Brothers Calvin Trapp, Richard Ventrca and Doyle Sitton were appointed as a committee to choose at least 3 students for our new annual $500.00 scholarship awards.

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Brother Wes Mersiovsky made a presentation for a new fundraiser by selling bumper stickers with "It Is - In God – I am" and a square and compass on it. These phrases are the answers to the first three questions of the E.A. Degree and meant to attract questions from the public.

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A petition was read for a new Lodge to be created, Freedom Lodge #1460 AF & AM in Houston. It will basically be a Lodge for members of Philippine decent.

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SICKNESS AND DISTRESS
Please say a prayer for,

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Brother Wes Mersiovsky's mother-in-law is currently in an assisted living facility,

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Brother Greg Williams' wife is home again and doing much better.

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A horse stepped on Brother Jimmy Hooper’s foot. The horse is OK, but Jimmy is hurting.

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Brother Fred Loofs said his pride was badly injured when he fell on the stairs at Grand Lodge.

Sometimes there are people who will accost someone wearing a Masonic ring or pin, with accusations about things they perceive as wrong with Freemasonry. They many times will ask questions, demanding a response from the man wearing a ring or pin. One Masonic Brother mentioned to me that he thinks that could be a reason the number of Masons “wearing Light” has diminished over the years.

Being confident in our ability to answer charges against Freemasonry is important. Every Mason can be able to do this by studying the allegories and lessons of Freemasonry. This is made easier if one reads articles and books written by other Masonic students. Those who attack Freemasonry and Freemasons rely on the presumption that Masons don’t know enough about their Fraternity and Craft to effectively answer the charges from the critics and enemies of Freemasonry.

We are admonished not to enter into arguments with those, who being misinformed will ridicule Freemasonry. Masons are not at their best if they enter into an argument and speak unkindly. We can be gentlemanly, and convey factual information about our Fraternity, when we have someone who will listen to us. One book I have that contains tips on Evangelizing suggests that some contemptuous people will not grasp what is being said. That is true, so the Freemason being attacked needs to discern if he is hearing someone with whom he can have a conversation. While it is true that the anti-Masons of the world are intent on accomplishing what they set out to do so long ago, to eliminate Freemasonry, the people you and I come in contact with everyday who may have a negative view of Freemasonry are not anti-Masons. They are generally just misinformed.

Someone once said about democracy, and I think it applies to Freemasonry as well, that if it ceases to exist it will not come from attacks from the outside - it will come from the apathy within. This reminds me of the saying that it is the internal not the external that renders a man worthy to be made a Mason.

When it comes to learning what Masonry has to teach, Masons should not be apathetic. It is true that when a Mason studies, learns, and applies what he learns in Freemasonry he will be a happier man, and a better man to be around.

The Masonic Student will look at the charges some level against us as an open invitation to investigate those charges and study Masonry to see if there is any validity to them. I hope no one reading this will think ill of this suggestion, because Freemasonry can stand up to investigation. It is the charges from our critics and enemies that can’t stand up to investigation.

One of the questions or charges against Freemasonry is that we Masons don’t pray to or acknowledge Jesus in our Lodges. I’ll say just a little something about prayers. The prayers in a Lodge are interfaith prayers, which are not unlike interfaith prayers offered up in the military, [government], or in interfaith religious gatherings of clergy. Anytime there is a gathering of people who are likely to be of varying religions, the prayers offered up for them as a group will be an interfaith prayer they can all be happy with. Anyone in the clergy will be familiar with that kind of prayer.

“Successful leaders don’t start out asking, ‘What do I want to do?’ They ask, ‘What needs to be done?’ Then they ask, ‘Of those things that would make a difference, which are right for me?’ They don’t tackle things they aren’t good at. They make sure other necessities get done, but not by them. Successful leaders make sure that they succeed! They are not afraid of strength in others. Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone, ‘Here lies a man who knew how to put into his service more able men than he was himself.” Anonymous.

Ed R. Halpaus

Summer travels off the interstate highways and onto byways, where vestiges of earlier American civilization linger, often lead to passing visions of neglected, boarded-up, or refashioned Masonic Lodge buildings. Just as numberless Catholic church buildings have been deconsecrated, demolished, and remade into clubs and bars, or, most creatively, into churches for African-American congregations that are at home in inner cities, so these buildings speak of a lost past. And just as great numbers of mainstream Protestant church buildings meet similar fates because their congregants have moved on, to suburbs or to nowhere, so these edifices are abandoned. Masonry, though a secret society, made a public splash in countless communities; it now falls out of public consciousness to an unanticipated degree.

Press coverage of this decline has been sporadic. In some cases it has not been noted because not enough people cared to read about it. In other cases, as typified by Holly Lebowitz Rossi's article in the Dallas Morning News (April 15, reprinted widely since; see References, below) there is good coverage. Rossi celebrates the fact that the Shriners, a Masonic expression, find ways to continue supporting children's hospitals and other charities. The headline, however, shouts "On Wobbly Ground: Masons, Once a Bedrock of U.S. Culture, Face Aging, Declining Membership." Statistics: Membership has fallen from 4 million in 1959 to about 1.5 million today. Some picture death, before long, for such secret societies.

Read all the analysis and you will find that certain explanations stand out:

1. "bowling alone," citizens head for solitary enjoyments and shun communal commitments such as those offered by Masonry;
2. "boys' night out," once an old attraction, now has lost its cultural slot, as men need to or like to be home;
3. "nights out" suffer in general, as work has become portable and men find it harder to get away from cell phone- and laptop-"offices";
4. "not our game": While the open warfare between Catholicism and Masonry is now in a cease-fire, armistice, or who-cares-to-fight-anymore phase, Catholicism, especially in the expanding Hispanic sector, has never shared Masonic culture;
5. "too staid": The quasi-religious (religious critics have called it Masonry's "religious" expression) is too wan in a time of noisier public evidencing of faiths.

Masonry is not alone in being a victim of such cultural changes. General Motors, Sears, Korvette, Marshall Fields, and hundreds of others were tied to one phase of the culture and could not readapt fast enough. While mainline Protestantism, with its cultural diversity, is not quite so closely wed to a waning part of the culture and adapts in many ways, where it does decline, the declines often parallel those in Masonry.

Now an abrupt end-note on the Zeitgeist: Recalling Dean Inge's old warning about how one soon becomes widowed if wed to the spirit of the times, it is time to ask about the future of currently prospering and often boasting leaders of religious movements that are overly tied to the new scene of pop culture, partisan political identification, and market-based choice of religious themes and strategies. Next time you pass a vacated Masonic building, think of the folly of swaggering today and ask: Who and what are next?

Rome — The Vatican has published secret documents about the trial of the Knights Templar, including a parchment, long ignored because of a vague catalog entry in 1628, showing that Pope Clement V initially absolved the medieval order of heresy.

The 300page volume re­cently came out in a limited edi­tion m 799 copies each priced at; $8,377, said Scrinium publishing house, which prints documents from the Vatican's secret archives.

The order of knights, which ultimately disappeared because of the heresy scandal, recently captivated the imaginations of readers of the bestseller The Da Vinci Code, which linked the Templars to the story of the Holy Grail.

The Vatican work repro­duces the entire documentation of the papal hearings convened after King Philip IV of France arrested and tortured Templar leaders in 1307 on charges of heresy and immorality.

'More than an error'

The military order of the Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon was founded in 1118 in Jerusalem to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land after the First Crusade. As their military might in­creased, the Templars also grew in wealth, acquiring property throughout Europe and running a primitive banking system.

After they left the Middle East with the collapse of the Crusader kingdoms, their power and secretive ways aroused the fear of European rulers arid sparked accusations of corruption and blasphemy.

Historians believe Philip owed debts to the Templars and used the accusations to arrest their leaders and extract, under torture, confessions of heresy as a way to seize the order's riches.

The Vatican archives re­searcher who found the parch­ment said Friday that it probably had been ignored because the 1628 catalog entry on the 40inchwide parchment was "too Spartan, too vague."

"Unfortunately, there was an archiving error, an error in how the document was described," the researcher, Barbara Frale, said in a telephone interview from her home in Viterbo, north of Italy.

"More than an error, it was a little sketchy," she said.

An important inquest

The parchment, in remark­ably good condition considering its 700 years, apparently had last been consulted at the start of the 20th century, Frale said, surmising its significance must have not have been realized.

Frale said she was intrigued by the 1628 entry because, while it apparently referred to some minor matter, it noted that three top cardinals, includ­ing the right hand man of Clem­ent, Berenger Fredol, had made a long journey to interrogate someone.

"Going on with my research, it turned out that in reality it was an inquest of very great im­portance" on behalf of the pope, Frale said. Fredol "had gone to question the Great Master and other heads of the Templars who had been segregated, prac­tically kidnapped, by the king of France and shut up in secret in his castle in Chinon on the Loire."

According to the Vatican ar­chives Web site, the parchment shows that Clement initially ab­solved the Templar leaders of heresy, though he did find them guilty of immorality, and that he planned to reform the order.

However, pressured by Philip, Clement later reversed his decision and suppressed the order in 1312. .

The acacia, which, in Scripture, is always called Shittah, was esteemed a sacred wood among the Hebrews. Of it Moses was ordered to make the tabernacle, the Ark of the Covenant, and table for the shewbread, and the rest of the sacred furniture.

The acacia, then, has always been consecrated from among the other trees of the forest by the sacred purposes to which it was devoted. The Jew has constructed the tree from whose wood the sanctuary of the tabernacle and the Holy Ark. The early Masons very naturally appropriated this hollow plant to the equally sacred purpose of a symbol, which was to teach an important divine truth in all ages to come.

The acacia, in the mythic system of Freemasonry, is preeminently the symbol of the Immortality of the Soul - that important doctrine which is the great design of the Institution to teach. As the evanescent nature of the flower, which "cometh forth and is cut down" reminds us of the transitory nature of human life, so the perpetual renovation of the evergreen plant, which interruptedly presents the appearance of youth and vigor, is aptly compared to the spiritual life in which the soul, freed from the corruptible companionship of the body, shall enjoy an eternal spring and an immortal youth.

Hence we see the propriety if placing the sprig of acacia as an emblem of immortality, among the symbols of that degree, all of whose ceremonies are intended to teach us the great truth that "the life of man, regulated by morality, faith and justice, will be rewarded at its closing hour by the prospect of Eternal Bliss. "

The sprig of acacia, then, in its most ordinary significance, presents itself to the Master Mason as a symbol of the immortality of the soul, being intended to remind him, by its evergreen and unchanging nature, of that better and spiritual part within us, which, as an emanation from the Grand Architect of the Universe, can never die.

Ain't it the Truth!!!

A woman goes to the doctor for her yearly physical.

The nurse starts with certain basic items.

"How much do you weigh?" she asks.

"115," she says.

The nurse puts her on the scale.

It turns out her weight is 140.

The nurse asks, "Your height?"

"5 foot 8," she says.

The nurse checks and sees that she only measures 5' 5".

She then takes her blood pressure

And tells the woman it is very high.

"Of course it's high!" she screams,

"When I came in here I was tall and slender!

Now I'm short and fat!"