or a minister can be forced to declare against his will which organization he belongs to. In a democracy, threats to individual freedoms are unacceptable, even when made in the name of interests considered superior. The persecution of Freemasons is a practice of dictatorships.
The PSD initiative could still have the merit of opening the discussion, but it ends up having the demerit of not closing it. With a guaranteed advantage in the Assembly of the Republic, the accusation immediately followed that whoever rejects the mandatory declaration of membership in associations plays the game of Freemasonry. The suspicion, larval and generic until now, landed in the Assembly of the Republic.
With the disturbing suspicion that political life is tied to networks of complicit loyalties that foster nepotism and inequality of opportunity, there would be only one solution: all politicians who are part of Freemasonry freely declare that the apron is part of their clothing. , as proposed by the PAN and the leader of the Gran Oriente Lusitano. More than responsible, it would be a decent attitude: democracy that guarantees freedom dispenses with secrecy and dark fraternities. But, with the exception of one or the other politician, no one will go there. Secret friends are less prone to inconvenience. That is what irritates Rui Rio and, in some way, a good part of the Portuguese.
