Free The Absolution by Jonathan Holt Page B

she had learnt over the years that Venice was full of such tucked-away treasures, too many to be listed by the guidebooks and consequently all but forgotten.
    A figure was bent over one of the display cases. “Signor Calergi?” she called.
    The figure turned, and she got her second surprise: he was wearing a dog collar. “Monsignor, actually. And you must be Captain Tapo – Dr Hapadi told me you might be coming. You want to know about Freemasonry, I understand?”
    â€œThat’s it,” she said, wondering what else Hapadi had told the cleric. “We have a corpse who’s had his throat cut and his tongue torn out. He was left on the beach, to be washed by the tides . . . That relates to a Masonic oath, I understand?”
    â€œSome Masonic rites make reference to such a scenario,yes,” he said quietly. “I’ve never heard of it being enacted before.”
    â€œOur victim was also wearing an unusual mask. Dr Hapadi called it a ‘hoodwink’. And he had some rope wound around his arm.”
    Monsignor Calergi nodded. “These are symbols connected with a Mason’s initiation into a new degree – that is, a higher level of the organisation. The hoodwink represents the mystical darkness, or ignorance, of the uninitiated.
    â€œAnd the rope?”
    â€œThe cable-tow symbolises the secret obligations that bind one Mason to another. Masons believe their first duty is always to help a brother, no matter what.”
    â€œForgive me for asking, Father. But are you yourself a Freemason?”
    â€œI have an academic interest in the Craft,” Calergi said with a slight smile. “But the Vatican’s position is that one cannot be both a Mason and a practising Catholic.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œTo understand that, you have to know a little about Freemasonry’s origins. Back in the thirteenth century, Venice was dominated by a number of powerful guilds and cofraternities. It was one such organisation, in fact, the Scuola Grande di San Marco, which built this very hospital. At that time, the Freemasons were little more than a trade guild for the itinerant stonecarvers who travelled from country to country building Europe’s cathedrals. Their symbols – the set square, the keystone, the plumb line – depicted the secrets of their craft, mysteries they were careful to keep from outsiders.
    â€œThen, in the eighteenth century, the first men of science found in the almost-forgotten secrets of the stonemasons a kind of allegory for their own rationalist beliefs. To them, themasons’ craft represented everything the Church was not – a brotherhood of equals, where man listened to his fellow man instead of the dictates of an autocratic pontiff; progress and reason, instead of medieval superstition and conservatism; mutual prosperity and self-help, instead of sacrifice and charity. In their rituals, Masons replaced the Bible with the Volume of Sacred Law. Their oaths were dedicated to the Grand Architect of the Universe. They weren’t denying God, not explicitly; but they were open to the heresy that the divine wears many masks, of which the Catholic deity is but one.”
    â€œAnd from rejecting the authority of the Church to questioning the authority of the state wasn’t such a great leap either, I imagine?”
    â€œExactly,” he agreed. “It was a group of Masons, for example, who were responsible for betraying Venice to their fellow Freemason, Napoleon Bonaparte, without a single shot being fired. A century later, an offshoot of the movement, the Carbonari, was accused of trying to overthrow the government and seize power for themselves. In many ways, the Masons were a white-collar version of the Mafia, and followed a similar trajectory. What began as a network of self-help organisations that depended on secrecy for their survival gradually became a magnet for criminality. In our own century that has been